The Music of Hindostan c13.4

c13.4

Musical time is in India, more obviously than elsewhere, a development from the prosody and metres of poetry. The insistent demands of language and the idiosyncrasies of highly characteristic verse haunt the music like ‘a Presence which is not to be put by’. The time-relations of music are affected both by the structure of the language, and by the method of versification which ultimately derives from it. Without pretension to any minute acquaintance with these, a sketch of their bearings upon musical time is here attempted.