The Music of Hindostan c16.s1: Specimens of Rāgs

The Music of Hindostan c16.s1

Language: English

Specimens of Rāgs

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Desh. Eka Trisra. Slow. Ex. 395. Ast. Ant.

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Myachā Malhār. Chautāl. 4 + 4 + 2 + 2. Ex. 403. Ast. Ant.

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Darbārī Kānaḍā. Eka Trisra. Slow. Ex. 415.

A European has great difficulty in giving himself account of these queer modes, because of the enormous difference between having the tonality condensed into a few contrasted chords and having it spread over a melody in successive notes which are epitomized as a scale. There is, however, a step between chord and scale in the arpeggio, as we may observe when immature pianoforte players sound the left hand before the right. It is useful sometimes to consider chords as scales, and scales as chords. Our harmony has gone through three chief moments in its history: the diminished seventh, the augmented triad, and now the whole tone scale, or chord,¹ have successively been regarded as the limit of permissible dissonance. Their double nature, scale and chord, becomes clear if we write them out as arpeggios:

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¹ The writer is indebted for this word to Dr. Walford Davies.

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Diminished Seventh. Augmented Triad. Ex. 441.

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Whole tone chord.

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From this point of view the modes too may be considered. The three chords just mentioned are practically statements that new notes are taken into the major scale (of C): the diminished seventh introduces A♭, the augmented triad D♯, and the whole tone chord E♭ and C♯. Other chords have, as they have appeared, introduced these or other notes.² The tonality of a scale may be quickly shown by taking all the constituent notes which are not part of the tonic chord, putting them upon the dominant note, and resolving them into the tonic. We will treat the principal modes thus in succession:

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² The first eleven bars of Tristan introduce into C minor F♯, G♯, C♯; A♮, E♭; D♭, and C♭.

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Ex. 442. Kaliān. Alahīya. Lydian. Ionian. Jhinjoti.

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Khamāj. Ionian. Mixolydian. Kāfi. Malhār. Dorian.

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Āsāvari. Pilu. Aeolian. Bhairavi.

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Ramkali. Phrygian Non-European (Bhairavi). (Rāmkali). Toḍi. Paraj.

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Shrī. Gaurī. Pūrvi.

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Lalat. Then Kaliān again.

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In this kinematograph of the modes they are seen to be each an isolated moment in the whole musical experience; or, to reverse the picture and the metaphor, the modes make a kind of stellar photograph of our harmony. The notes that give us difficulty are the F♯ and the D♭; the former yields freely, the latter persists surprisingly. In our scales we know two leading notes, upward to the tonic (B♮) and downward to the dominant (A♭). These modes show the other two, downward to the tonic (D♭) and upward to the dominant (F♯). But the whole of our harmony is based, of course, on the fact, which the ear, however, only gradually endorses, that any note may be treated as a leading note in either direction. It is in the same way that the ear endorses these extreme modes; to plunge suddenly into one of them is to be completely baffled. We have to take them as the native ear does, as extensions of some other more familiar mode, as accentuations of its poignancy, or as heightenings of its exhilaration.