The Music of Hindostan c17.165

c17.165

But if music at its best obliterates those distinctions, it will be at something less than its best when it maintains them. Thus both the ‘popular’ music which exalts matter at the expense of form, and extreme ‘absolutism’ in which the form dwarfs the matter, depart, to some extent, from the ideal. Indian music knows perhaps less than ours of this falsehood of extremes. It seldom descends to the merely popular because it refuses to compress itself into a square tune, something that you can carry away with you like an umbrella, and, as Corney Grain used to add, ‘it doesn’t much matter if you never bring it back’. Nor has it the deadly insistence of the cook’s song in the *We’re Here*, which was ‘like something ever so bad but sure to happen whatever you did’, because it is never sung twice in the same way. Nor is the tune a mere adjunct to the words, as rhyme or alliteration are to an advertisement, for the words are set to the tune, not the tune to the words.