The Music of Hindostan c5: List of Illustrations
The Music of Hindostan c5
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- English
List of Illustrations
c5.1
Rabindranath Tagore. From a drawing by W. Rothenstein *Frontispiece* PLATE 1. Music party. Detail from a picture (seventeenth century) in the collection of G. N. Tagore . *To face p. 14* PLATE 2. Māria Gonds. Circular dance Gonds and Kanwars. Slow dance, with anklets Malyas dancing Malayan women dancing . . . . . *To face p. 30* PLATE 3. Kashmīri bīn-player Nāgasaram-players, Tanjore . . . . *To face p. 46* PLATE 4. Rāgi-grinding Pāṇans Schoolmistress, Tanjore . . . . . *To face p. 63* PLATE 5. Musicians. Detail from an eighteenth-century Rajput cartoon in the collection of A. K. Coomaraswamy . . . . . . *To face p. 73* PLATE 6. Detail from a picture of the Surrender of Kandahar in the collection of Sītārām Lal of Benares. Seventeenth century . . *To face p. 77* PLATE 7. Mughal drawing, seventeenth century, of a bīn-player, from an original in the collection of G. N. Tagore . . . . . . *To face p. 78* PLATE 8. Dancing girl, South India . . . . *To face p. 80* PLATE 9. Portrait of Numa Khan Katawant, a musician of the court of Jahāngīr, from a picture in the collection of A. K. Coomaraswamy . . . *To face p. 83* PLATE 10. Seshanna, vīṇā-player, Mysore Aiknāth Vishnu Paṇḍit, vīṇā-player, Poona . *To face p. 86* PLATE 11. Ranganna, drummer, Mysore . . . *To face p. 225* PLATE 12. Bhai Santu, drummer, Amritsar . . . *To face p. 227* PLATE 13. Group of instruments. From the collection in the Museum, Bangalore . . . . *To face p. 228* PLATE 14. Sāmagaḥ, Madras Sāmagaḥ, Bangalore . . . . . . *To face p. 264* TABLE 1. Hindostani Rāgs . . . . . . *To face p. 151* TABLE 2. Folk-song variants . . . . . . *To face p. 154* were under sentence of death? A piece of scenery is truly enjoyed only in proportion as a man knows what he is looking for and realizes what he has found. It is a synthesis, but it is analysable, even if we do not consciously analyse. It is the same with music.
c5.2
Another difficulty in hearing music consists not in the departure from the old-established methods so much as in the substitution of new and strange conventions and associations. Cosmopolitan as the music of Europe is, we still feel the distinction of nationality. In a song by a foreign composer, whether the words are translations from his language or are originals in our own, we are conscious of passages in the music itself which to us, do not seem, to be quite the natural expression of the sentiment of the song. A German hardly seems to get at the conciseness nor a Frenchman at the dignity of what we feel. And it is a true instinct which leads singers to employ the language of the foreign composer rather than a translation, even when it is by Paul England at his best, or than the original English, even when the words are by Scott or Burns. Again, it is difficult for us to seize the point of thought of a Moussorgsky or a Ravel, not merely because they are new, but because they select and develop special aspects of our common heritage of European music. We might summarize such distinctions by saying that music which is to move the listener must be for a German solid and profound, for a Frenchman pungent and antithetical, for a Russian poignant and elemental, while we ourselves find our account best perhaps in humour verging on irony. At the same time the modifications of the general trend of European musical thought, as it is taken up into this or that national mind are slight, and the differences of idiom hardly more than dialectical; we are still travelling in the mother country, but, for the moment, in an unfamiliar part of it. But when we look beyond the ‘intense cultivation’ of Western democracies, away from the spirit of competition, the method of science, and the claims of ‘efficiency’, to the calm of the East, where a man’s life is his own or at most his family’s concern, rather than the State’s, where there is time to live it, where truth is found neither in analysis nor compromise, and spiritual food is not contained in tabloids, we do not know what to make of music which is dilatory without being sentimental and utters passion without vehemence.
c5.3
Another kind of music which has for us an unfamiliar convention is the polyphony of the Middle Ages. Here it is not the place but the time that is unfamiliar; we have suddenly thought away four centuries of our civilization. We step aside from the battle of the styles to contemplate achieved beauty. We wonder where now there are such workmen as those who built these melodies, what their secret was, and what the life of which these were the expression. They move us like forlorn hopes and lost joys, like the places we knew when we were children, like the land to which Blake hurried home from Santa Cruz. They appeal by their freshness and strangeness, but still more by an intimate familiarity. As an Englishman who happened to see for the first time the slope of a Sussex down would feel, apart from its intrinsic beauty, that it was the most English thing that he ever saw, so from these, apart from their intrinsic beauty of tone, the man of religion gets best at that truth which is beyond all limit and condition. Here the different convention helps rather than hinders him; just as his deepest intimations of those thoughts which are beyond words are conveyed to him more easily in Elizabethan language and in Hebrew phraseology than in any other form. It is this strange familiarity, which we are conscious of in Indian melody, that makes us sure that "though our language is different and our habits are dissimilar, at the bottom our hearts are one".
c5.4
But more imagination is needed to place ourselves at the point of view from which we may enjoy the method of early folk-song, that is, of melody conceived apart from harmony; and it is very difficult for those who have thought all melody with an underlying harmony, tacit or explicit, to accept it without harmony, except after long practice. Consequently they are seldom asked so to accept it; except for specialists, no folk-song is published without accompaniment. The problem is a difficult one, for if a harmonized folk-song, like a restored cathedral, is a persistent lie, yet a folk-song without harmony seems, at any rate for most of us, to fall to pieces, like a picture without perspective. There is another connexion between harmony and melody more intimate still, whereby harmony is no longer a mere adornment to melody which can be added or not, at will, but a vital factor influencing the actual structure of the melody itself. We may harmonize, if we please, 'Green Sleeves' or 'Walsingham' or the 'Agincourt Song' without doing them much harm; but if harmony, as we understand it, had been in the air these tunes could never have come to birth. A tune is just a musical sentence, paragraph, or chapter. And a sentence consists of important and unimportant words, and is not a string of dictionary words. In the same way a tune consists of important and unimportant notes, and depends for its convincingness upon a judicious management of these. But the principles upon which this ‘importance’ depends are different for melody and for harmony.
c5.5
The most obvious thing about harmony is that certain combinations are more euphonious than others; the more euphonious are dwelt upon, and the less euphonious skimmed lightly over. The essence of harmony lies in ‘substantive’ and ‘passing’ notes, and its progress consists in a training of the ear by which more and more ‘passing’ notes become ‘substantive’. The very various ‘chords’ that arise in this process give a distinct colour, i. e. importance, to the note to which for the moment they are applied.
c5.6
On the other hand, the most obvious thing about melody, a succession of single notes, is that the tune ‘lies’ high or low, that it has, as we say, a high tessitura or the reverse. This implies a level on which as a whole the song rests, and in comparison with which its salient passages are high or low. ‘Laws’ of melody spring into existence as the distance between these two levels, and the manner of passing from one to the other, come to be established and, later, stereotyped—as, for instance, in the ‘Final’ and ‘Reciting’ notes of Ecclesiastical music. In the process the intervening notes, and others beyond these two salient points, acquire varying ‘importance’ subsidiary to that of the two principal notes; and the whole of unharmonized song is laid out with reference to this variety of importance.
c5.7
But since harmony gives importance, at will, to this or that note of the tune, the ‘harmonic’ tune will in its turn tend to travel along the most telling points of the harmony and to reinforce its crises; and the significance of such music will be the result of the conflict between melodic idiosyncrasy and harmonic necessity. The compromise between these two impulses will lead to closeness of structure and make for unity, because each checks the tendency in the other to free improvisation. ‘Melodic’ tune, on the other hand, contains its law in itself, and it has merely to display that law, not to conflict with some other. Provided the ‘laws’ of melody are not transgressed, one particular structure seems no more desirable than another; and this leads easily to a variety and elaboration of detail, which blunts the sharp outline of *tune* and throws the weight rather upon definition of *mood*. The beauty of harmonic music is that of tilth and culture; of melodic music, that of the briony and the gossamer.
c5.8
In Europe the conventions of folk-song do not land us in any great difficulties. There is nothing in them which a good artist who is content to eschew conceits and lay aside all preciosity cannot as a matter of fact sing. There are few unsingable intervals because, with the exception of a few people, like the Greeks and Hungarians, the scales in use are the common property of the whole continent. There are few melodic ornaments or eccentric rhythms; they do not thrive when voices are much used in concert. But beyond Europe, at any rate in India, with which we are now concerned, it is very different. An enormous amount of convention, the growth of centuries, stands between us and the reproduction and therefore the appreciation of their melodies, for we understand little of any music we can take no part in. And yet no true musician would turn his back on it if he were convinced that the conventions were interesting in themselves; still less if he felt that there was real art behind the conventions.
c5.9
Music in India, as elsewhere, is of varying excellence; and it is as rare perhaps to hear the best there as it is in Europe. If we look away, however, from the less worthy kind, which is apt to deal in cheap contrast and to indulge in personal display, to the noblest which is to be found there, our chief difficulty is to feel the religious element in it which an Indian feels. To hold any intelligible language about the emotional content of music is difficult; it is still more difficult when the content is that subject which ‘every sensible man keeps to himself’. The range and depth of religious feeling varies in different countries, in one land it rides close, in another it sits loosely, to ethics, and the manifestations of it look different as they proceed from the intellectual or animal extremes of our nature—from the Vedantists or the Tantriks, from the Fourth Gospel or the Song of Solomon. Without questioning the spirituality of the religion of Europe or India, we may call the former practical and the latter contemplative; though it is difficult to say even as much as that without seeming to assert that the converse is never true, which would be absurd. But Europe, certainly England, thinks poorly of a religion that does not result in a good life: while India fixes its attention on the quality of the religion, the amount of realization and of vision it contains, and leaves the good life to follow as a natural consequence. India is still living the age of Faith. It is no accident, therefore, that the nearest analogue we can find to its music is that which culminated in the work of the Cinquecentists. Why it is that the Gregorian Tones portray a self-surrendering faith we can no more explain than we can say why it is that we agree with Heine’s description of *Ein’ feste Burg* as the Marseillaise of the Reformation, or that we recognize an undemonstrative pietism in Charles Wesley’s tunes and an undeniable suitability for their purpose in the hymns of the Salvation Army; but we easily feel that none of these can be divorced from their age or occasion. And though we may be unable to point to definite characteristics in Indian music which are due to its impregnation with a most spiritual form of religion, yet its extraordinary correspondence in detail both of time and tune with the music of Ecclesiastical Europe justifies the view that a peculiar outlook on the world, such for instance as the specifically religious outlook, does bring as a result a peculiar form of music. The best Indian feels towards his music, as perhaps the best of us do towards ours, like the Devout Lover:
c5.10
Wheresoe’er my fancy would begin
Still her perfection lets religion in.
I touch her, like my beads, with devout care,
And come unto my courtship as my prayer.
c5.11
Of this song, given me by S. M. Maitra, the tune is one commonly sung by boatmen in Bengal; the Bengali words are by Indu Bhuśan Ray, the translation by Maitra. The mad woman wandering about hugging a bundle of rags she has collected, with village urchins snatching at them, is a common sight; what is not common is the poet’s use of such an image to portray the soul’s close communion with God.
c5.12
Thou art my tiny bundle of old torn rags, my dearest lord; and I am thine own little mad woman holding thee always on my heart.
c5.13
When I am tired I lay myself down under the tree by the river-side, and sleep in peace, resting my head on thy bosom.
c5.14
In the streets men point the finger of scorn at me; they laugh at me, they throw dust on me.
c5.15
Some try to pluck thee from my heart, some tell me to cast thee away. Ah! but how could thy mad woman live without thee, my love!
c5.16
Pressing thee to my breast I go on my way, and neither fear nor falter; this mad mind of mine cannot be touched by any troubled thoughts.
c5.17
Long, long years have come and gone, but thou art still the one sweet thing that never grows old. With what talisman holdest thou this mad, mad soul of mine, my love!
c5.18
My translator said “Men weep when they hear this song”.
c5.19
BHATIAL (BOATMAN'S SONG) (Bengali Words)
c5.20
Andante. =72. Ex. 1. Srān-ta ho-le no-di tir . . to-ru tal pai tor bu-ke mā-tha re-kha . . ni-schin-ta ghu . . mai . . re . . Che-ra na . . krar pu - tu - li . . tu - i mor Ban-dhua-re . . . . . . Che-ra na - krar pu - tu - li tu-i mor, &c.
c5.21
There is, it is said, no statement which will apply to the whole of India except the geographical one that it is east of Suez. But three statements can be made about it which no one will be disposed to deny—that it is old and large and hot. India has had time to forget more melody than Europe has had time to learn. The elements of tone and rhythm have been combined and recombined, and have left the theory a tangled mass of forgotten systems and the practice an ineradicable instinct. The veneration for the past because of its remoteness, the mental attitude which looks away from the categories of time and space and turns its attention upon the essence of the thing itself, the faith which links the present closely with the time when the gods walked the earth and still points to the visible imprints of their feet—all these have united to personify every element of their music, and piously to preserve names and attributes which have long lost their meaning; so that much of the theory is clear only to those who can read myth. Nor on the practical side has extemporization, as it is there understood, been learned in a day, nor even in the lifetime of any individual; it is, just as much as their fluent public speaking, an inherited instinct of the race. This is, of course, bound up with another peculiarity, the disinclination to spoil a good memory by reliance on the written word or note. The writer heard two girl violinists at Tanjore play by heart in unison for five minutes, and they never once betrayed by a wrong note or by false intonation the fact that they were two and not one. But it is age-long practice rather than memory which has placed at the command of the best singers that inexhaustible wealth of variation with which they make a melody their own, that gift of improvisation which takes on an epic quality, as all crafts do that are handed down from father to son. To walk on the Old Trunk Road is, it has been said, to step into a chapter of Genesis; and in the same way we catch, in these immemorial cadences, the very spirit of the rhapsodists of Homer. Their music is old, but with an age like the eternal youth of Greece, not with a second childhood like the stereotyped formulas of the Troubadours.
c5.22
¹ The reason for this way of writing grace-notes is explained in Chapter VII.
c5.23
The size of a country is to be reckoned not in square miles but by its travelling facilities or their absence. The Norwegian valleys of Helgedal and Lejra Elv are ten miles distant at their nearest point; but as far apart practically, and as different linguistically, as Devon and York. Indian dialects have been variously computed at 141 and 183; it is probably within the mark to say that India comprises 50 peoples, each ranging from thousands to millions, who are mutually unintelligible. If it cannot at present be shown that music and language follow geographically the same lines, it is patent that in each the means of expression is based upon the same general principles of phonetic decay, antithesis, exegesis, and so on, and that both deepen in secluded communities and broaden upon the stream of a universal currency. And the hundreds of names of Indian Rāgs, and many more if we count all the variants which, coming from different parts of the country, are included under the same name, are there to show that ‘mood’ behaves in all respects like dialect. This isolation of the village or the tribe has been repeated in the isolation of the court. The method of Gwalior has been firmly marked off from that of Lucknow or Indore, and these from the methods of Mysore and Tanjore and Trivandrum. Such places formed centres in which local usages were summed up and tabulated; and music that was born in secluded valleys and in trackless deserts was there nursed by royal patronage. If it is too soon to say that the patronage is withdrawn, there are signs that it is rapidly diminishing; and, as for the seclusion upon which this reflective music has so largely thriven, there can be little pride in his profession left to a singer when gramophone records of his best songs can be bought in any large town. In spite of all this it is difficult to believe that Music will lose heart and depart from the earth, least of all from so poetical a race. *Alter erit tum Tiphys, et altera quae vehat Argo Delectos heroas.*
c5.24
Lastly there is the climate, the effect of which is twofold. Since life is lived under the simplest conditions and much in the open air, day being turned into night and night into day, all times of the twenty-four hours are available, to somebody, for making music. And the character of the music is felt, far more than in Europe where the conditions are more formal, to depend closely upon the hour and season of its performance. It is difficult to gauge the strength of this feeling, since those who believe that the beauty of the music depends on its being heard at the appropriate time are about equal in number to those who do not. The belief is strongest where the music is purest, where it is performed for its own sake rather than for display, and, like every other musical belief, is very old. Another result of the climatic conditions is seen in the simplicity of the instruments. The *Vina*, the most elaborate and the oldest, has not a tithe of the complication of the piano; for the tension of the strings being low, the framework can be simple, and the fingers being on the string, all mechanism is dispensed with. Nor are the gradations between the best and the worst specimens so subtle as in the violin; for the tone is not exposed so much to criticism on plucked as on bowed strings. Neither, of course, is there any comparison in the cost; ten pounds will buy a good instrument for the player's purpose, and the many tens more that may be spent on it are lavished, though not wasted, upon its ornamentation. Meanwhile, for simpler requirements, nature provides the bamboo, out of which an hour's work will fashion a serviceable flute, and man provides the water-pot (*chatti*) over which a skin may be stretched to furnish a quite sufficient drum.¹ It is not the great heat that matters—the difference between midsummer and midwinter is no greater than in Europe—but the all-pervading damp of the rains after the searching heat of June. This swells the wood and softens the glue and so breaks down the tone of elaborately constructed instruments such as we employ.
c5.25
¹ Mṛdaṅga, the general word for drum, means ‘clay-body’.
c5.26
We have spoken of some difficulties of understanding music which are due to an unfamiliar convention of time or place, or to the absence of a convention to which we are accustomed, or to the presence of a content which appeals less forcibly to us; we have also considered the effect on the particular music which is under discussion, of the conservatism, the broad expanse, and the climate of India. One more cause of the particular form which this music has taken is to be found in the language of the country; for speech is logically, if not also historically, prior to song. Sanskrit, with an infusion of Persian in the north, and in the south incorporating relics of still older tongues, is the basis of all Indian languages. Its pure resonant vowels and clear-cut consonants present the least possible obstacles to good vocalization. The fact that quantity counts for more than accent in its pronunciation has made metre rather than rhythm the decisive element of musical time. The combination of resonant vowels and a metrical language has led to the development of vocal rather than instrumental music. And since the voice employs equable force of tone rather than violent dynamic changes, its deficiency in this respect has been made good on the drum.
c5.27
That is perhaps as far as the printed page can go in presenting to the eye what can only be apprehended by the ear. To suggest the effect of that which even musical notation only faintly shows, we may borrow a device from the poets. When Homer wanted his reader to feel that Helen’s beauty was worth all the ten years’ agony of Troy, he made him listen to the old men on the walls talking about her ways as she had moved amongst them in their youth. In that spirit we may read the diary of Pierre Loti in the fifth chapter of his *L’Inde*; and those who have never heard what he speaks of may divine what he means, while those who have heard it may take pleasure in his accuracy of observation and truth of feeling.
c5.28
“About four o’clock in the afternoon, when the midday heat has passed, the musicians of the Maharajah’s orchestra, who have been placed at my disposal for a few hours, enter with noiseless steps, bow ceremoniously, and take their seats on the carpet which has been spread for them in the verandah.
c5.29
“In the clear-cut profile and dainty features you recognize at once the artist. Gold tinselled turbans are on their heads, and diamonds in their ears. A fold of silk, touched here and there with gold leaf and disposed in the classic style, is thrown over the shoulder and leaves free one side of the body and an arm covered with bangles. From their light drapery steals a faint scent of rose-water.
c5.30
“They have brought large instruments with brass strings; giant mandolins and overgrown guitars with the scroll of the finger-board ending in the head of some monster. These guitars differ considerably from one another and are intended to produce very different effects; but they have all of them large sound-boards, and occasionally, at the ends of the finger-board, hollow globes looking like fruit on a branch. They are painted, gilded, inlaid with ivory; they are old, well seasoned, and valuable. The mere sight of these queer shapes awakes in me a feeling of mystery—the mystery of India. The musicians smile as they show me them. This one is to be caressed by the finger, that to be stroked by the bow, a third to be plucked with a mother of pearl plectrum, and there is one which is to be played actually by rolling along the strings a little oval piece of ebony. Refinements, these, such as our Western musicians have never known. Then there are drums tuned to different notes and child singers sumptuously dressed. A programme specially printed for me is put into my hand containing the melodious polysyllables of the performers’ names.
c5.31
“By five o’clock they are all there, a score of them, seated on the carpet in the growing twilight while the punkah swings languidly overhead. And now the monster at the end of each guitar has reared its head and the concert is going to begin. What devastating sounds will issue, doubtless, from instruments of such a build, and what a din from the drums! I wait, nerving myself for much noise. Behind the players is an archway standing out against a white porch through which a group of the Maharajah’s soldiers are seen standing in the rays of the setting sun, their turbans glowing in the red light to a deeper red, while the musicians form a dim cluster in deep shadow. The sight of their serious faces, and the fixed look with which they regard each other rather than any actual sound, tells you that the concert has begun.
c5.32
“A note is held on *pianissimo*, almost too high for the ear to distinguish, like the opening phrase of *Lohengrin*, and then through several and various developments passes into a rhythmic movement without any increase in the body of sound. Astonishing it is, this almost silent music issuing from such powerful strings! It is like the buzzing of a fly imprisoned in your hand, or the rustle of a moth’s wing against a window-pane, or the death struggle of a dragon-fly. One of the players holds in his mouth a little steel implement, and by the vibration of his cheeks produces the sound of a whispering fountain. Another, on one of the largest of the guitars, coaxed by the hand as if the player were afraid of it, keeps up on the same notes a prolonged Tuwhoo! like the blurred note of an owl, whilst a third instrument, muted, gives the sound of the surf on a distant beach. Then there are taps on the edge of the drum-head with the finger tips which your ear can hardly detect. Suddenly jerks and jolts, utterly unexpected, introduce a mad fit of two seconds duration; the strings vibrate at their full length, and these same drums, struck differently, utter deep, dull sounds like the lumbering stampede of elephants over hollow ground, or the rumbling of a subterranean torrent in some boiling chasm. Then in a moment all grows quiet again, and relapses at last into the whisper with which it began.
c5.33
“Seated cross-legged on the ground a young Brahman with wonderful eyes holds between his knees an object whose lack of finish contrasts strangely with the refinement of the rest. It is a rough earthenware jar containing pebbles, and its large opening fits closely to the convex of his bared chest. The volume of tone increases or diminishes according as he leaves the jar open or closes it by pressing it to his body. His extraordinarily agile fingers draw from it sounds now twittering, now booming, or again, when the pebbles rattle inside, hard and dry like pattering hail.
c5.34
“When the melody of one of these guitars makes itself felt above this clamorous silence, it is with a sort of wail by which the sound is dragged from one note to the next, an intense and passionate moan of rising grief, and the sobbing melody instead of being drowned is reinforced by the tumult of the unearthly drumming.
c5.35
All this brings the listener into closer touch with the poignancy of human suffering than the supremest moments of Western music ever do. . . . The melodies do not, however, speak to us of sorrows so remote or so unintelligible as those of a Mongol or a Chinaman. If not at home in them, we seem at least to understand them. They depict the pain of a highly wrought nature which, though it has travelled down the centuries by another path, is yet not radically different from our own. And the gipsies, though through the medium of a less civilized music, have made us to some extent familiar with these forlorn and feverish accents.
c5.36
"The human voice had, I found, been kept for the end. One after another tiny fragile-looking boys in rich attire, with eyes almond-shaped and over-large, executed bravura passages with bewildering rapidity. The voices they once had were now broken—already dying, as it were. A man in a gold turban conducted them, to the sound of a truly awe-inspiring prelude, by holding them with his eyes, his head lowered like that of a snake fascinating a bird; and you knew that he was mesmerizing them and could, if he pleased, force to breaking point the delicate structure of their frail organs. The words they articulated to their minor cadences were a prayer to appease an angered goddess.
c5.37
"Last of all came the turn of the *primo uomo*, a handsome man in the prime of life. He sings and acts for me the laments of a young girl deserted by her lover. Seated like the rest on the ground he is at first buried in thought; his brow puckers; his eye darkens. Then his voice breaks out with the incisive wail of an Eastern bagpipe. In his extreme high notes you are still aware, by its harshness, that the voice is a man's; but in the heart-broken tones I hear—and it is a revelation to me—the very song of anguish; and his play of feature and the tense motions of his tapering fingers accentuate the agony of his despair.
c5.38
"These players and singers are the servants of the Maharajah. They are to be heard every day within the guarded stillness of his palace walls, while menials pass to and fro with a cat's footfall, or stand with hands joined in supplication. How far other than ours must be the thoughts of this Monarch's heart; how different his outlook upon the sorrow of life, and of love, and of death! But music like this, uncommon in character and distinguished in performance, reveals to me one little corner of his soul better than did our short and formal interview, spoiled by its tiresome punctilio and by the constraint of a language not my own.”
c5.39
Not all Indian music is at this level; and one who determines to hear the real thing must be content to pass hours of boredom and traverse tracts of philistinism, ignorance, and want of skill before he has his reward—as, indeed, may be the case nearer home. But when it comes there is no mistaking it. No doubt there is often that added charm which we get, for instance, in reading poetry in a foreign language, in which the unfamiliar words contain a poetry of their own apart from the poetic use of them; the very naïveté of the melody and the old-worldliness and other-worldliness of the setting in which it is heard often compel our feeling for beauty even in very humble specimens of the art. We lose, perhaps, by not understanding the words, but less than we might expect. All their burden is the simplest desires and the simplest fears—the unwearied iteration of *Miserere Domine*, and the unwearying tale of human love.
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Causes have been here assigned for this music being what it is; and it would seem that the music will not change until the causes change. Of these the language and the climate are two constant factors. It is shown in Chapter VIII that language, especially verse, has had a determining effect upon the rhythm of the music; and the climate, besides affecting the question of instruments, diminishes the enterprise which is necessary for concerted music. So far, then, it may be predicted that the music will remain metrical rather than rhythmical, vocal rather than instrumental, and individual rather than concerted. The other two factors were the conservatism and the large area of the country. This large area has already been somewhat contracted, and is likely to be still more contracted in the future, by easier and cheaper means of communication; the effect of this, musically, should be to reduce the variety of *Rāg* and *Tāl*, and to make the ‘dialects’ conform to some common standard. The conservatism will, no doubt, die hard. It seems to many as if all hope for music lay in recovering the traditions and the knowledge which made it so fine in the past. They believe that art can only prosper under munificent patronage, and that when that is removed art must die. In that they may be right; but when they go on to say, or to imply, that the *materia technica* of the art, its precise formularies as they existed in those days, must be sought out and quickened into life, as the only means of awakening an interest which has fallen asleep, they are on more debatable ground. Music cannot stand still. Its whole essence consists in finding short cuts to old routes. In the process it does many things that are afterwards seen to be regrettable; they die off, that is all, and the art lives on. The whole of our musical history is full of instances of this. We can appreciate the pope's prohibition of the sharp leading note or Mendelssohn's annoyance at the methods of Berlioz by considering the sort of reception we gave to Wagner's 'substantive' sevenths and chromatic harmony, now become commonplaces, and are giving to French whole-tones and to German pure dissonance. Life is too short to spend wholly in living in the past, and human needs are too imperative to be satisfied by proxy. It is inevitable that the multiple means of expression which Indian music has at its command will be reduced in number, that the fine edges of them will be worn down, and that the real needs will be expressed more simply. For, after all, a man sings because it is a splendid thing to do, and because he cannot help it; and when that is really the case he is not going to be fettered by obsolescent rules.
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Music party. Detail from a picture (seventeenth century) in the collection of G. N. Tagore.
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The process of simplification has already begun. The Carnatic system frankly ignores the niceties (examined in Chapter IV) of intonation. In northern India a number of songs are described as 'in a mixed *Rāg*' or 'not in a *Rāg*' and yet are accepted and enjoyed. The preponderance of common time (*Ādi*, *Tintāl*) and of 3/4 (*Rūpak*) over all the other kinds put together can hardly have been as great in the days when the system of thirty-five *Tāls* was invented. The 'new style' of drumming ignores the 'drum-words' and tends to simplify the elaboration of cross-rhythm.
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It is all very sad; but there can be only one remedy—to accept the conditions and to make music first in spite of them, and afterwards on the strength of them. Music which is not built upon the immediate instincts and needs of the people is no music at all; they must make the formal details of their music just as they make their language—by actually singing and speaking. It is as far from the truth to say that 'modes' and 'times' must remain in their primitive condition as to say that poetry of the twentieth century must be in Chaucer's English, or a Bengali love-song in Vedic Sanskrit.
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But there are other conditions which need not be accepted. If the rulers of native states realized what a death-blow they were dealing at their own art by supporting or even allowing a brass band, if the clerk in a government office understood the indignity he was putting on a song by buying the gramophone which grinds it out to him after his day’s labour, if the Mohammedan ‘star’ singer knew that the harmonium with which he accompanies himself was ruining his chief asset, his musical ear, and if the girl who learns the pianoforte could see that all the progress she made was as sure a step towards her own denationalization as if she crossed the black water and never returned—they would pause before they laid such sacrilegious hands on Saraswatī. Excuses may be made for such practices, but there is one objection fatal to them all; the instruments are borrowed. We do not hear much about Roman music because it was so easy for them to get Greek slaves; and the importation of the gavotte and the minuet killed the English morris-dancers. To dismiss from India these foreign instruments would not be to check the natural, but to prune away an unnatural growth.