The Music of Hindostan c9.s1.21

c9.s1.21

But there is a second difficulty, which Mr. Clements’s recent book raises. Was the *grāma* a scale beginning on a definite note at all, or was it not rather a gamut, a continuous series, which might be started at any point, but which differed from some other *grāma* by having one place where the series diverged? But there is the difficulty of the names. Why were they called *Sa-grāma*, *Ma-grāma*, unless they had some obvious connexion with Sa and Ma? And what could that connexion be except that they began there? The distinction between *grāma* (scale) and *mūrchana* (mode) may well be, essentially, that between *genos* and *harmoniā* (scale and mode), only that the Indian *grāma* did not and the Greek *genos* did not begin on a particular note.