Ragas and Raginis: A Pictorial and Iconographic Study of Indian Musical Modes Based on Original Sources c12.1
Rāgas and Rāginīs: A Pictorial and Iconographic Study of Indian Musical Modes Based on Original Sources c12.1
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The function that the Indian melodies, as rāgas, have been made to play, namely, of spelling out in the language of symphonic formulas definitive rasas, capable of evoking a variety of human emotions has yet to be investigated with reference to the nature of the psychology of musical expression. So much mystery has hovered round the phenomenon of musical expression itself, that until recently no clear conception of the nature of musical utterance has been possible. Great lovers of music have helped to intensify rather than elucidate the mystery. Definitions of music such as that of Cardinal Newman, as "the out-pouring of eternal harmony in the medium of created sound", or of Carlyle, who called "music a kind of inarticulate, unfathomable speech leading us to the edge of the infinite", or that of Lafcadio Hearn—who characterized music as "a psychical storm, agitating to unimaginable depths the mystery of the past within us", can only be regarded as emotional effusions, rather than as scientific enunciations of the nature of musical expression. Even the attempts of expert musicians have not been helpful in unravelling the mystery of the riddle. The technical experts, long persisted in the psychological fallacy, that music had nothing to do with the ordinary emotions of life, but were concerned with emotions peculiar to music itself—i.e. purely musical emotions. According to this view, supported by psychologists like Dr. W. Brown¹ and M.
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Combarieu, music is a unique kind of thought and musical concept which connotes sensations unattainable in the other medium. Says M. Combarieu: "La musique est l'art de penser avec des sons sans concepts." ['Music is an art of thinking in terms of sound without concepts’]. The logical implication of this view is that music, unlike painting and sculpture and, like architecture, is incapable of rendering, or expressing a theme, a subject, or a topic. It is one thing to say that music is a language, having laws and logic of its own, and it is quite another, to suggest that music can only deal with matters peculiar to the Kingdom of Sound and is unable to utter, express, or deal with subjects of human emotion, or other thematic materials. According to this doctrine, music is a Non-representative Art,—an Art of production of certain dynamic shades, tempos, phrasings, tone colours—blended into a design of orchestration—having a significance other than that of intellectual, or emotional values. If it arouses any emotion,—the same is not akin to anything that can be imitated, or verbally described. To put it in the language of plastics, music is decorative rather than illustrative. Its patterns have dynamic rather than thematic motifs. There is a certain amount of truth in the doctrines indicated above.
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It insists, somewhat unduly, on the quality of music as “pure art values”—something akin to ‘abstract aesthetic qualities’ aimed by exponents of modern paintings in attempting to release the art of painting from the tyranny of subject-matter. The exponents of the modern movements in painting have demonstrated that it is possible—to produce ‘pictures’ of great aesthetic significance, without recourse to any subject, theme, or anecdote. A picture need not tell any story, or represent any imitation, or description of nature. ‘Absolute painting’ though they represent nothing,—evokes a disinterested aesthetic sensation,—due to a happy perception and contemplation of special relations, dimensions, proportions, accents, colour values and rhythm inherent in the quality of the design, claiming to attain the condition of music. But this demonstration of the quality of non-representative painting, does not invalidate the capacity of the painter’s craft to represent, delineate, or imitate nature, or to render themes of human or emotional significance. And if music possesses, as it indeed does, in a large measure, the power of creating forms of ‘pure aesthetic values’,—it is not incapable of rendering and expressing concepts evocative of human emotions.
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Indeed, a school of psychologists, supporting the ordinary popular view, has strenuously emphasized on this function of music and some have gone to the length of declaring that music possesses an emotional power greater than that of speech itself and the expression of human emotion is its essential mission and glory. There is little doubt that music "can suggest and stimulate feelings akin to those produced by the vicissitudes of real life, and it can interest, fascinate, delight, or weary and displease, by what we can only call the purely musical quality of its sound patterns" (Vernon Lee). Musical experience has indeed proved to us that certain musical patterns, can well induce reveries peopled with a whole phantasmagoria of tender, weird, or alarming shapes,—reminiscences which one loves to recall, or shrink from recalling,—longings too unbounded to be called hopes—a submerged world of baffled endeavours, undirected passions, romances lived only in fancy. These take form again and again and become embodied in sound, emerging from the caverns of the mind where they have been biding their time of summons into the light of recognition. This phenomena of the evocation of human passions, sentiments and feelings (rasas in term of Indian aesthetics) is explained by psychologists by the theory of 'emotional memory'. As enunciated by M Ribot, this doctrine claims that emotional states divested of all their accompanying circumstances can leave behind them a memory of themselves.
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Feelings of love, fear, disappointment, anger, elation, disentangled and disassociated from its cause on the various occasions on which such feelings were experienced, attain an abstract emotional state, or form—which musical patterns can arouse and through them, by means of association "a kind of emotional reverberation," call up in each hearer his own particular images and ideas which once formed the settings of such emotional states when originally experienced by each individual.