Chinese classical music

[Sramana]

Hey everyone!

I'm surprised and delighted by DrShrikaanth's request that I introduce Chinese classical music. I think maybe the best way to do this would be to start with its fundamental aesthetic orientation and then proceed to specific problems vis-a-vis Carnatic theory/practice.


0. Preliminaries

Before I begin, I should note that the world of music genres is very different in China than in India. There is no over-arching system like CM (or HM) that can be rendered on many instruments. Repertoires, techniques, aesthetics, and even musical cultures are more focused around particular instruments. There are recognized 'classical aesthetics', but they are most concentrated in the tradition of guqin playing. Other instruments like pipa and guzheng have attained some classical status, but their classicism can be adequately understood solely by reference to guqin, which carries the most complete package.

To make an analogy with India: it is as though the vina were *by far* the most revered, 'mystical', and canonical instrument, and everything else were held to be somewhat inferior. A great singer or flute player could classicize his playing by association with the monolithic vina tradition, but somewhere in people's minds there would be the reservation: "it's still not vina..." As though the only thing non-vina instruments could do, by *definition*, was light classical. (I'm exaggerating a bit, but I think it's important to convey the difference in perspective.) Obviously this is more difficult to imagine for India because CM is an abstraction that can be rendered on many instruments. By contrast, the guqin is so organologically unusual (see below) that its music is difficult or impossible to render on other instruments, adding to its mystique.

Another way to look at the contrast is in social terms. Since music is made and taught by people, who are these people? I actually know little about the social history of CM before the 20th century, so people can enlighten me here. In 21st century international culture, perhaps the single thing we expect most from our best musicians is 'professionalism'--and virtually all well-recognized, respected musicians are full-time professionals. In more traditional cultures such as pre-modern Europe and China (dunno about India), professional musicians were generally held in contempt by the social elites. At worst they were considered scum on a level with prostitutes and circus performers; at best they were still servants employed by the elites, and not elite themselves. In conditions like these, a separate elite tradition of music flourished where the goal was not ‘professionalism’ but ‘virtuoso amateurship’. In fact the closest analogue to guqin I can think of in another culture would be the viol or viola da gamba. In Renaissance and Baroque Europe, the violin family was developing mainly on the ‘popular’ plane, while the elites preferred to develop the culture of a related but distinct family of instruments called viols. (Violin indeed means ‘petty viol’.) Viols were the string instruments of choice for solo or small-ensemble music throughout much of this period, suitable for what the elites could have been doing themselvesâ€"

[drshrikaanth]

Posted by Sramana

I. Fundamentals
Obviously any music has many facets and can be analyzed from many different perspectives. One of my CM friends, for instance, holds that CM is all about “binary gatewaysâ€ÂÂÂ

[drshrikaanth]

Posted by Sramana

II. Carnatic cross-references.
Now that I’ve given an introduction on the most fundamental issues, we can examine points of contact with CM. Since I’ve performed and discussed with a number of CM musicians, I can structure this around the most common questions they ask, and the most common difficulties they identify.

1. “WHERE’S SAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!â€ÂÂÂ

[drshrikaanth]

Sramana
Welcome and thanks for starting the thread as requested. You have given a very detailed introduction. I request all our esteemed raikas to come and participate in the discussions by asking questions and sharimg their knowledge and thoughts.

Ramana, I have edited your post and split it in three as it is much easier to read and also saves page space.

It may take a while for us to digest and ask questions. So please take up bit by bit and explain specific points both historically and technique-wise as well as situations/moods, rasas etc. Illustrations make it so much eaasier for one to understand. Like for instance you said about the same set of 3 notes(Or any number) being used to convey different moods and about combination of oppositesand ornamentaion used to convey the same. Now if you can give sample and tell us the emotions, it is easier to undersand as well as to ask questions. ANd do not hesitate to post your own recordings. You fusion band may be anAhata but all that we mere mortals get to hear is only the Ahata

[drshrikaanth]

[quote] dhrupad still has a rich vocal/continuous texture, but a qin “performanceâ€ÂÂÂ

[Sramana]

Thanks, DrShrikaanth, for splitting up that monster post. Unfortunately I think you left one part out by mistake. Here it is:




II. Carnatic cross-references.

Now that I’ve given an introduction on the most fundamental issues, we can examine points of contact with CM. Since I’ve performed and discussed with a number of CM musicians, I can structure this around the most common questions they ask, and the most common difficulties they identify.

1. “WHERE’S SAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!â€ÂÂÂ

[drshrikaanth]

Pardon the error ramana. I have made the corrections although that post has become extraling again. Is it ok now? Also please tell us about yourself, your background, musical training, connections with china, your group and musical activities. I had saved up your article on my system so it would not have got lost anyway.

[Sramana]

Regarding pentatonic scales.

Preference for intervals has to be one of the most interesting ways that musical cultures differ. As far as ancient western music goes, we have evidence that diatonic scales (basically any melakarta you can play on the white keys of a piano) were current in Mesopotamia by the early 2nd millennium BC; several tuning systems interacted in ancient Greece, some of them using quarter-steps. This page has a lot of fascinating stuff about that: http://www.kingmixers.com/Research.html. Again the evidence is mostly fragmentary (plus I know very little of it), but abundant quarter-steps, now distinctive of Middle Eastern music, seem to be a late development (i.e. not attested in cuneiform sources).

As for China, let me clarify my confused statements above. We have excavated instruments (tuned percussion) from the 1st millennium BC that are fully chromatic but seem to have been arranged to play only pentatonic scales. The chromaticity was apparently to enable transposition and modulation. But there was some diversity among the pre-imperial states: Confucius criticized the music of Wei and Zheng as being licentious, and excavated instruments from those areas indeed use different tuning systems (about which I know nothing, alas). Musical theory is evident in texts from not later than the 3rd century BC, and these seem to talk pretty explicitly of pentatonic scales. I have no idea whether the ancient cosmological focus on the number 5 played a causal role in hardening this theory, or is merely incidental and convenient.

Jumping ahead about a millennium, our earliest (6th century) piece, http://www.chineseculture.net/guqin/ram ... youlan.ram, has more heptatonicity than any later piece, but is still basically pentatonic. That's the same arrangement--what you might call pentatonic basis with heptatonic spice--you get as the centuries wear on, with the spice getting less and less.

What all this means is, Chinese musicians were fully aware of diatonic and chromatic scales but remained disinclined to use them...as far as we know. (It's kind of impossible to estimate without notated music, which doesn't exist in abundance until the 15th century.) Truly I lament this sometimes, but they've luckily developed pentatonic treatments to a high point of sophistication. I guess the preference for pentatonic can be explained by some combination of (1) cosmological theory that emphasized 5 (compare western cosmological theory with lots of 7s, originally derived from the 5 visible planets + sun and moon), (2) the notion that pentatonic music is more emotionally or musically stable than heptatonic music, which would appeal ideologically to the literati, and (3) some ultimately inexplicable cultural preference.

What do you all think explains the fixed sruti in all Indian music? I talked about this briefly with a professor of these things and he said the fixed sruti is a fairly recent development and derived originally from the fixed tuning of the vina.

[drshrikaanth]

The explanation for similarity between Greek music, mespotomian and Indian is simple. Indian music profoundly influenced ancient Greek music. The word Gamut is grAma-Ut which is the ShaDja grAma. I wonder if anything is known about exchanges between Chinese and Indian music. there was a huge amount of contact in the past by way of buddhists and hindu monks, the Hindu rulers of South East Asia etc. Please hae a look at my article that I wrote for Carnatica.

http://carnatica.net/special/essay-shrikaanth.htm

That last link(.ram) in your post(last) does not play at all. Please check the link.

[Sramana]

Imagine a Shuddha Dhanyasi scale that, once in a very long time, goes G2-R2-S and lingers on the R2, instead of G2-S. It's a very special effect, and catches the listener's ear--heptatonic 'spice'!

Regarding myself, I'm a Harvard graduate currently taking a year off before gradschool. My academic work focuses on early Chinese history and philosophy, but I'm interested in related topics in other civilizations as well. (Hence the Sanskrit.) I play the qin as much as I can, and have been learning from a teacher for about three years. Generally I enjoy fantasizing about globalization in both intellectual and musical disciplines, though my own abilities fall far short of what I hope others can accomplish.

[vasanthakokilam]

What do you all think explains the fixed sruti in all Indian music?

My first reaction is 'Adequacy' . Meaning, if you can do everything you want to do with fixed sruti, why mess with it by changing the sruthi...

But then the second thought is, that may be presumptuous. So, another way to get at this is, what extra can be accomplished musically with a raga based music by moving the sruthi in the middle of a piece? Can different emotions and bhava be brought about by shifting the tonic in the middle of the piece that are otherwise not possible? When a performer switches to madhyama sruthi, it does change the 'color' of the music, so there is something even a raga based music can 'purchase' with change in tonic.

Shifting the tonic is not completely unknown in CM as the practice of switching to Madhyama sruthi is there but if I understand that right, it is done for more practical reasons ( the compositions being skewed towards lower octave and the coverage of swaras is not too wide ).

Does sruthibEdam fall under this category as well?

[drshrikaanth]

SrutibhEda indeed fulls under the purview of changing the tonic. The idea of a fixed tonic is all about harmony(Cosmic), avoiding interefering moods and Convenience. The change in structure of instuments was crucial here. IIRC I have touched on this in my article, which is why I posted it.

[Sramana]

How silly, I followed the link you mention with a comma, which fused with the URL rendering it unusable. Here: http://www.chineseculture.net/guqin/ram ... youlan.ram

I was intrigued by your point about 'gamut', but every etymology I found sounded more like this one (from dictionary.com):

"Middle English, the musical scale, from Medieval Latin gamma ut, low G : gamma, lowest note of the medieval scale (from Greek, gamma. See gamma) + ut, first note of the lowest hexachord (after ut, first word in a Latin hymn to Saint John the Baptist, the initial syllables of successive lines of which were sung to the notes of an ascending scale CDEFGA: Ut queant laxis resonare fibris Mira gestorum famuli tuorum, Solve polluti labii reatum, Sancte Iohannes)."

I once asked an leading expert on Zoroastrianism what the influence of that religion on Second Temple Judaism might have been. He declined to comment, saying that for any two cultures in a given time-slice, you need to know what was going on in culture A, what was going on in culture B, and whether any relationships between them at that time would be relevant in assigning influence. In his opinion the Zoroastrian texts were far too difficult to date to even make "what was going on in culture A" accessible. As http://www.kingmixers.com/Research.html indicates, even exploring influence from Mespotamia to Greece is difficult; how much more difficult might it be between those civilizations and India?

Regarding India and China, India can kick back and heave a sigh of self-praise here. Buddhist monks introduced many aspects of Indian culture to China, which influenced China profoundly; there doesn't seem to have been any cultural traffic in the opposite direction. But, except for Buddhist liturgical music, the musical influences are probably impossible to trace. Buddhist influence was at its height in the late 1st millennium, after which contacts diminished. We have effectively zero notated music from this time in either India or China. Chinese writers certainly don't seem conscious of any influence.

What they *do* seem conscious of is influence from Central Asia on the popular and court-ensemble level. Many instruments--the entire lute family, for instance, and reeds as well--derived from Central Asia and retain some such associations among the Chinese today. Hah, as every dynasty declines in Chinese history, the literati go: "OK, where's the bad moral influence coming from?" At least in the late-first-millennium Tang dynasty, they laid a lot of blame on that "licentious western music". "Licentious western music" would probably be whatever the settled peoples of Central Asia were doing at that time; again, we have no music preserved. Perhaps it was somewhat like it is today: basically Turko-Persianate, with close relations to maqam. Significantly, the Chinese of later ages don't see themselves as having absorbed any of this music: it remains foreign. And given how "boring" most qin music is compared to "licentious western music", perhaps the influences were minimal indeed!

[drshrikaanth]

I was intrigued by your point about 'gamut', but every etymology I found sounded more like this one (from dictionary.com):

Yes it only goes so far as gamma ut. Iam unable to quote a reference (failure of retrieval). In the west, it is quite common to downplay any Indain infuence on their cultures. Talk about attitudes! It is true that as we go further back, the more difficult it becomes to trace anything with ease or certainity.

Here is a link exploring some of these areas

http://www.atributetohinduism.com/Hindu_Music.htm

As for zorastrian texts, the most important reason for difficulty in dating them is because the culture it was so completely suppressed and persecuted by islamic enthusiasts and the people themselves converted or fleed(In some numbers) to India. Even so, I should think a time-range can be given for these texts.

Regarding India and China, India can kick back and heave a sigh of self-praise here. Buddhist monks introduced many aspects of Indian culture to China, which influenced China profoundly; there doesn't seem to have been any cultural traffic in the opposite direction.

I was aware of this but did not say it so as not to give the impression of "Holier than thou" attitude. Chinese appear to have been generally insular and isolated. They must have resisted extraneous influences. And what they took, they assimilated and forgot about it.

[Sramana]

Oh, right, I forgot to mention. The Greeks used letters of their alphabet to denote musical notes. That includes gamma, which is a nonsense word derived from Phoenician gimel. (Aleph -> alpha, beth --> beta, gimel --> gamma) http://www.cedarland.org/alpha.html. This link is much better attested than anything about "grama".

"In the west, it is quite common to downplay any Indain infuence on their cultures. Talk about attitudes! It is true that as we go further back, the more difficult it becomes to trace anything with ease or certainity."

I agree more with the last statement than the first. Being actively involved in the Hindu community at Harvard, home of Prof. Michael Witzel, I've followed closely the recent controversy and became more aware than ever before of these issues in their political as well as academic dimensions. Neither westerners' alleged desire to downplay Indian achievement nor Indian desire to champion it has any bearing on the search for historical fact. Sober scholarship is needed to address such issues, and if there is one mark of sober scholarship it is dispassion and caution.

"I was aware of this but did not say it so as not to give the impression of "Holier than thou" attitude. Chinese appear to have been generally insular and isolated. They must have resisted extraneous influences. And what they took, they assimilated and forgot about it."

It's interesting to reflect on "Chinese isolation". When you think about it, which major civilizations HAVE absorbed large amounts from outside, and how did this happen? Greco-Roman culture was utterly transformed by Christianity--does this amount to a "Hebraization"? Or is Christianity best understood as one element among many diverse elements in the polycultural Roman empire, and thus "homegrown"? After the empire became Christian, Christianity and Islam expanded mainly by military conquest or overwhelming commerical/political advantage. Thus, the acceptance of these religions en masse by other cultures had more the quality of imposition than of "open spontaneous acceptance" of the foreign. (Would large numbers of South Asians have become Muslim without Muslim political/military dominance?) Buddhism and Hinduism transformed SE Asia and Central Asia substantially, but this was definitely a case of a distinctly superior civilization coming into contact with less developed ones--spontaneous cultural colonization, if you will. Against this backdrop, China's wholehearted (if ambivalent) acceptance of Buddhism seems to be quite remarkable! India wasn't militarily or economically dominant over China, and they were comparable in terms of cultural sophistication. Either Buddhists were insanely good at marketing their religion, or the Chinese were interested in foreign religions after all! Probably both!

[drshrikaanth]

Neither westerners' alleged desire to downplay Indian achievement nor Indian desire to champion it has any bearing on the search for historical fact. Sober scholarship is needed to address such issues, and if there is one mark of sober scholarship it is dispassion and caution.

Sadly sober scholarship is certainly hard to come by. Wheter you like it or not, attitudes and prejudices have powerfully influenced research and publication and continue to do so. One cannot simply wish this away.
But let us refrain from all these diversions. Our object is to discuss chinese music. Lets do just that.

[Sramana]

Agreed. You[collectively]'re up!

[Sramana]

VK and DrShrikaanth bring up interesting points about sruti. Just as a cosmology based on 5 might to some extent underlie the prominence of pentatonicity in China, DrS talks about "cosmic harmony". Do you all think philosophical ideas played a causal role in the development of the fixed drone/tonic?

Regarding VK's suggestion of 'adequacy', I suppose a human could theoretically find even very restricted musical systems 'adequate'. The Chinese seem to have found five notes 'adequate', but to many outside China that system seems impoverished. I think the best systems for testing "what shifting the tonic would be like" are Arabic/Turkish and...umm...11th-12th century European (I know...). Maybe even Byzantine chant. These latter Western systems use rhapsodic improvised-sounding melodic lines over moving drones.

[vasanthakokilam]

Regarding VK's suggestion of 'adequacy', I suppose a human could theoretically find even very restricted musical systems 'adequate'.

I realize your 'restricted' side remark was generic and not directed specifically at CM but since you said that in this context, I will have to clarify something. 'Adequate' has two semantics. An ascetic forces oneself to a restricted way of life thus finding that restricted way of life adequate. He will not be able to do a lot of things but that is perfectly fine with him. The other, but related meaning: Adequacy for the purpose in hand. There are no restrictions per se but what one has is sufficient for one's objective. Here, everything we want to achieve is achievable with out wanting anything. I meant it in the latter sense.

And a slightly removed aspect, though not a direct meaning, is 'Not having XYZ is better than having XYZ'. It is not a question of affordability or intellectual or imaginative limitation but a careful choice of exclusion.

(Hope I do not come across as defensive about CM... On the contrary, I was thinking in a neutral mode and just to get the meaning of the words we use to the same wavelength).

That clarified, as I stated earlier, the Adequacy argument need to be examined properly to get an idea for why change in sruthi was not considered wanting ( or why it may be considered a distraction ).

Getting back to what you said, your suggestion to look at Arabic and Turkish is a very good one. It is not too foreign to Indian Music and so the bridge is not too wide. I have a very small idea of what the Arabic and Turkish music sounds like ( though I have never listened with an expert's guidance ). How do we go about translating what it provides/communicates/evokes in a terminilogy that is compatible and relatable to CM listeners so we can check if CM already has that in other ways or it can only be accomplished by a sruthi switch ( besides sruthibhEda which CM already has ).

[Sramana]

Two great sites for getting to know Arabic music are:

http://www.maqamworld.com/ for theory, and
http://www.mikeouds.com/music.html for large numbers of oud solos

Regarding exclusion: yes, obviously in sophisticated civilizations musicians will be aware of many musical options, which means their choice to exclude certain things must be deliberate and purposeful. If, as we've hinted at, fixed sruti was a fairly late development, perhaps the reasons are historically traceable.

[vasanthakokilam]

I listened to a couple of pieces. Many of them could be very much a Hindustani AlAp. To me, in this limited listening and as a first impression, the key change comes across as a raga change. But I can not tell if the player is changing key all the time or changing it only in major sections. If it is the latter, then it will be like a ragamalika. In fact, since the items I listened to were like an AlAp, it had the same "feel" as the raga portion of the ragamalika RTP. But definitely, this requires further discussion.

BTW, it seems to me that an Oud, Guqin and Gottuvadyam Trio can play a Jugalbandhi in Mohanam, Suddha Saveri, Suddha Dhanyasi, Hindolam and MadyamAvathi with ease and it should sound nice. In addition to the Q and A type sawAl jawAl interaction, they can actually play together some precomposed pieces as well.

[vasanthakokilam]

Reading that arabic music theory site, the arabic maqam genre does not seem to emphasize that much on tonic shifts though, let alone shifting it within a piece. Even when it talks about shifting the tonic, they seem to not even want to call it the same name since the mood the new one evokes is quite different ( which we can all relate to well ).

In any case that maqam has many characteristics that are very close to Raga, only the details and performance techniques vary, as described here: http://www.maqamworld.com/maqamat.html

And some samples of the arohana & avarohana of some maqams are here : http://www.maqamworld.com/maqamat/ajam.html#ajam

[Sramana]

It seems there are two basic ways to modulate from a relatively fixed tonic. First: keep the tonic the same and change the other swaras. Second: keep all the swaras intact and choose a different tonic from among them. I suppose in CM the first appears in ragamalika, while the second appears in srutibhedam. I have one observation each here.

With ragamalika: if you listen to the best oud modulations (I'm thinking Munir Bashir), things can move very quickly, back and forth, in cool combinations and progressions. This is a completely different effect from ragamalika, which always seemed rather plodding to me. Stringing ragas together in 2-minute intervals doesn't really seem like an insightful way to explore them. Wouldn't things be more interesting if the progression was made tighter, transitioning every few seconds or even within phrases? Rather than "Raga A...hmm...kind of leads into Raga B; Raga B, go! Now what does Raga B kind of lead into...?", the result would be more like "Raga A, twist, Raga B, reverse, goes into Raga C, ambivalent note, back to Raga A." The only CMusician I've ever heard do this was L. Shankar. Just a thought as to where CM might go in the future...

With srutibhedam: basically, I've never heard it, and am a little confused when people describe it. Could someone post some examples? It can't be that commonly done...?

Also, just for reference, guqin can play heptatonic scales easily. That's because when stopped by the left hand the strings can play all intervals. It's just rarely done in traditional playing.

[Sramana]

VK: You bring up a good point, which lays bare some terminological ambiguity. You correctly point out that Arabic music doesn't stress "shifting the tonic". That's because, as long as you're playing within a maqam, the 'final note' is held to be the same. But there's a huge difference here: with no drone, the tonic is nowhere near as omnipresent as in IM. If you just imagine playing in a given ragam with no sruti playing and no drone strings, just doing pure swaras--many times particular phrases will seem to 'settle' on some swara other than sa. Ravikiran sometimes does this to great effect. This is really the effect I meant: while theoretically the 'final note' or 'base note' is always the same, it isn't omnipresent and so the melody can take other 'final notes' for particular phrases and passages. There should be examples of this in all the Arabic music samples on those sites.

[vasanthakokilam]

Ramana: Thanks for those two explanations. That claries things. So the tonic does not really shift but they can rapidly switch chateristic phrases which is the equivalent to a 'rapidly changing ragamalika'.

If I understand right, based on a quick reading of the maquam theory, each one is still based on a scale, without shifting the tonic, the 'rapidly changing ragamalika' will be with in the set of janya ragas of a mela. Right?

In CM, such rapidly changing ragamalikas do exist ( degrees might vary ) and usually cross Melas. The one we have discussed in the forum before 'ragathil sirandha ragam..' in the later portions switch ragams quite quickly. Santhanam has done such things too. But such things will not sell as the main songs of a concert but only as part of the thukkada. They are not considered heavy and weighty pieces.

My own reaction to such things is, yeah they add a different color to the song, it is fun to listen to but I feel sympathetic to the ragas If you spend 3 seconds in a raga and move on to the next one, that is not doing full justice to the raga. But one way of experimenting will be a happy middle where, as you wrote, come back to raga again and again, and treat it with a different characterristic phrase every time with its full depth and identity. May be then it can have the purchase of a heavy and serious piece of music in the CM genre. May be as part of a ragamalika pallavi which is usually considered heavy and serious.

[vasanthakokilam]

Also, just for reference, guqin can play heptatonic scales easily. That's because when stopped by the left hand the strings can play all intervals. It's just rarely done in traditional playing

Understood. The reason for my suggesting those 5 ragas is to still keep the integrity of the tradition. So in a mixed audience of Arabic, CM and Chinese music listeners everyone will still receive it with their traditions still in tact. Having said that, we do not know how a serious Arabic music listener will receive those five ragas ( meaning, do they have maqams that map to these 5 ragas). I think CM and Chinese audiences are in the bag

[Sramana]

"If I understand right, based on a quick reading of the maquam theory, each one is still based on a scale, without shifting the tonic, the 'rapidly changing ragamalika' will be with in the set of janya ragas of a mela. Right? "

Not exactly. Let me explain. Let's assume a Kharaharapriya scale:

S R2 G2 M1 P D2 N2 S

No drone. Assume the 'raga' is undefined so there are no characteristic phrases per se. The skeletal melody (insert gamakas where desired) goes:

S G2 M1 P M1
M1 N2 D2 M1 P M1
G2 M1 S G2

These phrases could be expanded. The important thing is, using a fixed series of absolute pitches, the phrases resolve into different pitches. The second phrase, suitably elaborated, could give the feeling that "M1 is the new S"; the third phrase, "G2 is the new S". If "M1 is the new S", suddenly you're playing in Kamboji. If "G2 is the new S", suddenly you're playing in Kalyani. But then if, playing Kalyani, you decide "D2 is the new S", you're back to Karaharapriya.

In Arabic music, Chinese music, and CM without drone, this kind of thing happens all over the place. I realize I'm not fully conversant with the technical aspects of CM, so forgive me if I'm not making myself understood. The point is, in Arabic music (for instance), the listener's subjective experience is that phrases resolve to different tonics in a ladder of fixed absolute pitches; this is equivalent to shifting the "sa" and playing in a different melakarta.

Does this make sense? If so, is it something genuinely missing from CM-with-drone?

[vasanthakokilam]

Ramana: Of the two choices, I picked the wrong one then. It then sounds like sruthibEda except the drone is still there. You asked about if sruthibEda is common, I do not know how common it is and whether it is well received by the general audience. T.N.Seshagopalan and Bala Murali Krisha do this and are quite good at it, and you said Ravikiran does this. But I do not think it is considered a requirement for a concert. So, may be the the issue itself is not one of accomodation of the techniques but it is in the significance given to such things.

If I recall right, to achieve this, the drone, though it is there, has to be drowned down a bit. The vocalist uses the shifted solfa syllables and that helps the audience latch on to the new tonic and the violinist helps too. It is an illusion after all and they probably want to do it in small doses for the desired effect And usage of the raga specific characteristic phrases seals the deal.
( I am way over my league here... someone else please jump in )

It will be interesting to get some recordings uploaded with the timelines marked where the sruthibEdas occur and if it is similar to the Arabian musical technique in its effect on the listener.

[Sramana]

Apparently what I just described is called murchana?

http://chandrakantha.com/articles/scales.html

I think it's interesting that researchers perceive a 'paradigm shift' whereby Indian musicians started thinking about scales in terms of internal divisions of an octave rather than in terms of frame-shifting. This has good theoretical reasons such as precise intonation behind it--if you're busy frame-shifting in the middle of a piece, what happens to the just intonation derivation by circle of fifths?

[vasanthakokilam]

BTW, the Murchana that is described at that link is more at a music theory level on how scales are derived. There are well understood Murchanais of the 7 note scale starting at Shankarabaranam and by shifting the tonic you sequenctially arrive at other Melas. Similary thus for the 5 Pentatonic scales that you described. But these do not necessarily mean that they shift it during the performance ( except during sruthibEda ).

[kaapi]

VK,
You are right. Actually there is no question of sruthi bedha without a basic sruthi.

sramana said:

Not exactly. Let me explain. Let's assume a Kharaharapriya scale:

S R2 G2 M1 P D2 N2 S

No drone. Assume the 'raga' is undefined so there are no characteristic phrases per se. The skeletal melody (insert gamakas where desired) goes:

S G2 M1 P M1
M1 N2 D2 M1 P M1
G2 M1 S G2

I am unable to follow what you are trying to say. Assuming a violin has been tuned to a particular sruthi and the artist plays
S G2 M1 P M1 and then plays
M1 N2 D2 M1 P M1
these notes remain the same unless one assumes that the M1 has become S during the second sequence. This assuption has to be made by the listener or a shifting drone has to provide the backdrop.
So, what is the performer's role in this ?

[drshrikaanth]

Hold on guys
1) The discussion is going too fast
2) This thread is veering away from the topic. Sramana, VK- this is turning out to be more of educating sramana on CM than us knowing about Chinese music from him. sramana, you do the talking and we ask questions. And as kaapi has indicated, we will go *SLOWLY*.

Sramana- there is nothing boring about rAgamAlike. And VK has rightly pointed out that exploring rAgas more fully is better achieved by proceeding slowly. CM is about depth and not for flourishes and effects although they all find a place here. Simply changing rAgas by the second is meaningless as it leaves every rAga neither here nor there. And leaves the audience confused. While each music has its own greatness, one is in a better position to understand the greatness by looking at it from the perspective of a native performer than a questioning outsider. For natibe performers do question an awful lot at times, but they do know what is the fundamental structure that cannot be questioned.

[drshrikaanth]

How many rAgas(as in CM) are known in chinese music. Is it just mOhana and its 4 mUrchanes? Likely not. So what are the other rAgas known? Can we hope for any samples?

[Sramana]

One of the stranger things about Chinese music is that, while theory exists, it doesn't seem very important to know about. That may be because there is traditionally no improvisation and no recognized method for composing. (Composition happens all over the place, but there are no rubrics taught.) Thus, while as a player improves he'll probably learn to recognize modes by ear and by name, he probably won't think much about them because he doesn't have to. All of this has changed somewhat under Western influence--a topic unto itself.

Asking what ragas are known in China aside from the pentatonic murchanas is a little misleading. "Raga" as a concept is completely foreign to the music. As I've said, 95% of the music falls somewhere among the five pentatonic murchanas. But never does it obey anything like raga grammar. "Characteristic phrases", for instance, are different in each piece, as is meaning or bhava.

[srini_pichumani]

Dr.Shrikaanth asks "I wonder if anything is known about exchanges between Chinese and Indian music."

In fact, there is -- a detailed account is given in Richard Widdess' book "The Ragas of Early Indian music".

The gist of it is a visit by a musician named Sujiva to China, during the reign of Emperor Wu of the Northern Zhou dynasty (quite precisely datable to the timeframe 568-578AD), who demonstrates a set of 7 heptatonic scales to the Chinese musicians on the short-necked lute (piba).

These heptatonic scales reconstructed from the Chinese sources are very close to the 7 primary grAmarAga system preserved in the KuDumiyAnmalai inscription from the 7th/8th century AD. As is well-known, this gramaraga system is the framework that somewhat displaces the grama-jati system outlined in earlier musicological texts in Sanskrit.

-Srini.

[param]

Here are links for some nice chinese music files.

http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/multimedia/chinese-music/

http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/multimedia/c ... ional.html

[Sramana]

Good link Param--unfortunately, mainly because it illustrates certain problems the contemporary Chinese have in conceptualizing their music. Decades of ideological reforms and revolutions (mainly from the 1910s to the 1970s) left Western-style conservatories as the main centers of musical power, and Nationalist/Communist ideologies as major elements in musical theory and performance. This has meant that Chinese folk melodies married with Western harmony and orchestral arrangements have come to define "Chinese national/ethnic music" for most people. In my opinion most of what has come out of the conservatories' "National music departments" in the past 50 years is abysmally bad music, motivated largely by a desire to conform to ideological ideas of proletarian culture and by a desire to emulate the West. The result is somewhat similar to what you see in former Soviet bloc countries: "traditional repertoires" defined centrally, by the state, which dictated the "national characters" appropriate to its ethnic groups in an effort to incorporate them into an ideological scheme. These "traditional repertoires" frequently borrow only superficial elements from the cultures they're supposed to be representing, filtering it through a late-19th-century-style Romantic nationalist orchestral framework. For better or worse, the vast majority of "traditional Chinese music" as performed in concert halls and recorded on CDs falls under this rubric. The juggernaut has tried to incorporate guqin--which only survived in the 1950s because its advocates insisted that it was really a proletarian instrument--but that tradition has managed to keep its own identity strongly distinct from the mainstream.

As to the "classical" label...recently I put on a concert with a Chinese music ensemble which plays mainly the music described above. The set-up was rather funny--I just sat silently 90% of the time and then finally got a solo. (Token guqin.) The introducer said the guqin was the most "classical" of Chinese instruments. A friend of mine who was sitting in the audience said she overheard someone whispering "most classical? I thought what we just heard was classical." And indeed, from a Western viewpoint, it was--schlocky and folkloric the music may have been, but it was through-composed, written down, and incorporated harmonies in a formal ensemble setting. It was well-executed with vivid techniques and spirit, and perhaps had some sophistication of its own, but it had essentially nothing to do with *Chinese* classicism--Chinese classicism before the onset of Westernization in the 20th century. Conservatory music from China has many of the elements we regard as "classical" in the West: long formal training, technical difficulty, through-composition, formal presentation...but none of these is present in indigenous Chinese ideals of classicism. Those are based much more on execution and the performer's mindset. (For which see my previous posts.)

Anyway, heh, I realize that was a bit of a rant. However endangered ICM may be in India, the impression I get is that it is much healthier and more popular than CCM in China. Chalk that up to the literati's refusal to lower themselves to music that actually sounded good!

[elektek]

Great data to explore.

[ramamantra]

What is this, a sudden interest in Chinese music? Armchair understanding, looks like. We haven't ventured into any music, even the all-pervading western classical and hate fusion. Now, Chinese? One thing is clear, we the purists/snobbists will never learn another music, maybe appreciate other, half-heartedly. We'll also not let any music influence ours. But, we'll hypocritically analyse like experts in it. Before we even learn one thing fully well (its always 'are-gore' - Tamil), we'll pounce on to the next trend. I love us - the snobbish scatterbrains. Lets all pat our backs.

[arasi]

rAma mantrava japisO, sangItava nuDisi
A zen-nu I zennu, chainEsu sangItavu
bhAratha janakkEkE! hADiri m p d p endE!

arai kuRai ATkaLukkengO irukkum sangItamO? saraLi
varisai mudal chatur rAgap pallavi varai pADuvOm, vArIr!

bi-lingual verses translation:

Chant only rAmamantra with sangeeta!
That zen, this zen, chinese music too!
Do the people of India need it? Sing m p d p--enough!

Do empty vessels need to know about distant tunes?
Come, let's sing from saraLi varisai to chatur raga pallavi!

I'm intrigued too, chinese dumplings are a hot item in Bengaluru now--sold from carts in front of super markets!

[chalanata]

We shall now listen to ramamanthram by Chembai in the following link:
https://soundcloud.com/archive-of-india ... dyanatha-2

[ramamantra]

Chant only rAmamantra with sangeeta!
That zen, this zen, chinese music too!
Do the people of India need it? Sing m p d p--enough!

Do empty vessels need to know about distant tunes?
Come, let's sing from saraLi varisai to chatur raga pallavi!
I'm intrigued too

Exactly the 'are-gore' playing itself out...(penning vogue poetry)

now intrigued about Chinese music... tom, it cld be Javanese gamelan, then Japanese biwa...

[arasi]

Chalanata,
Thanks for Chembai's rAmamantram. Delectable. Did he also sing Purandara DAsA's kruti after that, I wonder...

[arasi]

Ramamantra,
You meant 'vague', right?
Hazy too, because of my age

Our (rasika's) sense of humor may not be up to the mark, but really, without a bit of that, life can be a drag, don't we (rasikas) agree?


'I am intrigued too' wasn't part of the 'poetic' lines, by the way!

[VK RAMAN]

A discussion on Chinese music is good but Harvard Research and Doctoral/Scientific analysis go all over the World that makes it very difficult to fathom the thought of integrating/relating Carnatic music. But very interesting topic and let us not stand in the way of discussion. We never know what we will end up with as contribution to music in general and carnatic music in particular.

[vasanthakokilam]

This thread is from 2006 and has been dormant till it was pushed to the front by a comment by elektek yesterday. So this is not a sudden interest, it is a decade old interest rekindled.

I wanted to say "don't pay only 'are-gore' attention before posting'" but then that will not be civil.

[ramamantra]

vogue poetry - a slang for bad poetry people pen to torture others

btw, vk, are-gore understanding of other music and analysis doesn't need complete focus. What is given itself is a lot.

[arasi]

And, for those who have missed the 'are gore' expression in an earlier post, it isn't gore (in the violent sense of the word but the tamizh word for 'incomplete'!) are (arai--half) gore (kuRai)--so it means half-baked!

Yes, an age old thread--DRs, kaapi...

And, our posts crossed, ramamantra. I know, I'm not even in vogue, but I've been writing 'vogue' poetry for ages, i'm afraid!

[vasanthakokilam]

I am afraid I do not know that meaning of 'vogue'. Is that Indian usage? (slang or otherwise)

[arasi]

Possible. I wondered too. At least, it isn't a chinese expression, I guess!