Rītigaula

A Study of Improvisation and Discourse in Indian Music

Somangshu Mukherji

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000384536
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music Theory & Appreciation

This book, authored by the late Princeton music scholar Harold Powers, discusses a single Indian r?ga called R?tigaula. R?tigaula's pitch structure, conventions surrounding its performance, and its treatment in historical Indian music treatises are comprehensively described. Powers's unique approach to theorizing r?ga examines r?ga structure and meaning in this monograph too, from the perspective of musical communication and discourse. From within this perspective, Powers shares his thoughts about music's connection to language, and the relationship between r?ga expression and linguistic communication.

1The language of South Indian classical music

DOI: 10.4324/9781003171225-1

1.1 Improvisation of formal music

1.1.1 Improvisation, music, and language

This work is focused largely on a single rāga from one of the two canonical musical styles of India—namely, the South Indian (Carnatic) classical rāga Rītigaula. The purpose of this work, however, is not merely to provide a detailed guide to this rāga, though that is one of its incidental results. The analytic demonstration of how one rāga works entails naturally the introduction of categories, features, and relationships that cohere in a general model for how any rāga works—but even explicating that musical model in general is only in part the aim of the discussion. My claim is that the Indian musical concept “rāga,” properly understood, sheds light on a number of topics of current interest. I further claim, moreover, that any assertions about the nature of rāga, and about the theoretical relevance of the concept, can only be evaluated through demonstration. That is, one must not only state, but must also show, what kind of an entity a rāga is, how it is used, and what makes it both individual and usable in order to justify one’s broader claims about rāga music. To this end, thence, I shall need to do three things: discuss the rāga as a musical entity, analyze its particular and general formal properties, and illustrate the rāga as it is used in musical performance practice.

Each of these three spheres may be contemplated in aesthetic terms, and they may be important evidences in cultural analysis or historical synthesis as well. However, an entity of the general type to which the Indian rāga belongs is a musical matrix, equally informing both memorized “works” of music and ex tempore “discourses.” Since the Indian rāga is the most complex and the most consciously controlled matrix of this sort, with not only a widely appreciated living practice but also a long history of theoretical traditions behind it, it is of the greatest heuristic relevance in questions regarding composition vis-à-vis improvisation in music. And a matrix like a rāga, lying behind structured and coherent musical compositions and improvisations alike, must itself have a coherent structure. Such a structure or its generalized model may exhibit suggestive similarities to structures or generalized models in other cultural domains—but more than this, the parts and the whole of a structured model based on analysis need not, and should not, be separated from consideration of theoretical concepts and syntheses from the culture in question, especially when these are as rich as they are, and have been, in India. Thus, analysis of a rāga, and thence of “rāga,” bears most directly on general questions regarding interdisciplinary structural models and on analytic methods, but it also helps elucidate a proper relation between extra-cultural “scientific” and intra-cultural “indigenous” taxonomies.

It is this latter aspect—of rāga as matrix for improvisational processes, as the central structure of Indian musical practice and theory, and therefore as historical object—that will be taken up in greater detail in this monograph. The relevance of rāga as aesthetic artifact, however, as it informs composition (as opposed to improvisation) and as compared with aspects of extra-musical or extra-Indian systems—implicitly, and often explicitly, permeates the discussions too to lend them perspective. As for the analysis itself, it is inevitably long and probably tedious, but it is also the heart of the matter, and the only justification for whatever constructions, comparisons, and speculations may appear around and between them.

The rāga as historical object is illustrated in the last three chapters of this monograph. The demonstrations of rāga as a matrix governing musical discourse and as a structural model are intertwined within these, and in the next two chapters. I proceed now to the rest of this first chapter with expanded observations on structure, process, and object in Indian music—and on the relation specifically between rāga and improvised discourse.

The word “improvise” comes into English, via French and Italian, from a Latin participial form meaning literally “un-fore-seen.” There is no connotation, either in etymology or in usage, of a meaning, “unforeseeable.” That is to say, in normally improvised discourse what is going to occur at any given moment may not perhaps be imagined in advance by the auditor, but it is imaginable. The producer’s choices are free but not random. Any discourse, prearranged or extempore, is based on conventional agreements between sender and receiver. (Perhaps there may even be a conventional agreement not to bother with conventional agreements.)

The most familiar example of conventional agreements on schemata of arbitrary symbols is language. Music too is made with conventional sequences of sound recognizable as not being mere noise, and which suggest limited possibilities for continuation at each moment; sequences of sounds that strike the hearer as coherent—and to that extent music is like language, since “coherence” is equally relevant in music and language. It is like language also in that the nature of material and medium—sounds in time—neither forbids nor demands of its own nature that its expressions be permanently fixed in some fashion, in contrast, for instance, with stone in space for sculpture. To what degree freely improvised discourse at a high level of complexity is possible in either language or music is only a function of the inner complexity of conventional units and of the range of possibilities for relating them. And none of this is concerned with ways in which either verbal or musical discourse may or may not have references to anything outside itself. That is another question altogether. (Related to this is the idea I proposed in a 1976 essay that the question, “Does it have meaning?” is prior to the question “What meaning?” as an approach to the coherence and comprehensibility of musical language.)¹

In fact, music and language are so very much alike in so many ways that it is doubly important to stress the essential distinction between them. In another essay of mine (Powers 1980), in a section entitled “The linguisticity of musics”—and please note the plural, “musics”—I quoted an aphorism from an essay by the Belgian linguist Nicolas Ruwet, published in 1975, entitled “Théorie et méthodes dans les études musicaux: quelques remarques rétrospectives et préliminaires.”²

Toutes les langues humaines sont apparement du même ordre de complexité, mais ce n’est pas le cas de tous les systèmes musicaux.

(Ruwet 1975: 19)

In the same section of the aforementioned essay, I expanded on Ruwet’s brilliant aperçu:

If this be true—and I cannot imagine anyone would think otherwise once it is called to his attention—it highlights a fundamental deficiency in the general analogy of musical structuring with the structuring of languages. Put barbarously in terms of the analogy itself, the linguisticity of languages is the same from language to language, but the linguisticity of musics is not the same from music to music.

To Ruwet’s telling observation I would add only that musical systems are much more varied than languages not only as to order of complexity but also as to kind of complexity. For instance, no two natural languages of speech could differ from one another in any fashion comparable to the way in which a complex monophony like Indian classical music or the music of the Gregorian antiphoner differs from a complex polyphony like that of the Javanese gamelan klenèngan or of 16th-century European motets and masses. In monophonic musical languages we sing or play melodic lines more or less alone, just as we talk more or less one at a time in conversation, and our hearers follow accordingly. We do not all talk at once, saying different things, and expect coherently to be understood. Yet in ensemble musics with varied polyphonic lines we can (so to speak) make beautiful music together, which can be easily followed by those who know how.

(Powers 1980: 38)

The “linguisticity of musics” section of my 1980 essay concluded with a subsection entitled “linguisticity and extempore musical discourse,” which points directly toward this present work. The subsection begins as follows:

The language-music structural analogy breaks down in another and rather more crucial feature still. Languages begin, and linguistics began, with speaking. There is a freedom-to-fixity parameter in language use that extends from conversation through such stages as story-telling, formal oratory, and formulaic poetic recitation on to literary composition (oral as well as written down). In musical language this freedom-to-fixity parameter of use is more often than not eccentrically skewed. For instance, there are individual musics (including Western classical music and many others) where there is hardly anything corresponding with the spontaneous discourse of language, where skilled performance is simply the rendition of more or less set musical compositions. This contrasts very strongly with Indian classical music, for instance, where spontaneous and flexible musical discourse is as essential and almost as easy for the trained musician as speech for the fluent speaker of a language. Indeed, the Indic term ālāpanā, denoting the principal genre for presenting a rāga (melodic type) extemporaneously, simply means discourse.

(Powers 1980: 42)

The “linguisticity and extempore musical discourse” subsection concluded with the following:

The presence of modal models, and the concomitant capacity for free extempore oratorical discourse in music, characterize some complex musics, while other musics of equal complexity in musical product make no use of such models and have no such capacities. I would therefore expect to find that the less a musical practice lends itself to freely improvised musical discourse, the less amenable it will prove to quasi-linguistic analysis.

(Powers 1980: 46)

The above points suggest that musical languages may show a much wider range of formal typologies than spoken languages. One of the parameters of such musical-language typology would be the degree to which spontaneous versus prearranged musical discourse is possible and expected. Some musical cultures encourage and reward inventive performance; some musical cultures encourage and reward precise rendition of traditional materials; some musical cultures encourage and reward polished execution; and so on. The structural features of the musical language should reflect in some degree the capacity of its music for improvisation. In Indian classical music, materials and procedures exist and are arranged in such a way that composition and improvisation are related very much as they are in spoken and written languages.

This being the case, it will come as no surprise that there are many resemblances between the modes of analysis that I find appropriate for Indian cla...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• Editor’s preface
• 1 The language of South Indian classical music
• 2 The morphology of rāga Rītigaula
• 3 The syntax of rāga Rītigaula
• 4 Musicological method and Indian music
• 5 Sanskrit musical theory in the 16th–18th centuries
• 6 Pre-modern and modern discourse in rāga Rītigaula
• Appendix 1 Visual models of Rītigaula
• Appendix 2 Guide to the audio recordings for Rītigaula
• Appendix 3 Ornaments and notation
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Notes
• Index