Music of India

I started studying North Indian vocal music back in the early 80's, first with Dr. Tapan Kumar Bhattacharyya, and after Dr. B moved to Chicago, for many years with Shri Narenrda Datar.

I've always found the music beautiful, and I wanted the experience of confronting a highly developed system of classical music that had evolved along completely different lines than the European tradition. It's sort of a cliché to say that the best way of understanding something is to step away from it, to look at it from a distance or a different point of view, and it is certainly the case that my take on music in general was changed a lot by my exposure to the Hindustani tradition.

But even on the humbler level of musicianship, this was true. To get into this music, I had to learn not only a new system of solfa ("sargam" uses sa, re, ga, ma, pa, dha, ni, sa), but a new way of thinking about what it means, basically, to be a musician at all. I am eternally grateful to my teachers and friends in this music who helped me to open these doors and, perhaps unbeknownst to them, to use myself as a guinea-pig in my own crazy experiment.

Indian music uses a drone. I find that the drone is generally a very useful device for intonation, learning different sorts of scales, and so on. Besides, drones are known all over the world, from Scotland to Central Asia. As an aid in teaching, I put together a drone CD. It is very rich acoustically, since it uses an actually tampura, an couple of oscillators ("electronic tampuras" in fact), a shruti box, and one or two other things. The fundamental pitch is a around a b-flat, and the CD consists of a single track, around 74 minutes long. It you are interested, I can get you a copy, cheap. I can also send you a bunch of exercises, twenty-five pentatonic scales, and other cool stuff you can sing over the drone.

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