Music, open-ended

Have you ever noticed how there is no alaap in Western classical while the connosieur of Hindustani or Carnatic music listens primarily for the high that the alaap can deliver? Indeed the alaap in an evening dhrupad is the piece de resistance of the performance. The alaap allows for introspection, and is meditative. All these are states of mind that allow one to start the journey in the universe within the individual, to be antarmukhi. Look within yourself and the notes that I am playing will echo through your being8217;, is the promise the performer makes as the alaap gets underway.

The alaap also allows you to sever all ties with the outside world. From the hypnotic strumming of the tambura which reduces adrenalin flow to the introduction of the first notes where a kind of dulling of the senses takes place allowing you to forget traffic jams and production deadlines.

Not for the Western composer the slow, unmeasured languor of the alaap. He is eager to launch into the work and can open with an assault on your eardrums calculated to have the same effect as that of the alaap i.e. helping you forget the world outside of the auditorium. But there is a difference. While the composer takes a deliberately extroverted approach, the performer in India is intentionally introverted. One is surrounded by the ocean of sound that the orchestra creates while one drowns into the sea which the Indian performer draws his audience. The Western classical performance almost always begins with the tune or the theme of the composition. This is then intensified, expanded and reinforced with other instruments and when he tires of it, the composer goes into a second theme which in most cases is a total contrast to the first. Not only is it a different kettle of fish, but it is also in different raag than the first, something that you would not expect in a performance of Indian classical music where the raag is a holy cow not to be violated.

The involvement with the theme or main melody and the desire to be extroverted in their music has led the Europeans to evolve the technique of harmony, which simply means the clothing of melody. Parallel series of notes are played along with the melody, making it slightly more demanding for the listener as we are now dealing with layers of music. If melody is a straight line, harmony is two parallel straight lines with arrows moving upwards from the line representing harmony to the line representing melody 8212; indicating that the lower series of notes depends on the melodic strand of notes. Harmony was apparently an accident when some monks in the ninth or 10th century discovered that an interesting auditory experience was created when a secondary series of notes was added to an existing series.

The relationship between the existing series 8212; the melody 8212; and the new series was studied and a mathematical articulation of this relationship was made some 700 years later when the laws of harmony were established.

Indian music has continued to adhere to the melody in its pristine form. But the melody is garbed in different ways as it moves from one gharana to the other. From the clothing of a tune in the West with harmony, to the different ways of garbing a melody so that one can identify it as coming from a certain gharana, both approaches give us the best of both worlds. Indeed it would have been boring had the Greeks also decided on being introspective!