India's National Magazine
From the publishers of THE HINDU

Vol. 16 :: No. 06 :: Mar. 13 - 26, 1999

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BOOKS

A contribution to Carnatic music

LAKSHMI RAMAKRISHNAN

The Illustrated Companion to South Indian Classical Music by Ludwig Pesch; Oxford University Press; pages 376, price Rs.650.

SOMETIMES there comes along a book that stumps you. Ludwig Pesch's The Illustrated Companion to South Indian Classical Music is one such - a book with an inexplicable mix of the excellent, the passable and the unacceptable. It has an excellent cover with an unusual picture and has unusual chapter headings - "Graceful dialogues", "Child's play", "Variety" and so on. And, unusually, it has no preface or foreword. But thus Ludwig Pesch is known for his penchant for the unusual.

Pesch was a teacher in a music school in Germany. A chance listening of the music of the short-lived genius Ramnad Krishnan brought him to India where he did a stint at Kalakshetra in Chennai. He is now a regular visitor to India.

Pesch's is not an unfamiliar story. Western musicians and music lovers are increasingly attracted towards Indian music - by its sophistication and by the scope for creativity and improvisation within the bounds of a rich tradition. What is different about Pesch is his sustained attempts to contribute to Carnatic music. He is one of the founders of Sampradaya, a documentation centre and archive for material related to the traditions of South Indian music. He established Sittrarangam, a small theatre on the outskirts of Chennai. He conducts seminars on off-beat themes such as the playful aspects of Carnatic music. Pesch's capacity for organisation and his diligence are remarkable. The Illustrated Companion to South Indian Music is his latest - and perhaps his more conventional - offering to Carnatic music.

In the absence of a preface or a foreword one is left to one's own resources to assess the book. For whom is the book meant? The blurb says that it is the most inclusive, authoritative reference work on South Indian classical music with historical and technical details. Yet the couching of the book in terms from Western music, the inclusion of staves (of Western notation for the arohana-avarohana structures of ragas), and some views of the author suggest that the book is primarily meant for the interested Westerner or certainly for one with some grounding in Western music. Consider this statement: "... growing familiarity with South Indian music will lead us to the wonderful discovery that our ears, far from being offended by one continued note, can enjoy this single note in its own right" (emphasis added). The "ears" here are obviously those accustomed to Western music, to the music that explores the delights of sounding more than one note simultaneously. Such a book is, of course, very much in place as more and more Westerners are trying to come to grips with South Indian music. It would only have been in order for Pesch to have acknowledged that it is a Western reader that he has in mind.

The book offers in a lucid style details of various technical aspects of South Indian music with a fine sensitivity to its subtleties. The chapters on raga and tala cover all major and many minor aspects of these twin concepts that lie at the heart of Indian music. The staves for the arohana-avarohana structure of ragas, and the graphic depiction of the principles of rhythmic improvisation, are bound to be useful to the layperson. Among the most valuable pages in the book are those devoted to biographical notes on musicians and composers of South Indian classical music. The compilations are extensive and well-researched. The fact that the pictures of the composers are a product of the artistic imagination of painter-musician S. Rajam could have been mentioned in the book. One has no means of knowing what Tyagaraja, for instance, really looked like.

The least acceptable portions of the book are those where Pesch deals with matters historical. Some observations are rash, to say the least. Claims such as "Some music forms of South India (javali and thillana) evolved from the music exchange with Hindustani music..." (page 19) and "The present concept of the raga evolved at a time when the fretted lute displaced the older harps" (page 15) are examples. Such views are expressed without mentioning any references or ongoing debates. Here one misses the caution and care that go into a scholar's work.

While on the whole the book is accurate on technical details, there are surprises such as the explanation the author gives for the term gayaki: "literally a female singer". A female singer is called gayika. "In Hindustani music it refers to a type of instrumental style endowed with 'vocal qualities' (e.g. khayal gayaki)" (page 309). This is an unfortunate mix-up. Khayal is a form of vocal music and essentially has vocal qualities. Gayaki ang, loosely translated as the vocal way or style, is what is applied to the instrumental style that is modelled on the vocal. This mix-up is inexplicable since Pesch gets this right elsewhere: "This vocal approach, known as the gayaki ang in Hindustani music, is an ideal which all Indian instrumentalists seek to emulate..." (page 89). Again, "In older texts like the Natya Sastra, a raga without subtle ornamental features has been compared to a moonless night..." (page 73). This is clearly irreconcilable with his reference to Matanga's Brhaddesi as the text "believed to be the first to deal with the concept of raga" (page 88). Brhaddesi belongs to a later period. And, if the Natya Sastra talks of raga it does not mean that it was the first text to deal with ragas. The fact of the matter is that while there are references to ragas in Natya Sastra, it is debated whether the relevant verses are a later interpolation. Minor points, but these are important for accuracy, authenticity and rigour, which are critical parameters for a reference book.

The book, however, is more than a reference book. There are discussions of issues that are theoretical and abstract. Sometimes one comes across beautiful ideas: "... one could liken the basic note or tonic (shadja) to the immutable, divine aspect of existence while the mutable notes (vikrita) are engaged in a constant quest for harmony by shedding their dissonant properties." Sometimes the discussions are rather rambling. References to a little known thinker's (William Hogarth) views on beauty and art and discussions on Yoga, Vedanta and the Alwars, all in the same context, are a little bewildering. The point Pesch finds relevant in the views of Hogarth is his interest in the serpentine which Pesch promptly links with the idea of kundalini in the Yoga system. Hogarth says: "The point of beauty waves in two directions, that of grace in three directions..." Pesch finds application of this concept of the three-way wave in the tribhangi pose, a rather physical application. But what has all this to do with a book on South Indian music?

The chapter on voice has some interesting ideas which could benefit a contemporary Carnatic musician. Pesch tries to read meaning into the traditional association of the seven notes with birds and animals, an association which is dismissed as "fanciful". The shadja, the basic note from which all other notes are derived, is associated with the peacock. This crucial place of the shadja is reflected in the fact that all performances of Indian music are against the aural backdrop of this note. Pesch links this and the peacock association thus: "...the image of a splendid peacock whose dazzling colours suggest that the tonic or basic note is charged with the qualities of all other notes which in their totality create a colourful effect" (pages 60-61).

Again, the association of the nishadha, the highest note in the octave, with the elephant is "ingenious, for a mental image of this association certainly helps to counteract the tendency of most singers to narrow their vocal apparatus to the point of concealing the beauty of their voice when progressing to the higher octave" (page 61).

Such associations could be of great practical help in voice culture, a much-neglected area in Carnatic music. Ananda Coomaraswamy's remark that what is important in Indian music and not how may seem to be a clever move to explain away the appalling flaws in voice production that the greatest of Indian musicians exhibit, but it does capture an element of truth. Today there are a few experimenters among teachers of Carnatic music who work on the student's voice besides imparting to him or her any repertoire (which is what training mainly involves); by and large, however, it is left to the learner to try and work his or her way to getting the voice to respond to the demands placed by the music.

For a Westerner used to the idea of elaborate and systematic voice training, this would be astounding. Pesch attempts to revive what he would like to think as traditional theories and techniques of voice training in India by drawing parallels between the theory of chakras in the Yoga system and the Western theory of placing the tone. This is largely reproduced from an article written by an orientalist, Friedrich Brueckner, that Pesch translated. (This is not acknowledged as such, although the article is listed in the bibliography.) Indeed they are interesting and viable ideas, and if they would trigger a reclamation of a lost tradition that would be a lasting contribution.