All Night

The Frog and I happened to attend Chhandayan's annual whole night concert in New York City last weekend. We witnessed three of present day's best artists in full form consecutively for six hours, and since then I have not been able to lead a normal routine of work.


However, the highlight of the concert was undoubtedly Ulhas Kashalkar, whom I had last heard about seven years back in a live concert. As far as I remember, it was either at the SRA or the GD Birla Sabhagar in Calcutta, where he sang Raga Bihagda. I remember the whole audience singing the mukhda of the famous vilambit bandish with him in tandem. It was extraordinary.


At the Synod Hall last Sunday, he sang Raga Ramkali as a bada Khayal. The ambience was incredible since Rashid had just sung a long Jog, and had ended with a Bhairavi Thumri. Early rays of sunlight were just seeping in, through the stained glass windows of the cathedral auditorium, as the vilambit progressed. His layakari has evolved to the highest standards and at times it seemed like listening to Pt. Mansur in a live concert. The tabla and the harmonium mixed with his vocals as if the three were made for each other, much like the duo of Ali Akbar Khan and Swapan Chaudhuri. Ramkali's drut "Hoon To Baari Baari Jaun" was followed by a short khayal in Hindol Bahar. The two components - Hindol and Bahar were blended by the master so exquisitely that it created magic at the transitions.


I am dying to hear more of his renditions now, since there is so much to learn; fortunately I just received plenty of his new live recordings to listen to, and am feeling very privileged.

My journeys in tuning the guitar

Tuning a guitar is a tough job. For two reasons, it’s tough to have perfect ears, and most of the time the ears respond to aural clues not coming from the guitar too; and secondly because of equal temperament. I have wanted to write this article for several years now, because every day in my musical journey, I am fascinated by the trap of the tempered third.

The easiest way to tune the guitar is by using an electronic tuner. You turn the pegs until the tuner clicks and tells you that your string is tuned perfectly. Easy, simple and takes the least amount of time. But of course, if you are the perfectionist, this mechanism is rarely going to satisfy you.

The problem is compounded if you are going to play with a fixed pitch instrument (Which is not an electronic keyboard). There is a small chance that there is a conflict between what your tuner says and what the instrument says. In such conditions, it’s always best to tune your guitar to the fixed-pitch instrument, which will enhance your performance and the purists will have lesser areas to frown upon. Ideally, of course, all fixed-pitch instruments should be tuned to concert pitch, but they are sometimes way off, sometimes clearly lying between two notes on the electronic tuner, and that’s where the guitarist’s problems are compounded.

There was an informal jam session I participated in, in which there were five of us, and another guitarist who was new. He was not new to the guitar, he was new to us. So everything was fine, until he decided to join in. So he takes out his guitar, his electronic tuner, tunes his guitar and joins in. The jam session was wrecked. He was on concert pitch, but none of us were, and he was unaware that he was way off – possibly, because he was hard of hearing, or partially tone-deaf. I had contemplated telling him to switch to another guitar, or tune his guitar for him, but as one is painfully aware, the social dynamics of tuning another guitarist’s guitar for him is a non-trivial matter.

The best way, and something that has been supporting me lately in my exploits with the guitar is the D tuning. Tune the D (4th string) to the concert pitch, or what all of you in your informal jam session agree to as the concert pitch D. Using this D, tune the other strings using the open 4th string as a reference. The reason I ask you to do this, is because in this case, you won’t be basing your references on thirds or fifths to tune, but all your tuning would be based on the pure interval – which is the octave.

The problem is created now by the major third interval (that is the F# note on the key of D). This is important in most of all the music that you hear and most of rock, folk, country music anyways, that you would want it to sound good. Play your D chord now; and you will notice that it doesn’t sound good. Do you want to tweak the strings which play the F# so that it sounds good? You would be tempted, as I am all the time. But I guess that’s the peril of equal temperament, something that was experimented with for years, and ultimately resulted in a fret-board in which one perfect chord leads to other imperfect chords. The human ear which would always be more satisfied by the just temperament simply fails to agree with the guitar which wants to be tuned to equal temperament, with the result that most guitarists are moody people who are rarely happy.

So what is this equal temperament thingy which musicians have been so worried about over the years?

The scale is divided into equally-spaced semitones, and each semitone is around a hundred (100) cents away from each other. So a cent is 1/100 of a semitone. Simple concept.
Before we had equal temperament, all musical instruments were tuned according to the overtone series – which is the sequence of harmonics which we hear when a particular note is sung, plucked or blown upon. And that resulted in what is known as just temperament, something that nature designed every individual scale to be.

But that was not easy for the piano, which cannot be tuned in between a performance which shifts from one key to another. Thus arose equal temperament, which was first experimented with by Bach, who wrote his famous The well-tempered clavier, with a series of fugues and preludes in both major and minor keys to illustrate that with all it’s failures, equal temperament is the way to go, because it makes all your thirds slightly off, but not so far off as to actually sound discordant when played as a part of a musical performance.

So what’s the problem with equal temperament? Taking heed from the hundred cents which separate each semitone from its next (or previous), if we investigate the equally tempered scale, we find that the third (the major third) is 14 cents sharper than what the actual major third is supposed to be. So the actual major third on your equally-tempered piano is 14/100 times sharper than the actual third which occurs on that scale using the overtone series. The octave however, in equal temperament, is perfect, it’s exactly double the frequency of the lower note in the same key. Which implies that it’s always best to tune using octaves, something which I mentioned in the very beginning of this article. Tempered fourths and fifths are not very far off from their actual sounds in the equally tempered scale, in that the fourth is 2 cents sharper than the actual, and the tempered fifth is 2 cents flatter than the actual. The minor third, incidentally is a bigger problem than the major third, in that it is around 16 cents flatter than the actual minor third which is a part of the scale as per the overtone series.

This concept is academic in the case of fixed-pitch instruments, like the flute, the oboe, or the recorder, which can only change their ranges slightly but the pitches which these instruments can play are fixed in the mechanism of the instrument. The violin and stringed instruments, on the other hand, are more tunable, because of the pegs which are provided with the instrument, and that is what you notice concert fiddlers doing in the middle of performances. They change their pitches ever so slightly to adjust with the new key which the next concert piece is going to be played on. Guitars are stringed instruments but they should not be regularly tuned to the key because the frets are a limiting factor, making the instrument prominently like the piano as far as equal temperament is concerned.

So what is the trap of the major third as I mentioned in the beginning?

Let me illustrate with the simplest G – open chord. The 2nd string in the G open chord is also open, and it plays a B, which as we all know – is the major third in the G major chord. Now let us say, using the electronic tuner which we recently purchased, we tuned the guitar perfectly as per instructions and played the G chord. Well, to most ears, it will sound right – but to ears which were born fussy and inconclusive, the G will not sound good, the 2nd string sounds distinctly off. Wouldn’t it be nice, if I tuned it down a little, turned that peg just a little bit, and make the G chord sound like the most beautiful thing in the world? Well, that’s what I used to do when I first played the guitar; and that was a big trap. I always used to get a world-class G chord, but when I decided to play the next song on the scale of E, I sounded terrible. I spent days trying to understand what I was doing wrong, until I decided to ask someone who knew more than me, and that’s how I learnt all this. What was happening was that in my urge to get the perfect third in the G major chord, I was tuning the B open string (2nd string) to the perfect B, which is actually 14 cents lower than what it should actually be as per the equally tempered scale. On the E scale, however, the B is the fifth of the scale, which even in the equally tempered scale should never be more than two cents off, but because of my efforts, was actually 14 cents off, and hence my E chord always sounded horrible.

This is incidentally, one of the reasons why it will never be possible under realistic scenarios to play Carnatic classical music on the piano.

Presenting..

...Jayateerth Mevundi, a very young and very talented artist from the Kirana Gharana. Advay, my friend from the University of Pittsburgh introduced me to his Shuddh Saarang and it was incredibly promising. One gets reminded of Pt. Bhimsen's 75th birth anniversary recordings released by Music Today about 10 years back. Jayateerth's fast tans, especially the parts in the Tara Saptaka bears the Kirana signature. The sur-pradhan and simplistic approach again embodies the ghar's tradition. Here is an exquisite sample of a 6 minute Kedar. Interestingly, he hails from Dharwad from where come few of the greatest artists of the last century.

Yaman - Amir Khan

Yaman needs no introduction. Check out one of the most intense renditions of Yaman by none other than Ustad Amir Khan. It is astonishingly simple, but beautiful. I have a bias for Pandit Bhimsen Joshi, but this has the potential to be the most favorite Yaman of the unbiased.



1. Vilambit in Jhumra Tala (his favorite :)) (43'21)
2. Drut in Teentala (11'11)



Accompanied on the harmonium by Pandit Jnan Prakash Ghosh, and on the Tabla by Pandit Gobinda Bose.


Available here.

The Kamalambam Navavarna Krithis

I'm not sure what to post here, because I'm not sure to what extent you listen to Carnatic music. I thought I'd begin by pointing at some very famous pieces, do let me know whether this is already well-known to you guys :) And I should add that I am not an expert, I've spent a few years learning vocals, and a few more listening; that's all. :)

As you may know, the krithi is the fundamental unit in a Carnatic musician's repertoire. The most common structure of a krithi is 2 lines of a pallavi, 2 lines of anupallavi, and 4 lines of charanam. The first line of a pallavi acts as a refrain, and is repeated after the anupallavi and charanam; on some occasions the entire pallavi is repeated. Each line of a krithi has a basic melodic structure given by the composer, but each school (and indeed each musician) may add different kinds of gamakams & improvisations to the lines in their renditions; these are usually built up from simple to complex. The basic melodic structure of a krithi determines to a large extent what kinds of gamakams can be sung on it; some krithis sound fine when performed by your average talented 12 year old, some others can be unbearable. Those others are also often the ones that offer the greatest scope for beautiful gamakams, and the Kamalambam Navavarna krithis fall into this category.

The Kamalambam Navavarna krithis are a series of 11 krithis composed on the goddess Kamalamba at Tiruvarur, by Dikshitar. (All of the krithis that I know of are devotional in nature.) All 11 of the krithis performed by D.K.Jayaraman are available as MP3s on the Carnatic Krithi Archive (scroll down a bit, look for the last file on each line: "original mp3"). They are in each in a different ragam, and a few different talams are used. Many of these ragams are "major", turning up regularly in concerts as main/sub-main pieces, e.g. Thodi (Hindustani: Bhairavi), Kalyani (Hindustani: Yaman), Sankarabharanam (Hindustani: Bilawal?), Ananda Bhairavi, Kambhoji, Bhairavi (I don't know the equivalents of these). The Carnatica website has a lot of detail on the beauty and complexity of the lyrics, but I've never really paid attention there.

The music, however, is brilliant. They are wonderful to listen to, over and over again, because their elucidation of the ragas -- at least in the ragas that I know -- is so very broad and complex. They are all also slow, majestic krithis, giving ample scope for each line of teachers to add a non-trivial stamp to their rendition of it. In the Kalyani krithi for example (the only one I can claim to have learnt), the T.V.Sankaranarayanan version here sounds to me nothing like what I learnt (the song itself goes from 4.50 to 10.05, the rest is an alapanai before and kalpanaswaras after), whereas the DKJ version above is a tiny bit closer, and the version by U.Shrinivas on the mandolin here seems a lot closer (song from 6.12 to 10.12).

I've never heard them performed all together, though a search shows that there are a few such concerts: usually, one krithi gets chosen as the main/sub-main piece of the evening, and performed independently. In fact, I've never heard the last few performed at all (but then I didn't grow up in India.) And because these krithis are so demanding, I can't imagine how it would be to perform them all together.

In the meantime, that's what recordings are for... I highly recommend listening to them, and of course, I'd love to hear your thoughts :)

Bihag

I have been listening to a lot of Bihags recently, after starting to explore the Raga myself. This post is about its characteristics and some common explorations. The Raga is a late night one, and primarily denotes longing for one's lover, often in a sorrowful mood. In other words, it embodies the shades of pathos, and in a personal opinion, shades more of melancholy than joy. However, I have heard renditions which are joyful. To note one bandish that simply cannot be expressed without happiness is one that starts with "Ali Ri Albeli", which has been exquisitely sung by Ustad Amir Khan. However, the rendition differs from what I have learnt upfront.



Pandit Bhatkhande's book categorizes the Raga to the Vilawal that, as Rajan Parrikar's website corroborates. The vadi swar is Gandhar, and samvadi is Nishad, aptly so, because the meends involving these notes form the marrow of the Raga. Another noticeable facet is the sensual use of both Madhyams. The use of the Teevra Madhyam and its distribution with respect to the Shuddha variety appears to be different in different rendition styles.



I have heard many recordings of the Raga. Since I am inclined to the Kirana Gharana a little bit, I would start by mentioning Pandit Bhimsen Joshi and Smt. Gangubai Hangal's renditions of the Raga. Both of their readily available tapes start with the Vilambit bandish "Kaise Sukha Sove", which is very popular, and indeed a very beautiful one. I don't remember Smt. Hangal's drut bandish, and commenters are most welcome to remind me of it. However, I do remember Joshiji's drut, "Lat Ulajhi Suljha ja Balam", which is one of the sweetest drut bandishes I have heard. I have a recording of Ashwini Bhide Deshpande singing the same bandish, and it is quite attractive. Rashid Khan's performance of the Raga is amazing, and I keep on listening to it very frequently. There's a long recording of Pandit Ravi Shankar, which is amazing, and is played with his idiosyncratic style of playing the Sitar. I am listening to more of him these days. Pandit Ranadhir Roy's recording of Bihag is again, one of the better performances when instrumental renditions are concerned. He is just astonishing like his recordings of Tilak Kalyan and Jaijawanti that have been mentioned on this blog earlier.



I am looking for renditions of two Bihag bandishes that I learnt, but have not heard in recordings or concerts. The first one is a Madhyalaya bandish in Rupak Tala called "Aaye Sab Mile", a Sufi kind of bandish, which is a prayer for the saint Khwaja Mainuddin Chisti and has some interesting words. It says:

Aaye Sab Mile
Tero Darbar
Khwaja Mainuddin, Garib Nawaj.

Chisti Peer Tum
Hind ke Bali Ho
Puri Karo Sab Man ki Kaaj



and there's immense scope of Laykari in it because of the Rupak setting. There's another bandish called "Chhup Jaa Re Chandni Raat", which typifies the Bihag-ish feeling, and portrays the Viraha that Bihag's a trademark of.



Two cents from my side. Contributors of this blog certainly have more to say. You are welcome to continue this post, so are the readers of the blog.

My guruji has recently embarked on a project to help young and less known artists reach the mass who listen to Hindustani Classical Music. Though recent acquaintances made over the internet show rays of hope, I still believe HCM is a dying art. Moreover, the handful of people who do listen to Classical Music, listen to a small number of artists only.

They are both ignorant about the fraction of the past glory that exist in rare recordings, as well as the upcoming generation who might possess some promise. Well, we cannot do much about the heritage other than digitizing the recordings and labeling them with format MPEG II/Layer3.

Those who keep up with the core circles (primarily in Calcutta) and want to make a living by doing music only, are facing a challenge. I can hardly name more than two vocalists who have shown promise in the public sense during the past decade. People aren't eager to take up music as a career very easily. I cite one case at hand. I have met quite a few people over the past decade while taking lessons from my guruji. He, and people around had hopes. A few left music, some came to the US to pursue grad studies. The less brighter still continue taking lessons. Some people who have taken the risk are on their way to oblivion due to lobbying, politics and big organizations like the SRA who have not served the purpose that they were set up for.

My guruji and a few of his friends have started this organization that would focus on bringing unknown talents on stage. I am not sure about it's future, but it shows courage. Some hope too. Here's its vision.

‘Dithi’ is an organization born primarily out of love and admiration for Indian Classical Music. ‘Dithi’ embodies a vision. Staying within the bounds of our music, ‘Dithi’ aims at celebrating its magnificence, rediscovering its depths and reveling in its intricacies.

Even today, we get to hear good music from many who have not had their share of recognition. The promise of talent and good music is all that ‘Dithi’ rests its hope upon. It must be interpreted as an attempt to reaffirm our faith in the expanse and the future of Indian Classical Music. In its own humble ways, it desires to explore the possibilities that await our music. It desires to look beyond the apparent horizon of our music.

Perhaps, in course of time, ‘Dithi’ will make us look beyond, but not without your help. ‘Dithi’ needs the material and moral support of the lovers of Indian Classical Music. It cannot take a single step forward unless your advice, inspiration and patronage spur it on. It is your presence that it calls out for. It is your hand that its vision seeks. ‘Dithi’ needs you. On behalf of ‘Dithi’, we send an appeal out to all of you. We request you to come forward – we request you to make a success out of Dithi’s imperfect beginnings.

A couple of days ago, the inaugural concert of this community was held at the Birla Academy on the Southern Avenue. Though it aims at fostering the young talent, the first concert hosted a recital by the veteran Pandit Buddhadev Dasgupta, maestro of the lineage of Ustad Murad Ali Khan, Ustad Mohammad Ameer Khan and Pandit Radhika Mohan Maitra, doyens of the Rampur Senia Gharana. I have heard that the concert was a success and witnessed the presence of a few stars like Ustad Rashid Khan.





Pt. Buddhadev Dasgupta




I appeal to young and old, and the few readers I have left to be a member of this community and help forward this heritage of our country. The annual membership fee is Rs. 250, that translates to about $6. If you are eager to be a part of this process, please comment. Otherwise too, comments are welcome.



Cross posted on fflush(stdthoughts);, my personal blog.