Musicking Bodies: Gesture and Voice in Hindustani Music

3. Ragas as Spaces for Melodic Motion

53 chapter three Ragas as Spaces for Melodic Motion I am sitting before Vikas Kashalkar. He is teaching me Rag Hameer, but he hasn’t said a word about it yet. Instead, he is tacitly communicating a crucial feature of its structure: again and again, he follows the same crooked pattern of descent when bringing his phrases back home to sa. After repeating five phrases like this, I grasp a simple rule: sing {ga ma re sa} to close phrases in Hameer. But my rendering still sounds awkward—I am tentatively moving from note to note, as though exploring a path in the dark. It is only after following his graceful lead down this path twenty or thirty times that I begin to get my footing. He sings an ascending phrase and cues me to finish the melodic sentence, making a small downward spiral with his left hand; I descend along the crooked path to sa. By the end of the lesson, Kashalkarji has shown me more ways to move: a propulsive , energetic ascending route from gandhar to shadaj that leaps over pancham; a rapid forceful jump from below that touches nishad and hangs on dhaivat; and a region of tight, twisted maneuvering around pancham. Later, walking home, my mind wanders here and there, but I am surprised to find that I am humming Hameer to myself. Just as I needn’t think about the individual steps that lead me to my flat, I needn’t think about the individual notes on the paths of Hameer. The heart of Hindustani music training is learning to render melody freely and spontaneously in various ragas. Ragas are distinctive melodic worlds full of characteristic color, affect, and motion, encompassing many compositions and a wide scope for improvised elaboration; a well-trained musician will have mastered dozens of them.1 To sing in a given raga requires an understanding of both melodic models outlined in the previous chapter: an analytic sense of appropriate note sequences and a kinetic sense of appropriate melodic motion. Many music theorists have discussed raga in terms of the first melodic model: they treat ragas as grammars that organize notes. musicking bodies / 54 This chapter proposes a complementary vision of ragas, appropriate to the second melodic model: ragas are distinctive spaces for melodic motion. A fuller discussion of raga will come later in this chapter; for now, an example will illustrate how raga performance unfolds in both vocal and gestural space. Consider the performance of Rag Bhimplas by Shafqat Ali Khan referenced in figure 2.6. The alap begins with a few melodic figures near the low part of his range and gradually moves upward in large, swooping gestures over the course of several minutes. To a trained listener, his melodic action fills the room with the unmistakable color of Bhimplas. To a listener unschooled in raga, he may merely seem to be wandering up and down a scale. Over time, however, an attentive listener, schooled or unschooled, would notice that there are patterns in his melodic wandering. Every minute or so, for example, Shafqat Ali returns to a familiar groove: his right palm slides past his left while he sings a slow, sliding phrase in the middle of his vocal range (see figure 3.1). While we might otherwise expect this gesture to correspond to melodic ascent in general (so that pitch is mapped onto the sagittal axis), it is rather more specific. The hand-sliding zone is reserved for vocal action that rises from shadaj to come to rest on madhyam. These rising, madhyam-tending phrases are not identical—they may be timed differently, may be preceded (as in figure 3.1) by a descent to shadaj (during which the hands are not sliding past each other), and may even momentarily touch other notes. But all of these phrases are articulated by vocal action in a well-defined vocal region and by gestural action in a well-defined gestural region. Once we notice this region for melodic motion, we begin to notice others. Shafqat approaches nishad and gandhar from above with a gradual, Figure 3.1. Bhimplas hand-slide. Ragas as Spaces for Melodic Motion / 55 pulling vocal glide that is often matched by a physical pulling gesture. Rapid ascents to high shadaj skip rishabh and dhaivat (e.g., {ni sa ga ma pa ni sa}), and often his hands move quite far...