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Oral Tradition 20.1 (2005) 130-157



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Shellac, Bakelite, Vinyl, and Paper:

Artifacts and Representations of North Indian Art Music

[*eCompanion at www.oraltradition.org]
School of Oriental and African Studies
University of London

Introduction

Short songs in dialects of Hindi are the basis for improvisation in all the genres of North Indian classical vocal music. These songs, bandiśes, constitute a central pillar of North Indian culture, spreading well beyond the geographic frontiers of Hindi itself. Songs are significant as being the only aspect of North Indian music that is "fixed" and handed down via oral tradition relatively intact. They are regarded as the core of Indian art music because they encapsulate the melodic structures upon which improvisation is based. In this paper we aim to look at some issues raised by the idiosyncrasies of written representations of songs as they has occurred within the Indian cultural milieu, and then at issues that have emerged in the course of our own ongoing efforts to represent khyāl songs from the perspectives of somewhat "insidish outsiders."

Khyāl, the focus of our current research, has been the prevalent genre of vocal music in North India for some 200 years. Khyāl songs are not defined by written representations, but are transmitted orally, committed to memory, and re-created through performance. A large component of our current project1 has been the transcription of 430 songs on the basis of detailed listening to commercial recordings that were produced during the period 1903-75, aspiring to a high degree of faithfulness to the details of specific performance instances. The shellac, bakelite, and vinyl records with [End Page 130] which we are working are among the most outstanding artifacts of twentieth-century Indian musical culture.

Published representations of Indian art songs have typically been skeletal abstractions, only loosely related to actual performance practice. This phenomenon is to some extent exemplary of the gulf between theory and practice in the Indian musical tradition. The written representations found in Indian music books are neither thoroughly descriptive nor successfully prescriptive. There is usually not enough detail to approximate the features of actual performance, some of the symbols are used inconsistently, and neither the performance instances nor the name of the performers are identified, so there is no possibility of verification by comparison with live or recorded musical examples. Similarly, in terms of prescriptiveness, these transcriptions supply only vague guidelines for performance: important stylistic information such as tempo, the details of ornamentation, and the scope for variation are omitted. On occasion written representations have been misleading, inconsistent with the realities of performance practice and significantly colored by personal and social exigencies.

Traditionally, reading music has not had a significant role in either performance or musical pedagogy; in fact, it seems probable that previous to the published codifying of music that took place during the twentieth century, the use of the sargam syllables (Sa Re Ga Ma Pa Dha Ni) was not a common feature of either performance or musical pedagogy. We learned from one of his students that Mallikarjun Mansur, one of the great singers of the twentieth century, had difficulty following sargam syllables and never used them in the course of teaching. My (Nicolas Magriel's) teacher, the eminent vocalist and music scholar Dilip Chandra Vedi, likened the use of sargam in performance, a widespread contemporary practice, to spelling. "If you're making a speech, you don't spell out every word!" he used to exclaim.2

The Oral Tradition and Musical Representation

Hindustani art music is an oral tradition. Music has always been learned by imitation. To this day, in the traditional teaching setting, notes are almost never written down, although song-texts are sometimes written down, and these serve to some extent as associative triggers for the recall of melodies. Teaching exclusively by example ensures that music is imbibed in [End Page 131] the deepest levels of a future performer's being, his most corporeal memories. In its heyday...

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