Musicking Bodies: Gesture and Voice in Hindustani Music

2. Gesture and Melodic Motion

33 chapter two Gesture and Melodic Motion Sitting in the front row of a vocal concert one night, I am distracted by a scratching sound to my right. An up-and-coming young musician sits with a notebook in her lap and a pen in her hand, writing so furiously that the friction of pen against paper is audible above the singer’s voice. She is rapidly, and with astonishing accuracy, transcribing the singer’s improvised melodic passages, note for note. Every few minutes, after a particularly difficult phrase, the scratching stops. She drops her pen, raises her hands to her face, and traces the contours of the phrase in the air before her eyes. Seeing the phrase clearly in front of her, she returns to her pen, and the scratching resumes. Melody is motion; melody is notes. The young singer at the concert switched smoothly between these two ways of understanding. In this, she showed a mastery of two complementary models of melody among Hindustani musicians. One model, embodied in the young musician’s note-bynote transcription, sees melody as a sequence of independent units, as a necklace is made of beads. The other model, embodied in her hands moving in space, sees melody as motion.1 The note-sequence model is expressed in a precise, explicit, centuries-old notation system. Like movable-do solfège, this system names seven notes: sa, re, ga, ma, pa, dha, ni. This model, called sargam (sa/re/ga/ma), analyzes melodic action in terms of these stopping points. These stopping points retain their names even if their sonic referents are slightly raised or lowered, bent or oscillated. The English word notation is sometimes used for this analytic process of breaking a melody into units and naming them according to these seven notes. For example, the melody of “Happy Birthday” could be roughly notated as shown in figure 2.1.2 This model is precise and simple, and it is used widely by both musicians and theorists to describe melody. It allows for compact printed notation, straightforward classification of ragas according to scalar content, and the musicking bodies / 34 analysis of hierarchies of pitch importance. It also enables rigorous analyses and comparisons of ragas in terms of note sequences (for example, Bhatkhande 1964), and has become the dominant tool of musical analysis in both North and South India. The second model, which understands melody as motion, lends itself more readily to physical movement than to writing. Its tradition therefore seldom leaves a written trace. The idea that melody moves is familiar even to untrained musicians, who might perceive, for example, that “Happy Birthday” begins low, jumps to “to” before settling on “you,” ascends to its apex on the third “birthday,” and drifts down to “you” in its closing phrase. This chapter will focus on the gestural articulation of melody as motion. By the end, we will see that the two models are complementary and interconnected. Melodic Trajectories Trained musicians need not picture every note they sing as they improvise. Instead, they rely on nuanced models of motion and melodic trajectory. Vocalist Veena Sahasrabuddhe, for example, says that while improvising, she is generally thinking not about individual notes (svaras) but about curvilinear motion: If there are four or five notes, I will say this is one unit, because that’s how I practice every day. So if I want to reach from rishabh [i.e., re] to the upper rishabh, in the meanwhile, all the svaras in the middle, {re ma pa ni} [waves hand dismissively] I don’t care. I know from rishabh to rishabh. I’m just going to put the [moves hand in curve] just like a curve. I know I’m perfectly going there. I have full confidence. So {re ma pa ni sa} or {ni sa re ma pa ni sa}, whatever it is . . . I see rishabh there waiting for me [laughs]. And I will just go there. . . . I make all kinds of designs, and the designs are in my mind. But at that time, I’m not putting any efforts, “Now after re, ga, these are the svaras.” No. Instead of svaras, I’m just thinking about the curves and the lines. (Interview courtesy of Martin Clayton, Bombay, 2004) Figure 2.1. “Happy Birthday” in sargam. Gesture and Melodic Motion / 35 This is echoed by vocalist Arun Kashalkar: It’s like ascending or...