In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

70 chapter four Melodic Motion in Time Ustad Iqbal Ahmad Khan is singing a fast composition in Rag Purvi. I am sitting just to his left, accompanying him on the harmonium. While he improvises fast, elaborate melodic runs, I follow close behind him, trying in every moment to play what he just sang. But what he just sang is also here now, as the basis for ongoing, repeated patterns; thus he establishes melodic grooves for me to join. When he returns to the fixed part of the composition, singing the repeated first line three or four times in a row, I lock into unison with him. How do I know where he will end an improvised section and return to the composition? Part is convention: I know that the composition picks up from the twelfth unit of the metrical cycle, that he won’t let a whole minute pass before returning to the precomposed melody, and that his cadences occur within the space of Rag Purvi. But it is also evident from how he moves. When his hands start to come together at the end of a phrase, I feel him closing an improvisational episode. When he seems to be holding something and starts to put it down, I feel him finishing what he is doing. When I sense his body and voice moving somewhere, I try to meet him there. To accompany him is to feel both where he is going and when he will get there. If Iqbal Ahmad Khan was improvising, how could I know what he was going to do? This apparent paradox is rooted in a conflict between two ideas of how a musician moves in time. On one hand, each moment is new: the musician continuously generates new melodic material. On the other hand, each moment touches the past and the future: the musician continuously elaborates on what has come before and reaches toward melodic goals yet to come. Musicians devise melodic patterns with a culminating moment already in view, drawing on just-performed melodic patterns as materials. They work within recurring metrical cycles, using memory and imagination, the known and unknown, to unfold melodic motion in time. Melodic Motion in Time / 71 Melodic motion, like all motion, can never appear in an infinitesimal moment: just as a photograph of a runner is not in motion, a frozen instant of melodic action is not, by itself, melodic.1 Melodic motion emerges only when the present is connected to the past and future (cf. Schutz 1976: 37–38). This applies in principle to any of the melodic motion analyzed in chapter 2—recall that “we can know where a neume is going while it is still in the process of going there” (Barlow 1998–2000). It also, however, applies to the temporal organization of time structures longer than a single breath. After briefly touching on the conventional gestures that mark the progress of tala (metrical cycles), this chapter will investigate the ways in which extended gestural phrases shape musical time into long moments of melodic action and temporal attention. Tala Talas, ordered metrical cycles, provide the sturdiest temporal structure in Hindustani music. In the midst of various kinds of rhythmic play, the progression of tala is unambiguous; the rules of tala have become conventional and well established (Bagchee 1998; Clayton 2001; Kippen 2006.) Talas are marked both by fixed cycles of drum strokes and by fixed cycles of handclaps and handwaves that mark metrical progression. Their measure is so clear and verifiable that violations of tala are one of few cases in which the authority of a tabla accompanist can supersede the authority of a soloist. The fundamental unit of tala is the matra, and a key characteristic of a given tala is the number of matras it contains (ektal has twelve, jhoomra tal has fourteen, etc.). In principle, consecutive matras are of equal length, but the range of possible tempi in performance varies greatly. During a slow composition , a matra might last as long as four seconds; at the climax of a fast composition, a matra might be as short as an eighth of a second. Individual matras have no particular kinetic affiliate; indeed, they are not always of a length that corresponds to the comfortable range of foot- or finger-tapping, or stepping.At relatively fast tempi, matras at key structural points are marked with claps (or slapping the hand on the thigh) and waves of the hand...

Share