<h>Out of India</h>
Out of India
Indian classical music is an essentially improvisational music. Its origins vanish
into the hymns sung in temples and the folk songs sung in the villages in India'
s dim Vedic past. The raga occupies the pride of place in classical Indian music.
All Indian classical music, vocal or instrumental, has to conform to one or the
other raga. The raga as understood by contemporary Indian musicians, has no
known equivalent in non-Indian music. Each raga has a subtly molded
'personality'. On the one hand, it can be described in terms of a musical
system. It is similar to a musical 'mode' but can have very different ascending
and descending scales with as few as five or as many as twelve notes and the
dominant and subdominant notes may vary. Hundreds of such ragas have
been devised although only about 100 are used in public performances.
On the other hand, the term raga stands for an aesthetic concept. There is a
Sanskrit saying 'that which colours the mind is a raga'. Therefore, a raga has
also an emotional quality (joyful, peaceful, romantic, graceful, etc) and aims to
transport the listener into a purely aesthetic realm of gana rasa or undiluted
musical delight. The mood then that a raga creates is as important as its
technical characteristics. It is also said that the expressiveness contained in a
raga flows from a moment of the day or night and for this reason certain ragas
are performed only in specific times or seasons. Indian music theorists have
even drawn correspondences between the notes of the musical scale with the
positions of the planets, the days, the hours, and the colours to unite the
technical with the aesthetic concepts.
In Northern India, developing a raga requires controlled improvisation on the
part of the performer, who becomes during the performance the author of the
raga, even though he is not considered the composer of the raga. This is much
as the author of a poem who has not invented the words and the grammar he
used. During a performance, the raga moves from a free form called alap
towards a rhythmic structure and then towards a measured composition, a
procession that calls on the skill of the performer. The melody, which is central
to the raga and may be centuries-old, vanishes and reappears in innumerable
shapes during a performance. Even though the roots of this music are ancient
and instruments resembling the veena and tanboura are seen in carvings on
some of the oldest Indian temples, it is a constantly evolving music. "Art being
a living organism, it is bound to expand" and music being pre-eminently an art
is of an extremely changing nature. Everywhere in the performances of the
great Indian masters there is an air of freshness and change, of
experimentation with new styles married in a most Indian way with a
respect for the old masters and the traditions of the past.
In a tradition that runs through Indian classical music, the teaching of music is
often passed on in families of musicians generation after generation. Nitai
Dasgupta's father Bilas Chandra Dasgupta was an accomplished classical
vocalist. Neither is apprenticeship as obsolete in Indian classical music as
commonly believed. Almost every master, whether a southern vidvan or a
northern pandit or ustad, prides himself on being the pupil of a great musician.
Nitai Dasgupta studied also under Pandit Usha Raman Mukherjee of Calcutta
and continued and completed his studies under the great Ustad Amir Khan.
He has played at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, the Wigmore Hall, the Wembley
Conference Centre and at the Royal Albert Hall with Yehudi Menuhin and Ravi
Shankar on the occasion of Ravi Shankar's 70th birthday. He has toured with
Ravi Shankar through Europe. His previous concert in Cambridge at the
Peterhouse Theatre in 1997 drew an enthusiastic audience and created a new
demand for Indian classical music in Cambridge.
Baluji Shrivastav was born in Rajastan and has been blind from infancy because
of the poverty and ignorance that claim many victims in India.
He began his studies of Indian music at Ajmer Blind School and graduated from
Lucknow University with a BA in Sitar and Vocal Studies.
He obtained an MA on Sitar at the Alahabad University and a BA in Tabla. A
master of Hindustani classical music, he has tought at colleges in India, France
and the UK. He has recorded extensively both Indian classical music and jazz
fusion with Jazz Orient and other schemes.
He has also performed with several pop artists, including Annie Lennox,
Soul II Soul, Jah Wobble, Massive Attack, Boy George, Dario Marianelli
and the New London Orchestra.
Baluji Shrivastav and Nitai Dasgupta will be performing ragas in alternation.
There will be an intermission. The total duration of the concert will be about
two and a half hours. Recordings of the artists will be
available for sale at the concert. Trinity College is located in the centre of
Cambridge, entrance at Trinity Street. Because of the college's
central location there is no car parking space available on site, other than at
the Lion's Yard Car Park at Corn Exchange Street, a few blocks away from the
college and chapel. A second car park is at Park Street only two blocks away from the College.
Tickets are available in advance at the Trinity College Porter's Lodge and on
the day of the concert on the door.
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For further information on Indian classical music you may read
this article
written by Ravi Shankar.
Acknowledgement: The photograph of the Taj Mahal is used with the kind permission of Neeraj Peswani.
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