Shuba Gunapu, her veena, my guitar 
Category Archives: music
Ragas, Time, Notime
A raga is a scale to be explored (along with certain rules for its playing).
On a sitar and some veenas, there are sympathetic strings that vibrate when their pitches are played on the melody strings, and that are also occasionally struck with the little finger.
The sympathetic strings are tuned to the pitches of the raga. Striking them is like projecting a photograph of everything that is possible. A synchronic snapshot, as opposed to the diachronic articulating of the melody.
Neither the veena (South Indian) nor sitar (North Indian) are designed to produce chords. There are no chords in traditional Indian music. But there is this continued reminding interplay of timeless existence of all possibilities versus the soul’s narrative of the specific.
Indian musicians are extremely sensitive to pitch. They know a ragas by its feel. They learn to play each systematically, but when they have learned to explore the raga, they move within it, and know it.
I think of the raga as having an odor, a smell. And there are hundreds of ragas, and an Indian musician knows the range of their feelings. When the sitar player strikes the sympathetic strings it’s like waving the incense: the air is filled with its scent, and the melody runs and weaves through it, writing its life in time.
The Thing at the Edge
I remember that when I was back in college, Steve Reich made the statement that it wasn’t how you made the music, what was important was whether it was good music or not. And the statement puzzled me, because more than anyone Reich had introduced process into composition, process that led to unintended sonic textures. Well, maybe more than anyone except Cage. But what values did Reich use to determine what was good music?
I’d listened to as wide a range of music as I possibly could, from every inch of the globe, from every electronic and music concrete blurt, and from the very oldest to the current. And what I loved most to hear was something that I absolutely hadn’t ever thought existed.
If something is really foreign, your reaction is not usually intense. If something well known is played badly, you have an intense reaction. But if it’s truly unlike the art you make, you will not recognize the art in it on first blush. It will take repeated exposures, and learning about how it is made, and what rules are followed, and what came before it, and what the instrument that generates it is like to play etc. After a while, you’ll start to feel the inner parts, and you’ll perceive the play it has.
But at the edge of Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development, you do have a reaction. This is again intense, because your mind and senses are rushing into the experience to get a solid taste of it, to map it and perceive it. To perceive its beauty.
And for me, this is what I’ve come to believe is the “good music” that Reich refers to. I know it isn’t a definition that is pan-cultural, but I could imagine someone following that thread and making sense of it. Someone might argue that beautiful music is music that conforms to certain architectural ratios. I can agree, but the beauty needs a person who is ready to resonate with it.
And so I’ve come to value the beautiful over the new. Not because I think it is more important. But because I know it’s a healthy place for a person to have a nest. And because I know that as one perceives, the locus of that nest must change, as percept becomes concept. The thing, then, is always a balance among self, object, and sensory perspective.
