Every Sunday morning, I attend a one-hour class in light Hindi film music (सुगम सङ्गीत). This class is held by my guru, Shri. Umesh Bipin Khare at his home.
Besides teaching singing techniques, he also shares interesting and valuable information about the raags we use and also the work of the great music directors of the golden era (1955-1980).
My coevals (people of my age and antiquity) and I, harbor deep nostalgia for the hindi film music of this golden era,
which started a couple of years before I was born and blossomed through, my primary and high school years, ending when I graduated from engineering college.
On Sun. 16-Apr-2017, my guruji, talked about the thought processes, the great music directors must have gone through, while composing melodies.
My guruji educated us, that the svars(स्वर) were all related by a simple process of modulation known as “muurchhnaa(मूर्छना)”.
In the study of scales, muurchhnaa(मूर्छना) is the experimentation of shifting the tonic(शड्ज) on to any of the other six notes of the solfège(सरगम).
As the intervals between the diatonic notes in an octave, is asymmetric, shifting the tonic, results in change of mode, introducing new chromatic(विकृत) notes.
If one examines the Bilawal ThaaT(बिलावल ठाट) comprising all natural (शुद्ध) notes, one can clearly see how six other modes are produced by shifting the tonic.
Look at the table:
Guruji cited the following example:
Two everyday familiar, heptatonic (सम्पूर्ण) raagas in the Hindustani Classical world are:
raag yaman(राग यमन) and raag bhairavii(राग भैरवी).
Consider the raag bhairavii(राग भैरवी).
This uses the notes: सा, रे♭, ग, म, प, ध♭, नी♭, सा’. I use the symbols, “♭” and “♯” to denote flat(कोमल) and sharp(तीव्र), rather than the horizontal line below and vertical line above.
Assume the tonic was on the note C. (सफ़ेद एक).
Then the notes would be
C(सा),
D♭(रे♭),
E♭(ग),
F(म),
G(प),
A♭(ध♭),
B♭(नी♭) and
C’(सा’).
Here comes the interesting part.
Assume the tonic शड्ज was on the note D♭.(काली एक).
Then the notes would be
C(नी)
D♭(सा)
E♭(रे)
F(ग)
G(म♯)
A♭(प)
B♭(ध)
C’(नी) and
D♭(सा’).
Comparing to राग भैरवी, all the notes are identical.
So then how does one distinguish a भैरवी in D♭, from a यमन-कल्याण in C ?
The answer is in the movement of the melody.
Constant exposure to, and critical engagement with a raag’s elaboration alone is mandatory to develop familiarity.
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Two raags, with identical notes can yet be very different raags Pandit Vishnu N. Bhatkhande(1860-1936) -- one of the most influential musicologists in N. Indian classical music in the 20th century, observed that each traditional raag(राग) is based on (with small exceptions) one of ten basic thaats(ठाट), or modal frameworks. These are
Two raags, with identical notes can yet be very different ragas.
A simplistic knowledge of the notes of a raag (राग) or its family ThaaT (ठाट) may serve as a convenient starting point to achieve understanding. However the expert quickly finds it inadequate to be truly familiar or properly engaged with the raag. |