Is raga naturally occurring?

Ideas and innovations in Indian classical music
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kvchellappa
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Is raga naturally occurring?

Post by kvchellappa »

(I have the advantage of ignorance to raise such issues. I posted here instead of in the lounge as it may be technical)


What is natural? In a way, everything is a transformation of something. Nothing is created out of thin air (leaving out god who has not registered in rasikas.org). So everything is come out of that which existed anyway. That may be a strand of pure advaita. That will shut out the very distinction between natural and man-made, but common understanding does not seem to tend that way.
The very idea of sound is not invention. Sound was there at least along with life. Music is a play of sound.
Do the swaras occur naturally? A swara is a particular way of producing sound and seems to be man-made. Man has not made the sound itself, but carved out a special sound by his ingenuity. Different people in different parts of the world have done it and as it is amenable to a scientific dissection, areas of agreement or deviation could be pinpointed. The discovered differences in pitches were not naturally occurring as far as my mind could grasp, but have been within the laws that nature seems to obey. We can argue how far the swaras are natural. In any case, given the basic swaras, how they develop into various genres of music is mind-boggling.

Raga is one of the alleys into which the swaras have been shepherded by human mind. Is it still natural or a locus of human fancy?

VK RAMAN
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Re: Is raga naturally occurring?

Post by VK RAMAN »

The common elements of music are pitch (which governs melody and harmony), rhythm (and its associated concepts tempo, meter, and articulation), dynamics (loudness and softness), and the sonic qualities of timbre and texture (which are sometimes termed the "color" of a musical sound). Different styles or types of music may emphasize, de-emphasize or omit some of these elements. Music is performed with a vast range with vocal techniques ranging from singing to rapping. No music no ragam

Rsachi
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Re: Is raga naturally occurring?

Post by Rsachi »

Mr KVC,
My understanding of 22 shrutis is that they are derived by the inherent melodic (happy sound) relation between notes by cycling Sa Ma Pa and Sa again and again. That website http://22shruti.com has explanations and examples.

kvchellappa
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Re: Is raga naturally occurring?

Post by kvchellappa »

Thanks. I watched Oke's pesentation earlier. My doubt is whether it is human invention or discovery. My wild hunch is that is is man's creation.

Rsachi
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Re: Is raga naturally occurring?

Post by Rsachi »

Sir, I feel the effect of melody is on every living thing including animals and plants and perhaps even objects. That is what mystics say. And then there is music beyond hearing called Pranava. Or Om.

Nick H
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Re: Is raga naturally occurring?

Post by Nick H »

just thoughts and more questions...

I have a suspicion, ie might have heard somewhere, that what we hear as melodic, harmonic, etc is due to learning/conditioning, which is why the music of some cultures might sound wrong, or even bad, to members of some other cultures. Even if that is the case, would it make it unnatural? Is a cultural leaning towards certain foods and flavours unnatural?

On the other hand, there are mathematical relationships between the intervals which are heard in certain ways, eg harmony, discord, scale, raga. Does mathematical relationship suggest natural?

kvchellappa
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Re: Is raga naturally occurring?

Post by kvchellappa »

I thought man by his ingenuity understood the basics of sound and constructed in its idiom the scales and different systems of music. It is natural in that it is in terms of the underlying science of sound, but man-made in the sense the systems so formed are not some 'mystical' phenomena tapped by human mind.

Nick H
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Re: Is raga naturally occurring?

Post by Nick H »

I suspect that music pre-dates thinking, and certainly pre-dates science or understanding of sound. So, let us say the music came first, and then the understanding.

But whereas a flower remains a flower, whether it is looked at by a botanist, a physicist or a child, there must have been a two-way process with music and thought

arasi
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Re: Is raga naturally occurring?

Post by arasi »

Nick,
Yes, music first, then the understanding.
It still holds. Music comes first and then the understanding of it.

Ideally, they come together! How we wish!

MaheshS
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Re: Is raga naturally occurring?

Post by MaheshS »

Nick / Arasi

Sound, not music came before thinking. Organised / Classified [therefore thought based] sound is what we call music.

Nick H
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Re: Is raga naturally occurring?

Post by Nick H »

Hum a few notes, you have music. No thought required. Nor organisation or classification required either.

It is a long way from that to a classical music form, but, none the less, it is still music.

kvchellappa
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Re: Is raga naturally occurring?

Post by kvchellappa »

Gravity was a fact long before man knew about it. Is music similar? Sound is different, though music is a play on sound. Some notes might have existed (cuckko's for example) outside of human creation, but did raga, tune, harmony exist outside human mind? Were they not the products of collective human mind over a long period? What is understanding? If someone can sing, he knows it. He may not be aware of jargon or may not participate in rasikas.org, but his practical knowledge of the music he creates is for real. How can we say that understanding came later?

arasi
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Re: Is raga naturally occurring?

Post by arasi »

Ah, now the plot thickens! The word 'understanding' I carelessly used for 'knowing the ropes'--which is scientific musical knowledge.

Understanding can also be intuitive, or purely that (as it would have been, at the very beginning). As music evolved, as times advanced, the wheel carved by the caveman morphed into the modern radial tires?
Last edited by arasi on 25 Feb 2016, 18:39, edited 1 time in total.

Rsachi
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Re: Is raga naturally occurring?

Post by Rsachi »

Sri KVC,
The analogy to gravity as a physical phenomenon "discovered" by Newton would be up to comparing it to the discovery of vibration principles in a taut string. Both are facts of physics. No creative art there.

The fact that I have analysed and experimented with the sound I can produce by twanging a string, as a physicist, won't make me a musician!
Music is an art, developed by the advanced intelligence and creative temperament of man. Nothing that any animal or bird "sings" can come anywhere in the discussion of what we call "music". It is an act of intelligence even to perceive and relate our music to what animals and birds produce.

kvchellappa
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Re: Is raga naturally occurring?

Post by kvchellappa »

Thanks.

MaheshS
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Re: Is raga naturally occurring?

Post by MaheshS »

Nick H wrote:Hum a few notes, you have music. No thought required. Nor organisation or classification required either.
OK, Sangeetha Kalanidhi 2016 for you Nick :)

varsha
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Re: Is raga naturally occurring?

Post by varsha »

What occurred naturally was the lightening , the thunderstorm , the scary night .
And the glorious sunny day, after.
Music was the way the savage continued to respond, through ages,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DuTKvTDmJ1Q
As Chaurasia reveals in an extraordinary work
Twain was so correct when he said

The modern day man does not have the fascination for the rainbow,the savage had , simply because he knows how it is made.
He has lost, as much as he has gained,by prying into that matter
A masterly track ...

VK RAMAN
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Re: Is raga naturally occurring?

Post by VK RAMAN »

excellent varsha.

kvchellappa
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Re: Is raga naturally occurring?

Post by kvchellappa »

I read the following in Theory of Muisc (American) and it is interesting:

"Sounds are contained in all noises of nature, such as the wind blowing through the trees or in the roaring of the waterfall or of waves, but although the sound rises and falls in pitch, it is not music, for each tone has no definite pitch, neither does it bear a previously determined relation to the tones preceding or succeeding it. The tones which are gathered together to constitute any musical form are selected from a definite series whose individual tones progress in pitch by well defined degrees. This series is called a scale. The name is derived from the Latin word scala, a staircase, in recognition of the analogy existing between the progressing series of tones and the ascending steps of stairs. The Germans further express the comparison by using the name Tonleiter, a ladder of musical sounds, and the French employ the one word, echelle, to designate both scale and ladder.
This arranging of musical tones into a definite series has always been done by all races possessing music. Helmholz attributes it to a psychological reason similar to the natural feeling which has led to the rhythmical division in poetry. In other words, it is due to that inherent quality of rhythm whose reason lies beyond man's explanation but which is present in everything. It is within the realm of aesthetics. A constant factor in the problem of this science of the beautiful is to discover what it is in things that makes them beautiful or ugly, sublime or ludicrous. The explanation is ever receding and incomplete, universal laws of aesthetics cannot be established, for beyond a certain point training loses its power and each man becomes an authority unto himself, individuals having vastly different tastes.
The degrees of progression in the scale are not the same among the various races, but have differed with the epoch, the civilization, the tastes and the natural surroundings of the people. There are now in existence scales so different from our own that much training and familiarity are necessary before the beauties of their intervals can be appreciated by an alien ear.
.....
There are three points in which all scales agree. They are the octave, the fourth and the fifth. Scales of different civilisations and localities may contain any number of intermediate tones, but all agree in having established the natural relationship between the tones which are separated by the interval to which we refer as an octave, a name derived from the Latin word octo, meaning eight and used in this connection because the interval has been divided by eight tones, termed the degrees of the scale. The intervals between the other intermediate steps may be of various magnitudes, but the octave, fourth and fifth are always recognized."

vasanthakokilam
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Re: Is raga naturally occurring?

Post by vasanthakokilam »

Thanks kvchellappa. That is a clear way of expressing the significant basics.
This arranging of musical tones into a definite series has always been done by all races possessing music. Helmholz attributes it to a psychological reason similar to the natural feeling which has led to the rhythmical division in poetry. In other words, it is due to that inherent quality of rhythm whose reason lies beyond man's explanation but which is present in everything. It is within the realm of aesthetics.
One can see some delightful evidence of such universal rhythm in the sounds that babies make.

I analyzed a few such baby blabber sequences of my grand-nephew who is 8 months old. He was just blabbering something to himself and my niece happened to record them.

One such sequence lasted 19 seconds and the rhythmic split was like this. 5-10-6-6-6-4-2
And it was quite sophisticated. For example, the 6-6-6 was more like a Korvai ' 5 silence 5 silence 6'.

cpblog
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Re: Is raga naturally occurring?

Post by cpblog »

Nick H wrote: Does mathematical relationship suggest natural?
In spite of packing some form of mathematics under my belt over these years, I have often been
confused with even the most elementary stuff taught to me.

I still wonder how in a right angled triangle the hypotenuse "square root 2", as a line, is never supposed
to end, but that it can join (or terminate at) two points that were definite,to begin with!
I can see myself at any moment joining with a pencil and ruler, :D but the math teacher says that line is endless!

Or has this embodied self now become like "Rayare Kudre Katthe Ayatu" (an old adage of the Kannada colloquial
implying that "the King's Royal Horse has regressed to being a Donkey!") :D

'Best,

sureshvv
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Re: Is raga naturally occurring?

Post by sureshvv »

cpblog wrote:
I still wonder how in a right angled triangle the hypotenuse "square root 2", as a line, is never supposed
to end, but that it can join (or terminate at) two points that were definite,to begin with!
I can see myself at any moment joining with a pencil and ruler, :D but the math teacher says that line is endless!

Or has this embodied self now become like "Rayare Kudre Katthe Ayatu" (an old adage of the Kannada colloquial
implying that "the King's Royal Horse has regressed to being a Donkey!") :D

'Best,
It is endless but it converges, The increments keep getting smaller.

sureshvv
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Re: Is raga naturally occurring?

Post by sureshvv »

Some ragas are more "natural" than others. Or less "artificial". Indications could be the raga's presence:

1. In more than 1 system of music
2. In more than 1 part of the world
3. For a longer period of time

As an example, Mohanam may be more natural than say Natabhairavi.

arasi
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Re: Is raga naturally occurring?

Post by arasi »

sureshvv,

Mohanam is a good example--naturally occuring means common to all humanity over a long time, and we do hear it in the music of many lands.

minisantu
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Re: Is raga naturally occurring?

Post by minisantu »

Such a refreshing topic! I enjoyed the discussion. I tend to lean towards opining that ragas are 'discovery', not 'invention'.
An analogy that comes to mind is natural light (akin to naadam) that 'occurs' and a prism (musical genius) that can decipher the various hues (composite swaras) to now reassemble in various aesthetic permutations (ragas) for all of us to enjoy.
Naadam exists, swaras come together to present naadam and ragas are 'discovered'.

kvchellappa
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Re: Is raga naturally occurring?

Post by kvchellappa »

Read this recently:
"If art aims, in some instances, at a perfect imitation of nature, that does not circumscribe its limits: it may also produce what can nowhere be found in nature, putting in one object an assemblage of graces or excellences which are not found in such perfection in any real object."

munirao2001
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Re: Is raga naturally occurring?

Post by munirao2001 »

KVC, Today, by chance noticed this thread and read the discussions.
Shabda, Akshara are discussed in Vedas and Upanishads. They gave identities of Anaahata and Aahata for the primordial sound and for the 'discovered or captured' sound. Abstract primordial sound in frequencies in universal nature was objectified in 'OM kara', A-U-M representing A, existence, M, non existence, U, unity of both, in transcendence, divine in nature and pure in quality. Anaahata shabda is in human pure conscious and body in the flow of the blood with the rhythm of naadi, pulse, seated in heart as antaryamin, goohya, secretive and as sakshin, witness. Human, a seeker, experiences the divine presence and struggles to establish identity. His discovery of pranava naada, within self consciousness and universal consciousness rises to inner and outer consciousness with shabda, sound and akshara, its form in word expression and communication. Purely subjective experience in relation with objective, internal and external experiences results in to flow or stream of sounds rhythmically in saama gana. Saama gana leads to further experience of gaayana and gaayana as a creative output with the cognition of anaahata and discovery expressed in aahata in the form of svara and svaraakshara-note and rhythmical form of the note, in togetherness. Human with higher sensitivity and observation seeks and establishes the relationships of discovered shabda, naada with nature and its creative works of soundarya, aesthetic, but mute. The creativity urge results in establishing the relationship between emotions and aesthetic. In establishing the relationship, new creativity of yoga, union of sounds, notes, pitches, scales, songs and singing. In establishing the lakshana-science for the lakshya, art, similar to sruti and smriti of sacred texts. Now, raga. Raga is derived from ranj, color in manifestation either in svaras in a scale or words in a lyric as aesthetic of varying in nature but distinct in recognition and identity, identity of emotions and emotions relationship with color-light to bold; dark to bright; light and enlightening in strike and occurrence. Abstract aesthetic,in anaahata naada, in universal conscious discovered by a creator-artist and given form and identity in svaras, scale and pitch, established as aahata-emanation of anaahata with sanchari bhaavam, aesthetic movements described as ranj, color and in mutation, raga, melody. Raga is abstract aesthetic in nature, divine and human nature, in color rising to a raga, a melody, distinct in given form, identity and its experience felt and partaken, its unity in creativity and recreativity. Its soundarya, beauty is natural in occurrence and its bhavana and bhaava are discoveries, expressed and explained as creations.

munirao2001

kvchellappa
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Re: Is raga naturally occurring?

Post by kvchellappa »

Thank you, Sri Muni Rao.

munirao2001
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Re: Is raga naturally occurring?

Post by munirao2001 »

KVC Sir, Yet another of my observation in my study of Vedas and Upanishads for the musicology is relationship of Svaras 'Sa-Pa-Sa' with the line of teachers-verily first- Samaga, Pratyandina and Sanatana, not in conformity with the popular statement in publications. It is similar to the identity given as 'Santana Dharma' to religious principles and practices in Vedic times. Owing to the advancing age, I am not sure whether I can complete my research and study of this nature and magnitude.

munirao2001

shankarank
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Re: Is raga naturally occurring?

Post by shankarank »

Sri Munirao ,

It would benefit one and all if you requested a blog access in this forum and convert some of your posts to a central blog in this forum.

Thanks.

Ananth
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Re: Is raga naturally occurring?

Post by Ananth »

We see many new comers to Indian classical music struggle with the concept of raga itself (probably the most frequently asked question about CM and HM). They understand tune but raga seems more abstract to them. Probably this abstractness of the concept of raga, is what makes us think, ragas are (more) natural.

Let's start with one thing which is man made: scalar ragas. Many of these were created to fill a gap (72 ragas scheme). Some were born out of a specific individual's melodic imagination.

In contrast, we have rakti ragas which are definitely older, but are they naturally occurring? Were they always there? And only discovered by humans?

Now, we have seen the evolution of some of the scalar ragas. This happened through man-made compositions that interpreted these scalar ragas and gave them more shape and scope. This is a continuous process. The reverse also happens, some ragas which were very popular in an earlier century, fade out or even become extinct. I'm sure there would be examples.

Now, can we surmise that this evolution was what happened with some of the already-rakti ragas also? Take Ananda bhairavi. Before Syama Sastri and Thyagaraja, was Ananda bhairavi as evolved as it is now? Was it always there?

I'd lean towards the idea that, even rakti ragas were not always there but developed over a period of time; may be not attributable to one individual but surely human contribution was there towards the evolution. May be we can call it "collective artistic evolution", but surely it's not natural, it's man made.

What is definitely natural, are things such as octaves and half-octave (fifth), I cannot imagine some one inventing these ideas. They are as natural as naadham.

munirao2001
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Re: Is raga naturally occurring?

Post by munirao2001 »

Ananth Sir,

There are two aspects in human creativity-One, discovery and Second, invention. Discovery is related with priori or pre existence but not in sensory experiences. Many discoveries with empirical evidence gets established what was in nature. In Indian Classical Music lakshya is related with anaahata and abstract in nature, creating unending opportunities for imagination, ideation and creativity-discoveries and establishing the identities. Lakshana is related with innovation and empirical evidence with established structure and form. Janaka and janya ragas are the identities established for discoveries and innovation. Human urge, interest and drive are in seeing the unseen, knowing and unknown and knowing more of the the known. Human nature and nature in unity and in transcendence results in discoveries and innovations.

Let us take one example of raga Mahati of Great genius and Great Maestro Dr.BMK. Claim and disclaim discussions took place amidst the practitioners. The conclusion was it was creativity-innovation and not creativity-discovery. Discovery in establishment of identity rests primarily on the truth of anew, original in creativity and afresh, variant but uniqueness of the original in re creativity.

munirao2001

Ananth
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Re: Is raga naturally occurring?

Post by Ananth »

Sri Munirao,

Totally agree with you about discovery / invention / innovation. Human endeavour definitely contributes to evolution of music.

kvchellappa
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Re: Is raga naturally occurring?

Post by kvchellappa »

The origin of music: Gayatri Madan Dutt
Bhavan’s journal (Nov 15, 2016)
Excerpts
Many researchers speculate that music and language arose side by side, since all languages have some type of ‘song’, either tones or intonation. Others suggest that music may have preceded language, or that music may, indeed, have been the first language.
..song originated separately, and several times, within a variety of species. There is song among whales and dolphins, among songbirds, and even crickets!
..stirring quality of their (gibbons’) songs is brought out in a Chinese poem.
These emotion-evoking gibbon calls are being studied by scientists since it is thought that they may be linked to the evolution of human song.
..Nigel Osborne..believes that aalaap with which an Indian classical music performance begins, represents a very ancient form of communication between human beings which existed even before language. .. After the aalaap, he says, the noe structure becomes slowly more sophisticated till it reaches a high level of abstraction and design which is both intellectual and emotional. The sequence of an Indian performance appears to trace in a nutshell, the journey of human music from origin to culmination.
..Yehudi Menuhin also commented on the possible origin of music in ancient India.
..Alaine Danielou wrote, ‘A skilled Indian classical musician can lead the audience to depth and intensity of feeling undreamt of in other musical systems’.
Arrian: ‘No nation is fonder of singing and dancing than the Indian’.

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