Western music has a "standard pitch" in which, famously, the note A (above middle C on the piano) is at 440hz. However, this is absolutely irrelevant to the vast majority of listeners, because only a tiny number have "perfect pitch," which is the ability to hear and name a note, chord or key and/or to sing a specified note, accurately, "to order." This is not really inherent in the music, but has come about as a practical issue to facilitate ensemble performances where some instruments have limited ability to change the tuning, and others (eg a grand piano) can only be changed with a great deal of work.Shivadasan wrote:1. In Western Music notes have fixed values. In Indian Music the notes are generated from a basic note which can have any value. Therefore Western Music trained ears will always find the Indian notes off key.
Thus, it is not really the absolute pitch that matters in Western music, it is, as in Indian music, the relative pitches: the intervals between the notes. It can be said: music is not made of notes, it is made of the spaces in-between them!
However, Western music has a requirement that is not present in Indian music, and it is that its harmonies actually work. According to this, the individual note values have been adjusted to create a scale where they not only work but also work when the notes are several octaves apart. Uday, Mahavishnu and others could give us the lecture about the maths of this. Probably about the history too.
Thus, there may be one person in the audience across several performances who might object to A not being equal to 440Hz. The rest will neither know nor care. It is not this that makes Indian music uncomfortable for them: it is the fact that the Indian scale has not been adjusted to give the intervals they expect, and that makes it sound out of tune to them.
I came to realise this in thinking about why some of my Western friends, although musically adventurous and appreciative of improvisation are just uncomfortable with Indian music. Ironically, it may be that I escaped this particular trap because my sense of pitch is not good enough to notice!!!!
Notwithstanding my earlier quote from Prof Wright's music-listening course, Western music does too, which is why, of course, you are able to easily find western words to describe it. They may even be prescribed in the composition. Can I suggest that the difference is that, in Western music, they are not prescribed in the scale, which is part of why a scale is not a raga.4. Indian Music uses the interval between the notes with continuous glides and other ornamentations whereas In Western Music the notes are rendered plain .
Depends which genre of "Western" you look at. Would you believe that I never appreciated Jimmy Hendrix until after I started liking Indian music!5. In Indian Music everyone is well trained in ‘on-the-spot creativity’ or manodharma, whereas in Western Music they have to follow what is written and there is no opportunity to add one’s own creation. The essence of appreciation of Indian Music is the experiencing of the on-the-spot creativity of the artist
I think you covered this in your point 3. Western music uses harmony extensively, but not always: there is plenty of single-note music, and plenty of melodies which can be extracted from their harmonic setting and sung or hummed or played on a single-note instrument. It is only stuff like Uday's fugues*, cannons, etc that cannot stand alone.6. In Western Style the music moves in vertical groups of notes whereas in Indian Music it moves with a single note at a time
*What's a fugue? Don't ask me! I never really listened to much of this kind of W. Classical. But do watch this:
So You Want To Write A Fugue?
and enjoy! Perhaps it also illustrates perfectly that, before even approaching description or explanation of a musical form, better to start with an practical illustration. There were just a few notes in one of the clips Varsha (I think) posted that said so much more than words.
Good point. This jibes with my original line of thought that raga has an identity of its own because these things are properties of the raga and not the compositions. ( there are other properties that are actually properties of the relationship between a raga and a composition in that raga in a specific laya framework, but we do not have to go to that level of Ontology )
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