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Music and Musical Thought In Early India
By Lewis Rowell The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 1992 The University of Chicago
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-73034-9
CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION
1.1 MUSIC AND MUSICAL THOUGHT IN EARLY INDIA
Let us begin with the five keywords of my title. By India I mean the entire subcontinent of South Asia, including Pakistan and Bangladesh, before partition. By "early" I mean as early as possible, including the historical eras often identified as "ancient" and "medieval," with the middle of the thirteenth century as a convenient terminus ad quem. I shall have frequent occasion to refer to an important musical document from that century — the Sangitaratnakara (The mine of musical jewels) of Sarngadeva, a monumental synthesis of the many musical doctrines expounded by the authors of the previous millennium. My account thus ends before the successive waves of Persian culture made their full impact on the music of northern India and thereby encouraged the development of separate musical traditions in the North and South. I shall suggest some early evidence for this separation, but it is not among my main themes. Similarly, I shall point out many of the roots of modern Indian musical concepts and practices, but the main emphasis must remain on what Indian music was (insofar as that can be determined), not what it now is.
By "music" and "musical" I mean not only the phenomena that we ordinarily regard as music in the West but also the entire structure of ideas surrounding and informing the practice of music. When we recall that the ancient Greek concept of mousike was held to encompass all of the domains of the nine Muses — from poetry, song, and dance, to history and even astronomy — we should be prepared to encounter a complex structure of ideas with multiple dimensions and many interconnections. The standard Sanskrit word for music is sangita — the exact equivalent of the Latin concentus. The most precise, if not the most elegant, translation is "concerted song." Our investigation, however, must extend to genres that would not ordinarily be considered to be a part of the realm of gita (song). These include not only the various traditions and styles of sacred chant but also composite genres, especially the theater, in which what we call "music" is an integral part of a composite artform, and within which it is not always possible to separate what is music from what is not. But the word gita provides the semantic core of the idea of music and conveys the quintessential humanism of the ancient Indian concept: musical sound is, first of all, vocal sound. The most powerful and generally accepted ontological conception of music is rooted in a profound cultural metaphor, in which the emanation of vocal sound from deep within the human body has been linked with the process of creation as a "bringing forth" of the divine substance that lies at the heart of our innermost being.
By musical thought I mean the complete ideology of music — including, but not limited to, those technical compartments within which music has been organized into notes, scales, rhythms, forms, and the like, and extending to larger philosophical questions of being, knowledge, and value. I shall outline traditional Indian answers to such questions as, What is musical sound? What does it mean? How is music transmitted? and What cultural values does music represent? The separate chapters will help to channel these questions into a systematic organization, but at the same time they conceal the essential relatedness of all Indian musical thought.
A few preliminary observations on the distinctive patterns of Indian thought will set the stage for the more detailed discussions in chapter 2. Readers familiar with the surgical dichotomies of ancient Western thinking, in which the search for truth proceeds by separating everything that a thing is from everything that it is not, and eventually penetrating to the core of a concept when no further divisions are possible, will encounter different habits of thought. Inquiry is open-ended in the Indian tradition, and the process of making categories is infinite — at least in theory. Every statement that can be made blurs a finer distinction, and ultimate truth or reality lies beyond the reach of human experience or inference — except perhaps in those moments of suprasensible illumination vouchsafed to the yogin. Indian musical thought has thus been channeled into elaborate taxonomic structures within which subcategories unfold in profusion, subcategories that often are not mutually exclusive and which thereby encourage a certain amount of ambiguity.
Truth is revealed, not achieved. It is manifested by authoritative teachings and carried forward by a tradition of literary scholarship. Knowledge of it is always imperfect. Within such a framework of belief, the literature of music has taken on a prescriptive tone, and musical doctrines require no other justification than their prior existence in an authoritative treatise. If apparent contradictions appear, they are the result of our limited knowledge or of accidents of the transmission process. They are to be understood, not discarded and replaced by new teachings. Such is the reasoning behind the Indian commentarial tradition and the continuous probing for meaning in imperfectly preserved texts.
Musical writings have taken on a life of their own as a result of the many scribal copyings and recopyings over the centuries. It is not fanciful to regard these texts as living organisms — organisms manifesting the typically Indian play of images and plurality of forms that mask the underlying unity. Indian musical scholarship has also been likened to the course of a mighty river (one of the cherished analogies of Indian thought), accepting tributary streams, turning away from dry channels, and mingling separate waters in a central confluence of ideas — disciplining and accepting certain contributions while rejecting others outright. The analogy has no doubt been overworked, and this centrist imagery can cause us to overlook or undervalue the revitalizing force of new musical contributions, as in the movement referred to as desi — an infusion of various provincial musical traditions between ca. A.D. 500 and 1000, an infusion which greatly expanded the boundaries of the ancient musical system and altered the future course of Indian music in far-reaching ways.
Whatever the imperfections of the concept, I shall present the outlines of such a central tradition as documented in Indian literature from late Vedic times to the thirteenth century, a tradition that proved flexible enough to accommodate the mystical doctrines of Tantra (as in Matanga's Brhaddesi) and the elaborate transcendental philosophy of Kashmir Shaivism (as expounded by the commentator Abhinavagupta). Most of the evidence is from literature, oral as well as written: unlike European music, for which systems of musical notation have existed for more than three thousand years, the music of India has never been recorded in more than a skeletal script. Music, like other branches of learning, is not something to be acquired by reading books or studying scores; it is learned from a master teacher, a guru. The sole purpose of a notation is to remind us of what we have already learned. Paradoxically, this reliance upon a tradition of oral instruction has narrowed the boundaries within which innovation is acceptable. While there is still much to be learned from reconstructing the notations in early musical texts, it must be accepted that knowledge of what the music of early India was like must rest on two sources — the textual evidence and Indian music as it is heard today.
From Vedic times to the thirteenth century is indeed a long time, and certain historical problems must be acknowledged: with the aid of hostile nature and historical accident, Indian scholarship has managed to cover its tracks so successfully that the step-by-step development of music and musical ideas can be perceived only as recorded in the few scattered monuments of musical literature that have survived. And each such document as it has come down to us is itself a tangle of various historical layers and a mixture of quotations, glosses, and commentary in which the precise sequence of contributions is often impossible to determine. As Prem Lata Sharma has observed, "'history' in the context of Indian culture has to be viewed as a complex phenomenon comprised of concurrences and overlappings rather than a simple linear phenomenon."
Students of early Indian intellectual history have learned to accept the price that has to be paid for this inescapable lack of "simple linearity." What it means for the present study is that the advance of musical ideology must often be presented in an admittedly discontinuous format, in the form of successive snapshots instead of the more accurate form of a series of motion picture frames in extremely slow motion. Or to change the metaphor, I shall have to argue across the gaps in the fossil record and run the risk that the resulting narrative may appear more discontinuous than it in fact was. I shall, for example, attempt to trace the evolution of the Indian idea of musical sound — from early metaphoric concepts and primitive acoustical speculations to the refined arguments and subtle distinctions of the later philosophical schools — but the approach must be to present the various manifestations and clarifications of a single, complex idea, as assembled from the available evidence (sketchy as it at times may be).
The general plan of the book is first, to establish the appropriate contexts for music and musical thought — intellectual, cultural, and social — and second, to focus in turn on each of the main technical compartments of music. The chapters will therefore be thematic rather than chronological; each chapter will be a substantial strand in the fabric of musical ideas: thought, sound, chant, theater, pitch, time, form, song, and style. Each of the main strands of ideas will be unraveled into as many component strands as possible, and I shall try to show their relatedness. Although treatises are the main source of evidence, I shall not emphasize the many philological problems that continue to block our full understanding of this corpus of ancient literature. I shall present summaries and interpretations of the major musical texts and also translations of many representative passages so that the special flavor of the literature will be conveyed along with its substance. Where appropriate, I shall draw comparisons to the musical systems and thinking of the ancient West, so that the distinctive character of Indian musical thought will shine the more vividly.
The central premise of this study is that music and musical thought depend upon their cultural context and can be fully understood only with reference to that context. This is true with respect to other world musics, but it carries special meaning in the case of India, where a unique cultural tradition of great antiquity and literacy has given birth to a remarkable musical language. The aim of my study, then, is to explore in a systematic way the philosophy, theory, and aesthetics of early Indian music, with constant reference to the cultural contexts within which the idea of music arose and by which it was given distinctive form and flavor.
1.2 THE DIVISIONS OF MUSIC
In a typical Sanskrit treatise or a chapter thereof, this would be the appropriate location for an uddesa — a list of the principal topics to be expounded. My uddesa is displayed in the form of a schematic diagram (1). The intent is to give some preliminary idea of the range of the ancient Indian concept of music and its many traditional connections with the other performing arts. I will introduce a number of important terms to be encountered in subsequent chapters, although sharper definitions and fuller explanations will follow in due course.
The diagram (1) should be read with the understanding that it constitutes a unified semantic field within which the connecting lines do not represent exclusive pathways between the separate components. "Music," the hypothetical center of the field, is at the same time only a limb of certain larger artistic composites such as drama and dance. So it is helpful to regard the diagram as a flexible and multidimensional array with reversible pathways and numerous unshown interconnections. No particular priorities should be inferred from the arrangement of the diagram; I shall simply take up each of the divisions in turn. The diagram will also serve as a typical model of Indian classificatory schemes, which are more like networks than pyramids because of the many interconnections. In the various technical compartments (especially pitch and rhythm), it should be understood that each of the basic divisions opens out into an array of subtopics.
Sangita is the closest equivalent to the Western concept of music, although the inclusion of dance as one of the three main compartments suggests that in early Indian thought sangita was regarded as a composite art consisting of melos (gita), syllabic accompaniment (vadya), and limb movement (nrtta, or the more general term nartana). In later Indian thought and practice, the sense of sangita has narrowed to the point where it can more accurately serve as the equivalent of "music." One of the oldest and most cherished explanations of the word is an example of the etymological method known as nirukta, codified by Yaska around 500 B.C. Additional examples will follow in subsequent chapters. Yaska's method, which often yields results as fanciful and far from the truth as many of Varro's Latin etymologies, derives the meaning of a word — or as in this case, a symbolic substitute word — from its bija (seed) syllables. Hence, sangita is explained as a compound of the implied meanings of the three syllables of the substitute word bharata: bha from bhava (emotion), ra from raga (the modal-scalar framework for melody), and ta from tala (the system of hand gestures by which the rhythmic and metric structure of music is controlled and made manifest). Indian musicians have found this explanation deeply satisfying, despite the convenient blurring of the distinction between short and long vowels (a and a) and the equally convenient assumption that all syllabic components of a word have a separate identity as verbal roots or nominal stems. It is obviously invalid as a historical explanation, but failure to pass the test of linguistic credibility is scarcely an adequate reason to dismiss such a longheld belief.
1. The divisions of music
The literal meaning of the word bharata is "he who is to be maintained." The reference is to Agni, the god of fire by whose agency the sacrificial offerings are conveyed to the other gods. From this context the word came to refer to the priests who maintained the sacred fire, and thence to anyone responsible for preserving the world order. Many ancient Indian rulers took the name Bharata, but the specific Bharata invoked in the definition of sangita is the legendary sage who is said to be the author of the Natyasastra, unquestionably the most important of the early treatises on music and the theater. It is in this sense that the word bharata also means an actor or a dancer. In a derivative form, with the first syllable lengthened, bharata signifies the descendants of the Bharatas and the land they inhabit — India. Because of the close association of drama, music, and dance in the classical theater, bharata symbolizes the essential contribution from each of the three performing arts: from drama, emotion; from music, melody; and from dance, rhythm. The subconscious message embedded in this semantic cluster is that India's music is one of its national treasures. It suggests further that music and the associated arts are traditions to be preserved, not replaced in waves of new styles or with technological innovations. And from a more technical point of view, it is hard to find fault with a definition of music as a blend of melody, rhythm, and emotion.
The remaining classifications at the top of (1) are loosely related, although each has a different purpose. Gandharva and gana were the two major musical genres of the ancient theater; their opposition signifies the important distinction between strict or composed music (gandharva) and (relatively) free or improvised music (gana). Like many other terms, gandharva was applied in both a general and a special sense: in a special sense, it signified the ceremonial music of the preliminary theatrical rituals; in a general sense, it came to represent what we might call "formal" music — thereby implying the existence of more relaxed, less strictly prescribed musical styles. The word gandharva is another reference to divine patronage, in this case the host of celestial musicians (the gandharvas) who were the Indian equivalents of the angel musicians of the European Middle Ages. Gana is derived more prosaically from the noun "singing"; when opposed to the gandharva genre, it denotes the relatively free style of incidental music performed during the play proper.
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Excerpted from Music and Musical Thought In Early India by Lewis Rowell. Copyright © 1992 The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
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