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Hindustani Music, A
Tradition in Transition
Technological advances have enabled the creation of a mass-market, giving in turn rise to strong populist tendencies in Hindustani classical music. These tendencies have triggered off a conservationist reaction, which insists on sanctity of the dividing line between art and entertainment, says the book Hindustani Music, A tradition in transition. Raja, an accomplished sitar and surbahar player of the Imdad Khan/Etawah Gharana is a repertoire analyst for India Archive Music Ltd. New York, and a regular columnist on music. The book is a collection of Raja’s essays and papers published in journals and his commentaries. Hindustani music now finds it profitable to address the lowest common denominator by keeping itself accessible, intellectually undemanding and familiar, Raja says. With instrumental music under the greats like Ustad Bismillah Khan and Pt.Ravi Shankar overtaking their contemporary vocalists, there came a disparity between the concert fees of leading vocalist and instrumentalists. The decline of vocal music that followed heartens not only vocal music but all of classical music, the author says adding that for the uninitiated, instrumental music is easier to handle than vocal music as audiences are not required to come to terms with the quality of the voice delivering it. In his foreword, the renowned santoor exponent Pt.Shiv kumar Sharma says that with the growing impatience of musicians to live well and an environment that offers ample opportunities for exposure, a large number of musicians are struggling to create a comfortable niche for themselves. This tendency is crowding the music market with a lot of dishonest classical music. "It takes 10 to 15 years of rigorous training to groom a classical musician and another 10-12 years of concert experience for him to reach his peak level in the profession". A life in classical music requires a musician to defer his economic aspirations until he is above 40. This is asking for a lot of self-denial from a musician who sees a successful pop singer achieve a glamorous lifestyle at the age of 20 to 25, Pt.Sharma says. However, there is no need to be pessimistic about the future of Hindustani music, says Sharma adding that it nonetheless requires "us to drop the arrogance of the classical music world and appreciate the manifestations of the musician’s truth in other forms of music—semi-classical, folk and even popular." Divided into six parts, the book deals with important societal, cultural, economic and technological drivers of Hindustani music in the contemporary context, musical forms and structures, the world of ragas, the four major genres of Hindustani vocal music, major solo melodic instruments of Hindustani tradition and glossary of words. Populism has been the most widely noticed tendency in post-Independence Hindustani music, says Raja. In the post-Independence era, the disappearance of feudal patronage exposed Hindustani music to market forces and converted something that provided a secure way of life for the truly great into a high risk self-employed profession for all, he says. As a result great music disappeared and what most of the greats left behind was not much more than the bonsai of a banyan tree—very few competent disciples and commercial recordings mostly of three-minute duration. The author says that the process of "commoditisation" of high art is not unique to India. Post-war developments in the technologies of storage and distribution have made it a global phenomenon. Substantiating his points, Raja gives revealing statistics. He says that the highest level of concert-admission was around Rs 100 per seat in 1961, Rs 150 in 1971, Rs 200 in 1981, Rs 250 in 1991 and has settled down at Rs 500 at the end of the last century. "If we apply an inflation-adjustment factor to these figures, we find that a front-row seat of Rs 100 in 1961 is worth Rs 2100 in current rupees. If we plot a long-term trend line on inflation-adjusted data, we conclude that the real cost of concert admissions has been falling by 40 to 50 per cent every ten years!" — PTI |
