Arabic and Asian Music Blog
Indian Classical Music
As we have noticed, Indian Citizens seem to have their own entire world of music. That is easily classified under Indian Music. In the blog today I’m going to be talking about Indian Classical music. Better known as. “Hindustani” in North India and Carnatic in South India.
Raga is known as a concept of Indian Classical Music. Which seems kind of complex to me. it is stated that raga is dominant in its expression than actual notes. Where i took it as, the music itself is written to be performed to the expression of the player. So it is said that Raga is something that deals with note intonation and also the duration of notes but that notes are flexibly put together in a manner of word phrasing rather then a set notes by the composer. Raga is a given set of notes that are set on a scale and different musical motifs. That when played can either use just those notes are can use different notes added to the raga.
Along with raga , Indian musicians have a concept that they call tala. which is easily defined as a clap or the tapping . Basically something that holds the measure in time of music. This is important because even in all music type it has a beat that keeps the time of music. Indian Tala is typically through numbers with 3-128. That will always recur through the same pattern in a musical performance . Which i think is cool because although they keep time of music they do it their own way.
Notating music in Indian Culture is also something that is quite satisfying for me. The way that they also have an octave set up that is divided into 12-semitones . The 7 basic notes notated as Sa Re Ga Ma Pa Dha Ni (Hindustani) and Sa Ri Ga pa Dha Ni (Carnatic ) . Their tuning system is different however they use a “just-intonation” tuning system which tunes notes in a whole number ratio sequence.
I also think it's interesting how even though Classical Indian Theory and music is a lot different than Western music, they still have an octave divided into 12 and even syllables to go with it.
ReplyDeleteI found it interesting that they approach music differently than we do. It’s also really cool that they have names, rhyming at that, for the different parents of their music.
ReplyDeleteI think it is pretty cool that they think of music in an 8 beat cycle and I actually found that flamenco has a similar correlation where they see it as a 12 beat cycle. The accents in this cycle are on the 1st, 4th, 8th, and 9th beats. I wonder if in the 8 beat cycle they have the same style of putting accents on specific beats especially since their music sounds as if they are playing 2 different things and then finally settle in.
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