| Some thoughts: > What's amazing is that Indian classical music has no key. There is no absolute sense of middle C or whatever. It is relative to the tuning of the drone European music actually was largely relative too until keyboard instruments (organs and later pianos) became common and popular which forced standardizaton. In North Indian classical, you can see the popularity of the harmonium in recent years driving a similar effect. Singers in popular western music often transpose scales freely. Many live performers tune half down or full down vs. their studio recordings and many singers transpose their songs down as they age. > I find the construction of these musical scales (correct me if I am wrong but there is no analog in western classical music of what a raga is) very interesting. Going up in the scale is different than going down and there are some key phrases that identify a raga. Yes-ish. If you look at the scales in different "modes" of western music, you'll find they do correspond to foundational ragas in Indian classical music (eg. Ionian = Shankarabaranam, Aeolian = Nata Bhairavi, Mixolydian = Harikamboji etc) . The core raga in Carnatic classical
(maya-mayava-gowla) has the same notes as the double harmonic scale (think Misirlou from Pulp Fiction). The ragas with different notes going up and down or having fewer than 7 notes are considered derived or synthetic ragas and some artists still create new ragas. However, as you correctly recognise ragas are not themselves scales. It's more correct to think of ragas as frameworks to present and improvise on scales. There is a concept of "pakad" for example as it's called in Hindustani classical which is a characteristic sequence of notes for a raga etc. This is easiest to spot and understand this if you listen to recordings by top artists in Raga Jog - it comes in the avarohana (descending notes). > Then its all about interpretation. "Freedom within a framework" is how I'd best describe it. A typical Hindustani "Khayal" (literally meaning "thought") concert begins with a heavily improvised "Aalap"/"Jod"/"Jhala" section that presents the main raga followed by the main composition ("bandish") in which also the artist improvises to a certain extent. After this main presentation, the artist typically presents other compositions in other ragas (with some improvisation) often ending with a "bhajan" (simple devotional song). A Carnatic classical concert often starts with smaller compositions and has the main piece in the middle which also has "Aalapanai" and composition sections. Usually the "aalap" is shorter and more improvisation happens within compositions vs. Hindustani. The closest analogies to this style of performance in Western music is Blues and Jazz. |
> "Freedom within a framework" is how I'd best describe it.
and
> The closest analogies to this style of performance in Western music is Blues and Jazz.
Reminds me of the distinction between "opinionated" and "non-opinionated" dev frameworks. Like how Angular strongly pushes you into a MVC/MVVC architecture as compared perhaps to React. Or how Rails simplifies _everything_, so long as you want to do everything "the Rails way" - compared to less opinionated frameworks like Flask.
To push the analogy further (perhaps way to far)...
Blues is like Rails. If you want to stick to mostly pentatonic scales and 12 bar structure, you can deliver new blues tunes extremely quickly with a very small and often relatively new/inexperienced team. You can break out of the norms for small parts of the song, but its usually best if it's just one of the team, usually the guitar player, who does that, while everybody else just sticks to the groove. Great blues is possible, good-enough blues is relatively easy.
Jazz is like Flask. You can do whatever you like, the "rules" are no more than "best practice" guidelines which you're free to ignore. Having everybody in a team choosing which guideline to follow and which to intentionally break requires much more fundamental knowledge of the underlying theory, a lot more "teamwork", and often a much higher level of technical competency to get it all to end up coming out right. Great jazz is transcendent. Not so great jazz is often a complete mess.