Amit Chaudhuri, _Finding the Raga: An Improvisation on Indian Music_

I ENJOY INDIAN music in a casual, hardly-know-what-I'm-listening-to kind of way, so the idea of learning more about it appealed to me, and any book by novelist Chaudhuri promised to be at least readable and likely fascinating. 

Finding the Raga, I'm glad to report, is both readable and fascinating, not only because of Chaudhuri's graceful prose but also because he has, in addition to writing his novels, been practicing and performing this music for most of his life. The book incorporates a good deal of his own personal history as a musician, which includes picking up a guitar in his teens because of a fascination with Joni Mitchell and Neil Young, so his account of the music's history and techniques reflects a performer's intimacy with the tradition.

What I learned: 

Since about my 95% of my familiarity with Indian music derives from listening to sitar virtuoso Ravi Shankar's mainly instrumental albums (I also once saw his daughter Anoushka in concert), I had not realized how central to the tradition vocal performance was. I've been listening to some of the singers mentioned by Chaudhuri (e.g., on pp. 74 and 126), and what I now realize about Ravi Shankar is that a lot of his power, like that of great violinists, comes from how his lines "sing." 

I knew Indian music was based on improvisation, but I had not realized there were no "composers" as we understand them. A lot of jazz and rock improvisation is based on pieces known to be written by, say, Rodgers and Hart or T-Bone Walker or Charlie Mingus, but while some Indian melodies have persons' names attached to them, they are no one's intellectual property. They are a shared legacy.

Chaudhuri also emphasizes that Indian music is not mimetic, not representational. This can be said of most music, I suspect, and is why Walter Pater once claimed that all arts aspire to the condition of music. Chaudhuri means, I think, that a particular raga is not happy or sad--the same musical pattern (or thaat) could sound happy or sad, or convey any other emotion, depending on what the performer does. (This reminds me that every time I've heard Dylan perform "I;'s All Over Now, Baby Blue," it seems to mean something different.)

I also learned that the improvisations are not free-wheeling, anything-goes affairs, such as you might get from a stoned American guitarist noodling a scale over a drone and imagining he is playing Indian music. Every melodic pattern has its own allowable moves, and these depend on things like the time of day it is. As in western classical music, the performer has to walk a fine line between precise execution and giving the piece his or her own particular shape.

Chaudhuri has illuminating things to say about the Indian musical tradition's relationship to the literary one (Meerabai, Rabindranath Tagore) and makes some telling connections to English language literary traditions as well (Blake, Cavafy). 

A fine book.