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Years ago I used to like Talvin Singh and Nitin Sawhney, and this reminded me of that. Lovely sounds, and I'll be listening to this tonight! Slight tangent, but anyone got suggestions for Asian electronica (tabla/raga inspired)?
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> Sometimes but not always. Most ragas are the same ascending and descending. They are more like the western modes system. I in this list, http://soundofindia.com/raagas.asp I see half or more than half have different Arohana (ascending scale of notes) and Avarohana (descending)
I stand corrected about my incorrect use of the word "most", but a great many of the popularly performed ragas are the same ascending and descending.
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It has a 'key' it's just not standard. It doesn't matter though. What it does is make use of specific scales, or one scale, in particular, the minor scale or maybe one of it's variants. The problem is actually ... they stay in that one scale, forever. This is a limitation of this music. This music is: take a scale, and have someone play a very long, intuitive solo overtop in that one key, effectively one chord. The s…
Tuning (at least in our universe, due to the distribution of the prime numbers) is an exercise in tradeoffs. Indian classical music makes a different tradeoff than western classical (or its direct and indirect descendants), which gives it GREATER freedom than western some areas, and less in others. Its true that Indian music doesn't modulate (~change keys). If your goal is modulation (~changing keys), than Indian cla…
There are dozens of scales within 'Western Music' and there's many musical variants which allow 'notes in between'.
Stringed instruments easily allow for the variation in chord intervals as you've mentioned, yet they're generally not used in the manner you've described, because I don't think that's the tradeoff being made.
("holding a base note, and the note five keys above it" will sound totally different depending on the base note you pick. This comes necessarily from the math." - I basically don't buy this. A perfect 5th sounds essentially the same whatever the root note is)
There are far more forms, far more instruments, far more variation of ensembles (how many ways to re-arrange 50 different instruments).
And it's spawned 100's of genres.
So even if the 'interval argument' holds, and I don't think it does, it does make up for that much.
There are many examples, but the best to illustrate the diversity in a snapshot would be Jazz.
Here is my basic understanding of Indian music: The northern and southern parts have their own styles but with overlaps. 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. I don't have a strong background in music, but this seems to get rid of the complexity of the notation system in the west with a much more fluid a…
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…
> "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.
They already have curated playlists. But with AI, they could do this any day? or am I thinking crazy?
Music video: Sitar - Vilayat khan - Rarely Heard Ragas
https://jugad2.blogspot.com/2013/10/music-video-sitar-vilaya...
Try searching for KappaTV Music Mojo in youtube if you like Carnatic. Also artist Mahesh Raghavan has good collection of fusion.
What does "classical" mean in this context? My benchmark for the term "classical" is traditional European classical music, and so I'm having a hard time understanding where this fits in the Indian musical spectrum, either stylistically or temporally.