WRITING SOUND
Earlier this year, I experimented with transcription and notation systems to see whether music writing could enhance my practice and/or understanding of the tradition. These writings did not have prescriptive purposes, since I privileged embodied learning through imitation, body-part counting and audio recording. Rather, they were attempts to represent the music, which became instead tools to look at the relationship between the music, my own assumptions and those implied in the notation systems I used. The composition I worked on is Chanchal Chatur, a bandish in Raag Bhopali rendered in Khyāl. The composer is unknown; such is the case of many pieces which were composed, for instance, by pupils, to be gifted to their teacher.
My first experiment with notation involved the use of a Romanised digital table based on the Bhatkhande notation system. This system was developed by Bhatkhande (1860-1936) as part of a nationalist project which aimed to systematise and democratise musical knowledge for easy access to the middle class, at the expense of traditions of tawaifs (courtesan singers) and ustads (Bakhle, 1996; Subramanian, 2000).
In the 1933 All-India conference, Bhatkhande stated: “I have tried to redeem our music from the hands of the illiterate artists whose method of teaching is unscientific, since unsystematic, and consequently unappealing and unacceptable to the educated student” (Magriel, 2005:123). Yet, the sīna-basīna (‘breast to breast’) oral tradition of the ustads remains popular and highly regarded among students to this day.
The Bhatkhande system is a simplified notation of the skeleton of the composition, with emphasis on the relationship between matras (beats) and syllables. In my notation, this system is adapted to suit language and digital limits. It includes separated stahyi and antara, Roman numerals to trace the beats, and bold characters to highlight the sam (Sadhana, 2011). This system works well to visually represent the basic melodic structure and the importance of tal, but it is not suited for an analysis of ornamentations and other stylistic features, as the table would become crowded and confusing. Another system I experimented with is transcription on the pentagram. At first, I was reluctant to include this methodology because of its history and the biases it carries, having been used by early ethnomusicologists to record ‘endangered’ non-western music in a process of racialisation of music. Stemming from social Darwinism, this trend assumed that non-western music with its rhythm and melody represented earlier stages of the ‘advanced’ western harmony (Moon 2010). The use of the pentagram to transcribe non-Western music today still reifies the contraposition between the West and the rest, hiding implications of status behind claims of universalisation and accessibility.
In the case of North Indian classical music, transcriptions took part in the history of colonial knowledge production: from the political interests of the East India Company in cross-cultural contacts to maintain a public “show of good relation” (Woodfield, 1994:201), to the collection of exotic Hindostannie airs by Sophia Plowden and the Oriental miscellany arranged by Bird (ibid.). Although these transcriptions might have raised interesting challenges and creative translations, using one’s own musical vocabulary to represent another’s inevitably carries not just errors and approximations, but in the case of the pentagram, even implications of status linked to the objectification of oral traditions, which also fostered early dichotomies between European popular and classical music.
As much as no methodological tool can ‘faithfully’ represent music because of inherent subjectivity, it is necessary to look at the politics of ethnomusicology also in relation to ideological assumptions on structure, pitch, and musicality, hence heavy interpretation embedded in the tools used.
In my rudimentary attempt, I found these fundamental differences: a) key signature, which I did not include and yet, it becomes implied in the notation, which fixates the melody even though I did not use Do as conventional Sa, but rather La# to show that Sa can be placed anywhere on the scale; b) the limitations of the equal-tempered scale in representing microtones and movements that slide between notes; c) the linear timeline is not apt to represent the cyclical nature of the tal and its relationship to the lyrics’ syllables. Both writings do not give information on specific stylistic features and aesthetic qualities, and they make sense only to someone who is already familiar with the tradition. Yet, to my ustad, notation has no purpose, and it can even be distracting from in-corporation of music.
Who is it for then? According to Marian-Balasa (2005:6), one can never transcribe what they hear, but rather how the music sounds to their “culture-selecting and culture-embedded heart and mind”. Nettl (2015:75) adds that it is in the relationship between the outsider’s interpretation, i.e. transcription and the society’s understanding of the music, i.e., notation, that the value of such analysis lies. Yet, such relationships are complicated by histories, identities and power
dynamics as shown above. Furthermore, neither of the two systems represents how I, as an outsider student, understand this music. Below is a short sample of my own way to notate this music.
This way of notating comes from visualising the sound in shapes, through voice movement, body gestures, but also symbols and metaphors. For instance, in (1) I use bigger and smaller circles to visualise the rounded sound of R when it touches on G and goes back connectedly; in (2) the small v between the two P represents going down without reaching the M and yet it is different from PP; (3) and (4) are for meend and gamak; in (5) there is _ for holding notes, the circles for rounded sounds and the ‘stairs’ symbol for briefly touching the notes during the glide. These shapes are not necessarily connected to pitch, but rather to how I visualise and/or imagine the quality of sound that I want to reproduce, which can be extra-musical too: for example, when I use the circle, I want my voice to be like honey on a wheel.
Of course, this is my own personal understanding and does not measure, analyse or share conventions, yet it opened the door for me to explore my relationship to music on my own terms.
SEEING SOUND
Further explorations of the relationship between sound and movement were inspired by the work of Clayton (2007) and Leante (2009) on gesture. The first examines the participatory role of hand gestures and body language in Indian classical performances, using video recordings. The second studies how gesture can help understand the connection between sound and images in the musicians’ experiences of rag. With the aid of the medium I am most familiar with, photography, I recorded the movements of my hand while singing Chanchal Chatur. To trace the movement, I tied a small LED light to my hand, and I shot four frames at long exposure (ISO 100/f 22).The resulting images correspond to (1) the slow alap, (2) medium speed alap, (3) faster speed alap, and (4) bandish. In the images, there is a clear difference between the alap, which looks clearly delineated and the bandish, which has a smoky appearance instead; this is due to the fact that during the alap I meditate more on each note, while the bandish follows the fast tempo of the tabla. There are some similarities in how I use shapes in notation, such as circles in the first image and zig-zag motions in the third; however, gestures do not necessarily represent voice movements: I might associate a note to a particular space or gesture because of muscle memory, but this is not a map of pitch. Instead, it is part of my embodied understanding of music, which involves personal and spontaneous expression and communication of the meanings of sound through the body. In this sense, it is closer to what Leante (2009:187) calls “anaphone”, or the sonic, tactile or kinetic rendition of existing models, imagery, and emotions. Gesture, in this case, mediates personal and cultural associations through the body, in relation to time and space. To me, these photographs tell me more about how I understand and construct extra-musical meanings of this music.