Indian Musicological Literature and its Context1
La littérature musicologique en Inde et son contexte historique et social
p. 57-75
Résumés
The traditional theoretical literature on musicology, Saṅgītaśāstra, shows at times a tendency to deviate from the concerns of musical practice. The character of this literature should be considered partly in its relation to the main stream of “ Sanskritic ” culture, and as far as possible in relation to the interests and priorities of its authors and supposed readers. In so examining the literature we may find that the correspondence of theory to practice, and of theoretician to practising musician, is somewhat different to that in Western traditions. The arrival of European learning and discourse shows an interesting encounter with the traditional Indian science and brings the development of a new and equally remote kind of critical language, but in recent times, despite the sometimes uneasy relations between academic analysis and the performing art, which are partly due to some uncertainty of the sanctity of the śāstra, there have been signs of the development of new types of musicological writing; these may be expected to produce a genre of literature useful in itself and of immediate interest to the practice of music.
Les Saṅgītaśāstra, recueils indiens traditionnels et théoriques de musicologie, tendent parfois à s’écarter des préoccupations liées à la pratique musicale. Les caractéristiques de cette littérature devraient être étudiées en partie dans leur relation au courant général de culture sanscrite, et, autant qu’il se peut, en tenant compte des intérêts et des priorités des auteurs et de leurs lecteurs présumés. En prenant ce parti, on peut découvrir que dans cette littérature la correspondance entre théorie et pratique, entre théoricien et musicien, diffère quelque peu de celle qui prévaut dans la tradition occidentale. La pénétration de la science et du discours scientifique européen a conduit à une confrontation intéressante avec la science indienne traditionnelle et a provoqué le développement d’une nouvelle sorte de discours critique – tout aussi peu soucieux, cependant, de la pratique. Mais récemment, et en dépit des relations parfois difficiles entre l’analyse académique et la pratique musicale, difficulté due en partie à l’incertitude concernant le caractère sacré du śāstra, on a pu observer les signes de développement de nouveaux types d’écrits musicologiques : on peut espérer qu’ils produiront un genre de littérature utile en soi et d’un intérêt direct pour la pratique musicale.
Texte intégral
1Since antiquity the practice of music in India has been more or less closely associated with a technical literature of a theoretical and didactic nature. Scholars have for long been aware of the existence of a rich tradition of Sanskrit musicological texts, a tradition which for a large part of its technical content and expository method can be traced back to ancient times. The roots are to be found in the literature of the vedāṅgas, but the genre survived and grew through the centuries with great tenacity and has exerted direct or indirect influence on a good part of more recent and contemporary musicological discourse. The relation, however, of this musicological lore (saṅgītaśāstra) to practical music and the musicians themselves is complex, and in certain ways and at certain periods tenuous. For a start, we may safely say that a part of the literature was composed by persons other than professional musicians, and the gulf that separates them is often wide, wider perhaps than that which separates theoretician from practitioner in our Western traditions. No doubt some antagonism between the two interests is a constant, if not universal, theme. In contemporary India the symptoms of tension are easily observed in musicians who assert, with every justification, that their art cannot be acquired from, nor improved by, books. In fact there has been on the whole an increasing contact between the literate and literary world and that of the practising musician, and a characteristic reaction of the latter is the lament that today’s music suffers from the “ disease called musicology ”1 But such conflict, which results from attempts on the part of scholars or critics to place musical practice within their own theoretical constraints, may be a development that has corne particularly with the “ emancipation ” of musicians from their older spheres of patronage; for in the present century there have been considerable changes in the social and professional milieu of musical activity, and a greatly increased and widened public has brought the musician’s art more into the realms of popular discourse and criticism. In earlier centuries, when even the finest musicians depended normally on far more restricted and local patronage, the musical art was more at the mercy of the individual taste of an employer or preceptor and less subject to assault from this general academic criticism. The main surviving tradition of classical musicological writing represents as much the concerns of a receiving élite, and one which knew Sanskrit, as it does that of the professional musician, who in traditional India was often of a different social group and whose culture was not necessarily “ Sanskritic ” , even if he was able to sing Sanskrit texts. We shall examine a few characteristics of this classical literature and may thereby air some general questions of how music and musicology co-exist in traditional and in contemporary India.
2Though the literature of saṅgītaśāstra may not have been much investigated in this way, we should not underestimate the important studies that have appeared; in the fields of bibliography and textual editions there are already many useful tools available.2 Though many texts remain unedited, those that have appeared in print are sufficient to enable us to study the style and chronology of the genre; several studies have been directed at their historical placing, and though there remain areas of ignorance, and some enormous lacunae in the literary tradition itself, it is possible to construct at least a partial history of sangītaśāstra. 3 As for the content of the literature, research has been largely concentrated on technical questions,4 while a few studies have examined parts of the system of aesthetics and philosophy. It has been a natural priority to extract from the texts what information they may provide on the history of music itself. In the case of the very earliest level of the musicological sources, texts such as the Vedic song books, the Gānas, and expository works like the Puṣpasūtra,5 the context and the very raison-d’être of the literature are strictly technical matters. These works were produced by the necessity for singers of acquiring a particular technical competence, namely the singing of Sāmavedic melodies according to orthodox practices and traditions. Certainly the ability to “ improvise ” was implicit and fundamental, but the art of improvisation was limited and governed by the application of rigorous canons; it is natural that such technical manuals, at the same time as furnishing rudimentary descriptions of scales, rules of prosody and so on, should assume a prescriptive or normative character, and scholarly efforts to understand this level of the literature are ultimately directed at determining to what sort of musical practice the texts relate and what may be the progress and development of the practice in the conservative tradition of Vedic recitation.6 The last few years have seen the arrival of some significant contributions to this study. An analogous normative function is present, if less obvious, in those texts which form the main tradition of Sanskrit musicology, that is to say the tradition which in the extant literature may be traced back to chapters 28 to 33 of the Nāṭyaśāstra of Bharata. Furthermore, there can be no doubt that musicians and theorists of the time of composition of this work and later were conscious of the hallowed importance of Sāmavedic tradition, and especially of the spiritual attributes of music within that tradition; indeed when the social status and spiritual merit of musical art were called in question, the precedent of Sāman-chanting could be a useful apologetic, however remote in reality from the type of music under discussion. We may well understand the presentation of music as the “ fifth veda ” , or the notion that the Sāmaveda is the source of vocal, and hence ail, music.7
3At the same time the different context of music as presented in this tradition lays the subject open to new influences, and even in the early stages we can see an eclectic amalgam of interests. We may find, for example, growing importance attached to secondary philosophical observations on the signifiance of music, clearly attested by the time of the Bṛhaddeśī of Mataṅga (currently considered to belong to the eighth century A. D.), but no doubt traceable to earlier times. Here we have not only a continuation of the idea of religious significance in music, but the placing of musical science in a philosophical “ grade ” of literature. It is also necessary to see the musicological tradition in relation to the theory of drama, as in the Nāṭyaśādstra itself, where it is introduced as one of many constituent elements. As one scholar has put it, “ The ancient Indian drama was the prototype of a ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’ in which music, theatre and dance played an equally important role. ”8 The origins of these separate elements, as they appear in the technical treatises, are of course complex. On the one hand it is natural that if music is treated as a part of the Gesamtkunstwerk the accent should fall on those of its aspects and functions that correspond, through its own techniques, to the general aims of dramatic and poetic art. That music should be able to contain rasa and generate aesthetic responses analogous to those induced by poetry would be a predictable part of the theory. Already in the epics music is sometimes seen in this light,9 and the Nāṭyaśāstra quite plainly attributes rasas and other values and spiritual powers, not only to melodies as a whole but even to the individual notes of the scale.10 The practical significance of such attributions, especially in the absence of absolute pitch values, is apparently slight, but this element of the technical lore was well known to the learned consumer of sangītaśāstra. 11 On the other hand, music was not invented for the purposes and benefits of drama, much as the inception of its technical theory may seem to link the two. Music, we may suppose, already existed independently with its own body of performers and its own rules of artistic merit, to which numerous technical terms and representations in early sculptures bear ample testimony. The existence, prior to the Nāṭyaśāstra, of an autonomous musical art has left little of a literary heritage; it seems that it was easy for some of the literary and canonical side of the language of musical discourse to be subordinated, in śāstra, to the influence of other disciplines. As music developed in educated society in close connection with drama and poetry, it was quite natural that it should adopt some of the categories of dramatic and rhetorical theory. It is therefore unsurprising to find the aesthetic response to music expounded by philosophers in similar terms.
4Here perhaps a general observation may be in place. It is that when we attempt to form an idea of the real nature of music in ancient and classical India we cannot reasonably confine ourselves to the śāstric texts alone. The distinction between the history of music and that of Sanskrit musical treatises has not always been adequately drawn.12 It is essential to refer to other bodies of evidence such as non-technical or non-specialist texts, as also to the findings of ethnomusicology and to common sense. Even when we can be fairly certain that the treatises are giving us an exact understanding of some characteristic of musical practice we should remain aware that there are aspects of the art which are not mentioned because they are of little interest to the śāstric writers. For example, often as we find the assertion that the competent musician must be expert in the science of music, there is little to tell us on what criteria we may distinguish the creative talent or genius or originality of an artist. For comment on such issues we depend just as much on musical references outside the specialist literature. Sadly little of such material has so far been brought to light or proper critical examination, and in those studies that have appeared there is often a tendency to confuse erudite theory with musical reality, as in investigations of Kālidāsa’s musical references, which contain both elements. Moreover even when such statements do surface in the treatises, there are enormous deficiencies in our powers of interpretation because we lack supporting auditory evidence. The historian of Indian music is at a greater disadvantage in this respect than his colleague in the field of European musicology, for the corpus of notated music available for historical research is meagre and often obscure; Indian music has never required a System of very precise notation – indeed it could be argued that in many respects it has depended on the absence of such a System – and interpretations of the notated melodies that do exist in the treatises must have a large conjectural element. Certain fundamental problems in the early texts have been approached by some tradition al scholars as if the śāstric record is self-sufficient historical evidence. To take some extreme examples, the theories of intonation, of the development of the musical scale, and that of the classification of styles have often been taken from the treatises by traditionally-minded scholars as the ultimate authority on which historical investigation must rest. The division of the octave into twenty-two śrutis, as “ demonstrated ” in the notorious two-vīṇā experiment in the Nāṭyaśāstra (aimed at establishing the tuning of the two grāmas, or basic scales) has left the Sanskrit musicological tradition some intractable problems, precisely because authors after Bharata usually felt compelled either to reiterate the old System in toto or to attempt fo fit their observations of contemporary musical practice into what they had to regard as canonical, and therefore incontrovertible, theory. By using simple mathemathics, and without doing great violence to the interpretation of historical texts, it can be satisfactorily argued that the Nāṭyaśāstra System of intonation was a purely theoretical model insignificant for experimental practice; the two-vīṇā experiment would be possible in practice only if the śruti intervals were all of equal value, whereas mathematical calculation shows that they would have to be of different sizes, and in any case the experiment presupposes the unlikely ability to discern single-śruti microtonal intervals with total accuracy.13 As for the scale, historians of Indian music have sometimes accepted the notion that the full repertoire of notes (svaras) as found in the Sāmavedic chant was the product of gradual experimental development starting from the restricted tonal range of the earlier Vedic chant – a kind of “ unfolding ” of the octave from three to four notes and further. Furthermore, of the two branches in the traditional Indian classification of musical styles, some interpretations have tended to assume that the earliest texts are concerned only with mārga ( “ classical ” , or perhaps “ sacred ” ) music, while the deśī (local) variety appears only later. Such clear-cut distinctions are indeed encouraged, though with rather imprecise definition, by the canonical theory itself, but with the experience of empirical musicology one may prefer a different historical account, namely that local music already existed and exerted from early on a growing influence on sacred music; it is scarcely plausible that even in the earliest Vedic period there was no musical practice in existence apart from religious recitation, and equally hard to believe that the Vedic melodies engendered an autonomous tradition and development without drawing on any musical experience other than the chant itself. The historian should of course be prepared to speculate on these early developments, just as in the investigation of important historical developments in European music, such as the advent of polyphony. There is much to uncover, from external sources and from logical argument, which the canonical treatises leave obscure; the theories these texts do present may, when viewed in a general perspective, retain their great interest as stages of intellectual history.14
5We have already mentioned a few traits of the kind that may help to place the literature in its true context; by identifying certain characteristic elements we may be able to draw some conclusions about the aims and motivation of the compilers of the texts. It is beyond dispute that a discipline or area of research or expertise in traditional India could derive a special status and authority from the establishment of a Sanskrit śāstra. The authority of a śāstra is at once permanent and self-sufficient; its elucidation and exegesis is achieved by mastery of the texts themselves, with additional reference to other bodies of Sanskrit learning. There are two important consequences: first, the learned literature has a vitality of its own, not necessarily dependent on changing realities in the practical field, and secondly the canonical theories are slow to become obsolete. An eminent present-day specialist in saṅgītaśāstra well represents for us the traditional approach to the śāstra. Responding to the statement that throughout musical history in Europe theoretical rules have frequently been violated, and that theory and practice have continually diverged, she draws a powerful distinction with India:
Such a tendency of disregard of theoretical principles of music is not to be found in the traditional Indian literature (my italics). The reason is that the foundation on which the Indian theory rests is more solid and secure than is the case with the European theory of music. The ory in India has always been respected as an unfailing guide in evaluating and confirming the merit of all artistic creations; it was never challenged or repudiated by artists.15
6Given that this scholar is referring specifically to the theoretical literature, the statement may still be verified on the two different levels of the texts and the musicians themselves. First let us consider the textual tradition. It is clear that, as is often the case in other technical literatures, the analysis of certain aspects of musical theory can be highly conservative, even to the point of retaining old categories and obsolete Systems. A simple example may be found in the retention of ancient classifications of scales even at times when more recent and practically significant Systems were available;16 indeed it is possible for the two to co-exist in the same text. By calling the older Systems “ obsolete ” we do mean that at a later stage they were explicitly rejected, but that eventually they ceased to figure and others took their place. Precisely because ancient theoretical principles are “ not disregarded ” it was quite acceptable in the śāstra that passages which in practical terms may have been of purely archaeological interest should be incorporated as a homage to the notion of ancient authority. Secondly, it is true that in the traditional relationship between guru and śiṣya it was unthinkable to reject that which was imparted by the teacher. (How much the material of the Sanskrit texts was actually imparted in that form by any teacher to a disciple in music is of course a separate question.) Innovation in musical execution, one may suppose, could be explained, much as nowadays, as the synthesis of influences from different sources, combinations of ideas and so on; very rarely does a musician admit that he rejects any of the influences he has received. It is therefore understandable that one who strongly upholds the validity of classical śāstra should also believe that musicians were consistently guided by its doctrines.
7Returning to the treatises, we may examine in this light a number of survivais of traditional elements. In certain sections which classify and enumerate the rāgas and other melodic structures there is a frequent tendency to repeat material from earlier Works; often it is a mark of the author’s scholarship to do so. The tendency may be observed from the 13th century onwards, the authors borrowing lists from previous works of basic authority, notably the Saṅgītaratnākara of Śārṅgadeva, and passing the material on, sometimes with the simultaneous addition of contemporary Systems. The definitions (rāgalakṣana) take the standard Sanskrit śloka form typical of śāstric discourse, verse formulae which present in summary the essential characteristics of strong and weak notes (i.e. frequently and infrequently used notes) in the melodic structure, the dominant rasa, the times of day and seasons of the year to which the execution of the given rāga is appropriate, and so on. This type of formulation is normal and standard from the Bṛhaddeśī on, right up to texts of the 18th century.17 The technical vocabulary is musical, the method of presentation śāstric and parallel to that which may be encountered in other technical literatures. We have no sufficient evidence to say to what extent this kind of technical literary genre was of direct practical use in the teaching of music, as opposed to the study of saṅgītaśāstra by those who needed it for purposes of general cultivation and learning. There is certainly a pedagogic tone,18 but there is also a clearly erudite intention in the idiom and form of many parts of the texts. Also striking is the survival, among other types of rāgalakṣaṇa, of those known as dhyāna, evocative verses which accompanied the illustrative miniature paintings of the rāgamālā (16th to 18th century), but which in several musicological treatises appear independently without the paintings.19 The imagery of the rāga is translated into an abstract literary form, whose development naturally depended on the continuing patronage of cultivated society. In many cases it is quite possible that the basic imagery had its origins in the views and sentiments of musicians themselves, but the literary fashioning of it belongs to a cultural milieu of scholars or theoreticians who interpreted and represented musical reality in a form acceptable to the circles of cultivated amateurs. It appears that the production of the miniatures was in the hands of a profession another step removed from the musicians. The appeal of this kind of classical musical theory in the Sanskrit śāstra is a possible reason for its continuing influence on the cultivated public even after the arrival of Muslim musicians on the North Indian scene and the consequences and changes their contribution must have brought in musical performance and exposition. At earlier periods the requirements and interests of this educated public should be kept in mind when we corne upon musical references in the works of the classical poets and their commentators. Such references contain, as we may expect, a mixture of the scholastic and the non-technical elements of musicology, but sometimes there is a tendency for the commentators to air their erudition in śāstra to the point of complicating or even obscuring what was the original purport of the mūla text.20
8The consideration of these examples of traditional musicological method and discourse may help us to understand the presence of certain elements which seem to have slender connection with the practical training of musicians and which one may see as signs of śāstric dignification, the ennobling of musical science by erudition and philosophy. The history of “ art music ” in the West runs closely parallel to the history of changing social conditions and the evolution of styles and the secularization of content and performing conditions are vivid indicators of general cultural trends; correspondingly the musicological literature itself bears witness to the historical developments at different periods of different aspects of musical science and aesthetics, thus reflecting the changing tastes and preoccupations of different ages. Classical Indian musicological literature shows the opposite tendency, partly because cultural conditions did not bring such radical changes and evolution in art music and partly because of the very conservatism we have noted in the mode of presentation. Moreover the more rapidly changing styles and forms of Western musical history have necessitated frequent reappraisals of technical matters and theoretical priorities, whereas with Indian music the presuppositions remained relatively constant. It was some of the more perennial features of musical aesthetics, in the most general sense, that apparently attracted Sir William Jones to Indian musical theory and what he assumed it told him of musical practice. His essay “ On the Musical Modes of the Hindus ” , composed in 1784, was one of the first and one of the more remarkable of early European contributions to the study of Indian musicology. An important point to note in its favour is the lack of alien concepts and inappropriate prejudices imported from Western experience; in this the treatise differs from very many of its successors in the nineteenth century. The tone is set by the introductory paragraph:
Music belongs, as a science, to an interesting part of natural philosophy, which, by mathematical deductions from constant phenomena, explains the causes and properties of sound, limits the number of mixed, or harmonic, sounds to a certain series, which perpetually recurs, and fixes the ratio, which they bear to each other or to one leading term; but, considered as an art, it combines the sounds, which philosophy distinguishes, in such a manner as to gratify our ears, or effect our imaginations; or, by uniting both objects, to captivate the fancy, while it pleases the sense; and speaking, as it were, the language of beautiful nature, to raise correspondent ideas and emotions in the mind of the hearer: it then, and then only, becomes what we call a fine art, allied very nearly to verse, painting, and rhetoric; but subordinate in its functions to pathetic poetry, and inferior in its power to genuine eloquence.21
9Putting aside the last few words, which show the author’s ultimate allegiance to language and literature, we may easily understand the sympathy and admiration which Jones felt for the Indian musical Systems presented in the few treatises that actually came his way, for the ideas he expresses corne very close to those that give the saṅgītaśāstra tradition its philosophical mould.22 Of course the setting and the language of this side of the śāstra are metaphysical; the religions or mystical exercise in which the musician characteristically sees himself engaged is given textual authority and sanction, especially by the placing of music in its relation to the whole world and the world in its relation to sound, nāda, and this particularly in its essential and extra-mundane form, anāhata nāda ( “ unstruck sound ” ) and the absolute of the nādabrahman, perhaps originally an analogue of the śahdabrahman of grammatical theory. The locus classicus runs as follows:
na nādena vinā gātaṃ na nādena vinā svaraḥ
na nādena vinā nr̥ttaṃ tasmān nādātmakaṃ jagat.
« without sound (nāda) there is no (vocal) music, without sound there are no musical notes, without sound no dance; hence all the world is formed of Sound. »23
10The influence of various philosophical Systems is felt in such passages,24 and this should not be overlooked when we encounter at the very start of the Saṅgītaratnākara a lengthy passage apparently dealing with human anatomy, which is both an attempt at a scientific account of the generation of sound and also a more philosophical brand of physiology, the elements of which may be found originally outside the technical saṅgīta literature but begin to appear there as early as the Bṛhaddeśī. These philosophical trappings form an important part of the aesthetic background and reappear in much later texts.25
11It is interesting that in India today scholarly opinion has been divided over the significance of notions of aesthetics in the classical texts for later periods in musical history. Around the beginning of this century the great educational reformer Pandit Viṣṇu Nārāyaṇ Bhāṭkhande was concerned with improving the social position of musicians and strengthening the importance of music in society.26 His textbooks of North Indian music have had an enormous influence on musical education. At the same time he was by no means ignorant of the classical śāstras and devoted considerable energy to historical investigations of them.27 And yet his failure, or rather refusai, to connect earlier śādstric ideas too closely with the practice of his contemporary musicians, especially in the field of aesthetics, has brought on him the strong criticism of some scholars. Dr. P. L. Sharma, for instance, argues that Bhāṭkhande failed to understand the essential interests of musicians, who, even if they lacked the scholarly vocabulary and articulated theoretical knowledge, still represent the ideals of musical aesthetics as found in the literature. Of course, in so far as Bhāṭkhande was not a practising artist, he was performing some of the same functions as the śāstrī who interpreted, codified and summarised in scientific form what the artists were doing; furthermore his sifting and analysis of evidence from the historical texts place him among those historians of music who have shown those ways in which the texts do represent in technical matters the interests and practices of musical performers and teachers. But because he was reluctant to apply all of the scholarly notions to the business of present-day professional music he “ attempted ” , writes Dr. Sharma, “ to formulate theory designed to suit the needs of contemporary mediocre and illiterate musicians whose art he would seem to have accepted as the norm or standard of classical music. Traditional authors always tried to bring contemporary practice to conform to fundamental verities accepted in their application to relevant Indian arts or literature. Prof. Bhāṭkhande in breaking away from this tradition broke to pieces the very ideal and foundation of Indian music. ”
12Such conflicting opinions can perhaps co-exist more comfortably in India than in the West, where contemporary idiom seems to dominate, even define, the categories of musicology. This is to say that, as Dr. Sharma argues and in part demonstrates by her own writing, modes of aesthetic appreciation and expression are not so easily outdated in India; just as the aesthetic categories survive from one śāstric text to another, so it may be found that many musicians, in so far as they are aware of traditional notions of rasa, and of other connotations and conditions of their music, have accepted such notions without serions question right up to modem times.28 Classical music in India is that which in theory is backed up by a śāstra, and many musicians would willingly claim that this is the case with their art, whether or not they know the content of the śāstra. For the same reason it is still possible for theoretical musicologists to employ śāstric vocabulary when discussing certain fundamental aesthetic questions. But the rapid developments in methods of musical education in India over the last few decades have brought also newer forms of musicological discourse and literature, both at the level of technical manuals for practical use, such as those of Bhāṭkhande and their derivatives, and in works on saundaryaśāstra (aesthetics); alongside the more traditional approaches, which seek authority from Sanskrit sources for most points of exposition, and are rapidly becoming a province of purely historical studies, newer styles of critical writing are developing both in the Indian vernacular languages and in English. In order to serve the real interests of musicology this literature will have to throw off many of the influences that have beset the study before now. The rôle played in the past by the English language in the study of Indian music is a complicated story containing many episodes of misunderstanding and false interpretations. A frank account is given by H. S. Powers (1965) in his essay, “ Indian Music and the English Language ” , and his observations are relevant also to other matters raised in this article:
Art works, language, social behaviour, even religions belief, are subjects whose data are either directly accessible or indirectly accessible through language. Music, however, as well as dance, is a non-verbal art in a primarily temporal medium; it presents enormous difficulties of scholarly analysis and description even to those intimately acquainted with it as a living art. Thus, the development of the Literature on Indian music in the English language is an especially valuable illustration of inter-cultural contact. For the Westerner, it is the application of familiar methods to alien materials; for the Indian, is it the impingement of alien ideas on familiar methods [...].
[...] There are three principal strands which are woven through the ‘ standard ’ literature on Indian music, and particularly the literature in English: 1. the practice of music itself, in the hands of primarily professional musicians, to whom neither a knowledge of the Sanskrit literature nor a knowledge of the English was or is in the slightest necessary; 2. the surviving Sanskrit literature, coming from various places and times over a period of roughly two thousand years, produced by leamed men who knew Sanskrit, and some of whom may have known music, with a more or less continuons and purely verbal tradition of its own; and 3. the historical and experimental approaches of the West available in English. Conspicuously absent from this list are extensive musical monuments from the past in notation.
13The growth of English literature in India in all fields of study has implanted some of the Western approaches in the language and technique of a good many Indian writers on music, and has as a resuit compounded the problem with a second layer of misunderstanding. Certainly it is the absence of musical « monuments » in notation that makes for one of the greatest differences between Indian and Western historical musicology. Western musicologists may base substantial arguments on the evidence of musical works, the actual musical creations of past ages, while the historian of Indian music is largely confined to theoretical writings. The distinction is especially important if we consider the musicians themselves of former times. As suggested above, the art of the professional musician is, historically speaking, only contingently connected with the written word or literary tradition in any language.29 I have attempted to show in this article some of the ways in which the literary tradition of the śāstra responded to the attraction music exerted on cultivated people and converted the principles of music into a form acceptable to them. In a crude formula, one might say that the musician supplied music while the śāstrī claimed understanding of it and took the responsibility of explaining it to the literate and literary public.
14In India today there are signs of considerable change; new possibilities and new requirements have already modified the social and cultural conditions of musical performance.30 The professional progress of a musician now depends less on private patronage and more on the approval of larger institutions and a wide public. These conditions have produced a new journalistic type of writing on music, which among other interests can concentrate on individual performances and biographical accounts; this both responds to, and further feeds, the growing cuit of the individual musician, and also brings a significant shift of emphasis from the more impersonal and perennial sides of music to the immediate experience of modem audiences. Biographical studies and analyses of teaching traditions are also to be found at the more scholarly level as part of an increasing emphasis on documentation. A more broadly based approach to musical aesthetics, derived from both Indian and non-Indian precedents, is at the same time bringing musical literature to an ever wider public, whose access to music is greatly facilitated by the development of the radio and recording industries and by the reforms in musical education and instruction resulting from the establishment of more public institutions, and the corresponding decline of the more traditional and exclusive guruśiṣyaparamparā31. An examination of nineteenth-century vernacular literature would reveal some interesting precedents for descriptive and educational literature on music, but there can be little doubt that the enormous growth of this literature was inspired not only by the spread of printing but very largely by the establishment of music schools and the improvement of the social prestige of music during the last hundred years. Professional performers and teachers would affirm as strongly now as ever that music cannot be learnt from books, and indeed the actual training of artists depends only marginally on texts and manuals, but young musicians are nevertheless more in contact with the written word, and the authority of the written word is felt more and more, among both musicologists and the public audiences of musical performances.32 Moreover the new technical possibilities of recording Indian music have brought an awareness of the importance of recordings; the ability to study performances of contemporary and historical interest reduces the dependence of musicologists on the evidence of purely verbal descriptions and indicates new directions in the documentation and study of music.33 University departments of music may begin to equip musicians with a technical and expository vocabulary of which they previously had no need. We may therefore expect, in addition to the practical manuals which demand the medium of a teacher and a formal pedagogy, the growth of a descriptive musicology which can be recognised by performers as pertinent and useful, and one which responds quickly to changing social, educational and technological conditions of musical practice.
Bibliographie
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Bibliography
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Notes de bas de page
1 cf. Chetan Karnani 1976, esp. ch. viii, “ Music cristicism in India
2 Much of the textual work on the Sanskrit literature has been summarised by E. te Nijenhuis in her Musicological Literature 1977. The literature in Persian and Tamil, and for the more recent periods in Bengali, Marathi, Hindi and other vernaculars is so far less well served in bibliographical surveys.
3 Earlier pioneering studies were those of Richard Simon 1923 and Joanny Grosset 1913. Particularly valuable among recent studies are the contributions of V. Raghavan 1956, 1957, 1960 and 1961. A survey of historical sources is given in the first chapter of E. te Nijenhuis 1974: Handbuch der Orientalistik, 2. Abt., 6. Bd. Most recent is the substantial article by H. S. Powers on India 1980 a; see especially § 1, pt. 4, Music histovy to the mid-16th century and 5, Music and theory in the canonical styles after the 16th century.
4 The technical material of several of the important treatises is cited by E. te Nijenhuis 1970 in the notes to her edition of Dattilam, a compendium of ancient indian music.
5 Edited with German translation by R. Simon 1909: 481-780.
6 The major recent contribution by W. Howard 1977 is a timely achievement in such studies, particularly as the modem practices of Vedic recitation which he bas examined and documented are uncertain of surviving.
7 Cf. E. te Nijenhuis 1970: 413. More recently attention has been drawn to this and other features of the śāstra in Lewis Rowell 1981.
8 E. te Nijenhuis 1977: 5.
9 Preliminary examinations of music in the epics have been made by L. Omcherry 1967 and P. C. Dharma 1937-1938. See also V. Raghavan 1945.
10 For this and parallel passages in other texts see E. te Nijenhuis 1970: 94 ff. An interesting text of saṅgītaśāstra contained within the Jaina canon is examined by Adelheid Mette 1980: 83-97. In this Prakrit text much of the same philosophical detail is to be found as in the Sanskrit treatises, but there are passages which vary according to doctrinal differences.
11 The erudite handling of such material may be seen in Mallinātha’s commentaries on Kālidāsa’s musical references. One of these is briefly examined in this light in J. Katz 1982. The rasa of the actual text set to music could of course be interpreted as endowing the music itself with rasa, and the depiction of rasas in dance could be a practical and graphic possibility.
12 The point is well stressed by H. S. Powers 1979 and 1980 a.
13 For a general survey of theories on intonation see M. Levy 1982.
14 For an ingenious attempt to make sense of the early śruti theory see N. Jairazbhoy 1975.
15 Cf. P. L. Sharma 1963. This substantial paper is an interesting example of the traditionalist endeavour to defend śāstra as the guiding principle of musical practice. The evidence is in fact necessarily confined to the theoretical literature itself as a cogent intellectual system, and the idea the author adopts of the Indian artist and his aesthetic awareness is ultimately based on the śāstric model.
16 Most frequently this is found in the case of the ancient classifications of grāma and mūrchanā (cf. J. Kuckertz 1970 and Nijenhuis 1974), a System still referred to in texts as late as the 18th century and long after it ceased to have practical significance.
17 Such definitions do of course often contain information of considerable historical value precisely because the tenacity of tradition can be tested at different periods. Also the musical examples in rudimentary notation that are sometimes found can, though often textually corrupt, lead to tentative transcriptions and comparisons with modem practice.
18 Arising from the more detailed prescriptive and descriptive passages of this kind, and from some of the accompanying notations, there are again possibilities of examining traditions and survivals to more recent times. An interesting new study of musical forms which draws on a number of classical sources is D. R. Widdess 1981.
19 Though there are some fine studies of the pictorial traditions (see especially K. Ebeling 1973), so far little attention has been given to the dhyānas, their history and status; in his examination of one set H. N. Randle 1943 commented, “ Rāga-mālā art, as such, has a history of hardly more than two centuries. But stanzas from Kālidāsa or Hāla would serve as descriptions of some of the themes, which had a literary history of almost two thousand years. ” For the fullest discussion available, see O. C. Gangoly 1948. See also E. te Nijenhuis 1971. Most recent is a major review article by H. S. Powers 19806.
20 Cf. note 11.
21 This treatise first appeared in the Asiatick Researches, 3, but was revised later and printed together with other Works on music by various authors. The most recent printing was in Jones and Willard 1962.
22 Among the limited sources available to Jones was the (?) 17th- century Sañgītanārāyaṇa, which was originally produced in Southern Orissa. Jones obtained his manuscript copy from Benares, and it is clear, both from his treatise and from the notes in the manuscript (now preserved in the India Office Library, London) that he paid particular attention to it. The text, which has since been printed in Orissa, is a compilation from earlier musicological sources, apparently composed by a good Sanskrit poet of wide scholarship and cultural interests. Though new poetic compositions are included to illustrate some of the musical forms, and a certain amount of information is given on local traditions in Eastern India, the stamp of antiquarianism is particularly clear. Jones states that he happily made do with this work while he was unable to obtain the “ Dmodara ” , which he said was frequently quoted in the “ Nārāyaṇa ” and which was the favourite text of the Bengal pandits. In fact the Saṅgītadāmodara itself contains many antiquarian features and was clearly of influence among later authors; apart from the Saṅgītanārāyaṇa there is the Saṅgītadarpaṇa of Dāmodara, which borrows substantial portions from it. Jones’ remark is good evidence of the tastes and interests of music scholars of this time. In the same treatise he tells us that they admitted inability to find a musical System in practice which truly corresponded to their favorite text in the śāstra.
23 With small textual variants, this passage is a constant feature of Sanskrit musical treatises from the Bṛhaddeśī onwards.
24 Cf. Swami Prajñanāda 1963.
25 The case of the Khaṇḍameru system of svaraprastāra in the first book of the Saṅgītaratnākara may be viewed as an importation of mathematics into scholarly musicology. This exercise in determining the number of possibilities in combinations of notes, and conversely determining the place in a series of a given combination, has been described by N. A. Jairazbhoy 1961. I cannot agree with the suggestion that the scheme was of practical importance for music. A similar system of calculation, containing the same techniques and the same terminology, may be found applied to the science of prosody and no doubt elsewhere too. See L. Alsdorf 1933: 97 ff. (I am grateful to Prof. J. C. Wright for drawing my attention to this article some years ago.) We are here dealing with a mathematica exercise of interest and complexity, which made its mark on the scholarly world to the point of appearing in non-mathematical writings.
26 For an assessment of his career and writings see S. N. Ratanjankar 1967.
27 Cf. N. V. Bhātkhaṇḍe 1972 and 1975. Both these works, though difficult to obtain in their original editions, are available in recent reprints by the Indian Musicological Society, Baroda.
28 For an engaging story illustrating the persistence of traditional lore, see W. Kaufmann 1968: 18.
29 This is of course not to deny that some of the greatest musicians of the past were literate.
30 The subject of social conditions governing music in modem times has recently attracted some good studies. See D. M. Neuman 1978 and 1980 and W. van der Meer 1980.
31 There are some attempts to preserve in some measure the old conditions, but the changing educational environment assures a future on the larger scale only for the newer kinds of musical training. In this connection see also R. E. Brown 1978.
32 It is interesting that Bhāṭkhande was able to predict the developments of recent decades. Speaking, he says, of his own “ part of the country ” , “ In the present moment [...] most of our professional artists are not learned in the science of music and the theorists are not well versed in the art [...]. This state, however, is happily passing away, and the Indian nation is now taking a great interest in the subject. It is to be expected that at no distant future we shall have people who combine in themselves both the art and the science of music and then the progress we make will be both rapid and stable. ”
33 There are, nevertheless, dangers in the new techniques that arise from such possibilities, as the background of Indian music is one of freedom from many of the restrictions that recordings may impose. Cf. A. D. Ranade 1980.
Notes de fin
1 A revised version of a paper originally read in French at the conference on “ Fait littéraire et sciences sociales ” in Paris on June 7th, 1980.
Auteur
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