Sandeep Bhagwati: Indian Music in Western Composition

Transcript of a lecture given by Sandeep Bhagwati, addressed to an Audience of Indian Classical Musicians at the Indian Music Forum Mumbai in Jan 2002, in the context of a Seminar entitled "Indian Music and Globalization".

Generally speaking, Indian Music is better known to the West than Western Music is to India. This dictum, however, only truly applies to art music - as an observation on popular culture it would be blatant nonsense: The opposite can be said to be true there!

So, while for the past 200 years Western art musicians have turned to Indian art music traditions for musical models, aesthetic ideas and plain melodic and rhythmic inspiration, in India - from the 1920s onwards - mainly popular musicians have studied popular musics of the West: to draw sounds, composition techniques, instrumental skills and aesthetic possibilities from them. There are, of course, many possible explanations for this asymmetric balance of interests - and, obviously, questions of different access to information, the rather one-sided balance of economic power, but also the rapacious, revolutionary Western dynamics of cultural progress vs. more tradition-oriented Indian ideals of artistic evolution loom largely here. Unfortunately, this text will not be able to address them.

My approach is more modest: To describe some of the musical influences of Indian music on Western art music composers and to illuminate, if only sketchily, the cultural background that prompted them to tune themselves to musical traditions outside their own for new inspiration.

1
Indian music entered Europe as a phantom: In 1799 William Jones published his treatise "The Music of Hindostan". Around 1800, this book was widely read: the German translation appeared in 1801 and was dedicated to the great composer Joseph Haydn. Vienna, then the musical capital of Europe, seems to have been buzzing with discussions on the yet literally "unheard-of" Indian Music. Ludwig van Beethoven notes: "Have read the Book on the Music of the Indians. Extremely interesting philosophically, but of no practical consequence to my work."

Of all colonial personnel musicians were the least prone to travel. Especially, if they were famous composers who had enough work and fame at home. So - even if Jones' book introduced the musical community of the West to the theories of Indian music - throughout the entire 19th century no European composer of consequence ever had the opportunity to actually listen to this much-talked about Indian music.

This deficit was badly felt: for throughout the 19th century India was all the rage in Central Europe. The countries that had lost the colonial battle for India (France) or had never entered into it (Germany, Austria) opened themselves to non-combatant values of the subcontinent: Every important German writer in the first half of the 19th century let his audience know that he had studied Indian philosophy and the great epics. Kalidasas plays, especially "Shakuntala" were translated, performed and feted as equals of Shakespeare in France and the German world.

India was, among the intellectual circles of the continent, the much-needed and coveted Other, a culture of similar depth and range, but so different from their own they could use it as a mirror to look at themselves. China could perhaps have played the same role for these European romantics, had it only been less "independent" - and less practical. India appealed to the Romantic continental thinkers and artists precisely because of its idealistic philosophy - and because of its reputed non-practicalness in mundane matters: for Europeans seeking artistic escape from an increasingly industrialized, formalized and bureaucratic European society this purported combination of high thinking and disregard of worldly details was just the thing they were looking for.

Whereas writers, painters and photographers could and did travel, whereas Indian books and paintings were translated and sold in Europe, Indian music alone remained shrouded in mystery. But not only non-exposure, deeper reasons, too, prevented Western musicians from looking outwards: from late 18th century to early 20th century, Western music constantly discovered new modes of expression that could be unfolded from the unexpectedly deep recesses of the so-called tonal-functional harmonic system. From Haydn to Schönberg, from Berlioz to Debussy, composers would explore the ramifications of this 18th century musical technique, the same simple rules of harmony that now, via pop music, have spread all over the globe. As one can surmise from Beethoven's remark on Indian music: even had they been exposed to Indian music, Western composers would surely have found it enthralling - but of no practical consequence to their work. For neither rhythm nor melody truly interested them: harmony was their real land of hope - and here, India had nothing to offer to them.

But the philosophical, literary, artistic aura of India still occupied the imaginary of Western art - and India remained a dreamland for every artist. The British composer Gustav Holst, just as many lesser colleagues, could not resist the intellectual prestige of an Indian context in his opera "Savitri" or his "Songs from the Rigveda". French Composers Leo Délibes and Jules Massenet, hugely popular in their time, wrote operas called "Lakmé" and so-called "Hindu Melodies". In all these cases, the text may be Indian or about India, but the music is a Western idiom largely unhampered by real knowledge of anything musically outside of Europe.

2
India's real musical influence on the West finally took shape in the years before World War I. In the first years of the 20th century, two young French composers independently visited India: Albert Roussel and Maurice Delage. Both visits seemed accidental: Roussel stopped over for a few weeks as a naval officer on duty, Delage accompanied his parents on an inspection trip - they owned a shoe factory in South India. But India's music changed their compositional careers forever: During their stays - Delage stayed longer than Roussel, but Roussel later came back for a private trip with his wife - they avidly listened to every Indian classical concert they could attend, wandered through the streets and temples to soak in the popular music of the time. Their diaries hardly ever specify names of performers, much less raags or taals played: but the works they wrote after their trip to India deeply reflect the profound impact these concerts made on them.

After his return to France, Albert Roussel wrote Evocations, a thrilling large-scale work inspired by his impressions of the caves at Ellora, of Jaipur, and of Benares. A movement is devoted to each of these places. Evocations is a cantata for singers and large orchestra. It even earned him the Rome Prize, one of the most prestigious music awards of his country, and in his later career Roussel repeatedly returned to Indian subjects, intonations and atmospheric evocations, notably in his ballet-opera Padmavati, premiered in 1923 and described by a contemporary critic as "surely the most beautiful Indian music ever written by a Westerner".

All this characterizes his approach to Indian music: far from trying to analyze and to emulate what the Indian musicians actually played he tries to give a subjective impression of what he heard, transforming the atmosphere of the surroundings and the evening into Western music - his evocation even includes a song he had heard on the banks of the river Ganges in Benares. Just how authentic, then, is Roussel's setting of the fakir's song? Decades later musicologist Jann Pasler attempted to answer this question:

"When I played this section of Evocations for various Indian musicians... they found it totally lacking in Indian elements and remarked that the text is not at all what a fakir would have sung. However, in Benares, when I sang the tune myself after playing the recording, an eminent Indian music scholar as well as my two drivers instantly recognized it as the devotional music of fakirs. Roussel's recitative-like setting and the vibrato... on my recording had thrown them off... Roussel's treatment of the tune nevertheless respects the way this tune was performed and would be performed even today."

Maurice Delage was a composer from a different background and thus reacted differently to Indian music. Mostly self-taught, but also a student with Maurice Ravel, he was of a more intellectual kind, seeking new means of expression, new forms and new sounds. A critic wrote about him: "Maurice Delage is a composer in the precise image of the "enfant du siècle" - the 20th that is, who is at his ease instinctively in handling "delectable" dissonance, is curious about rare timbres and wishes to extend the frontiers of sound and skillfully assimilate the borderlands into the beautiful unexplored territory of sound".

It is evident from his music that he even listened to Indian musicians differently, perceiving srutis as essential features and acknowledging the important role of rhythm. His most noted work Quatre Poèmes Hindous (Four Hindu Poems) reflects these preoccupations in their very un-Western sparseness of instrumentation, a dominance of melody and rhythm (as opposed to Roussel's refined harmonies), and even the attempt to use microtones as a mode of expression: passages of these songs seem to be written for non-European musicians. Interestingly, the second poem of the series is not Indian at all, but a poem that is the epitome of 19th century infatuation with India, written by the German poet Heinrich Heine: "A fir-tree stands alone/ on bare heights in the north/ it sleeps; a blanket white / surrounds it: ice and snow.// It dreams of a palm tree/ that, far in the Orient,/ grieves, mute and alone,/ upon a scorching rock."

3
If I have unduly dwelt on these two composers, it is because they exemplify the two approaches of Western Composers towards Indian art music that would prevail during most of the 20th century: EXOTICISM, Roussel's penchant for atmospheres and evocations of India; and INVIGORATION, Delage's incorporation of Indian sounds and techniques not as atmospheric details but as new structural devices and an extension of the expressive repertoire of Western music.

Both attitudes are manifestations of desire, they differ only in their attitude towards their own culture: Whereas exoticists look for a means of temporary escape from the pressures of the so-called over-civilized world, the incorporators seem to be quite at ease with their own culture - so much so that they want to extend its boundaries to include all conceivable forms and techniques within itself, including those that were invented in other cultures. Exoticists desire the Other as a child would desire a new toy - because it is tired of the toys it knows. Invigorators desire the Other as a craftsman would desire a specialized tool - because he can do more and richer work with it. Exoticism could be seen as decadent: invigoration, however, definitely is a form of avant-gardism - and thus aggressive, always on the lookout for new conquests.

It is one of the characteristics of Western culture throughout the 20th century that one could describe it as decadent and avant-garde at the same time. If this seems surprising it is only superficially so: for the profound dis-ease of Westerners with their own civilization is only matched by their increasing technical prowess - and both attitudes, the tired as well as the adventurous, reflect a profound repudiation of the past: even the desire for things past was felt by many artists of the 20th century somewhat as an act of treason.

This also explains why, in all the following interactions of Western Composers with India both - a clutching at the last straw, and a yen for bold exploration and exploitation - can often be observed in the works of the same composer: they are not aesthetic turncoats, they just a shift their weight from one foot to the other.

4
I have also highlighted the role of Roussel and Delage because the French avant-garde remained the circle of composers that most consistently continued to look at Indian art music until the late 1940s. The most prominent amongst them was Olivier Messiaen, a seminal composer of Western 20th century music and teacher of some of the most important post-World War II composers.

Messiaen delved into the writings of Sarngadeva and extracted from this treatise a curious concept of Indian rhythms that interested him: he called them non-reversible rhythms. A rhythm can be said to be reversed if it is played strictly "backwards": the last stroke becomes the first, the next-to-last becomes the second etc. This is a compositional procedure well-known to Western composers since the middle ages.

Messiaen now found, in Sarngadevas discussion of "taal", several rhythms that were symmetrical: they were non-reversible in the sense that reversing them would just yield the original rhythm. These palindromic rhythms became essential building blocks of his musical language, albeit on he same proto-musical level as another of his aural interests: birdsong. Messiaen acknowledged his debt to India with titles such as "Turangalîla-Symphony" (a momentous 80 minute orchestra work) and "Cantejodjaya" (a short piano piece).

The above description shows that Messiaen definitely believed in invigoration. And what also is evident is his obvious dis-interest in any "adequate" representation of actual Indian music in his compositions: he took what he could use and blithely ignored context. For him, as for many of his pupils, other cultures provided cheap and abundant "aesthetic raw material", new kinds of musical thinking, and musical forms as yet untapped by the growing need for innovation in the West. The twin interests of Messiaen - melodies of birdsong and a few misunderstood Indian "taals" - distinctly show the role Indian music played in his musical universe: he saw it as a resource toolbox.

Karlheinz Stockhausen, Messiaens most prominent pupil, continued on this path throughout the 1950s and 1960s: In works such as "Mantra" (for two pianos and live electronics) and "Stimmung"(for six singers and electronics) he used different Indian concepts such as the drone, microtones in melody (microtones in harmony are a Western pre-occupation since the 1910s, arrived at and, of course, sounding very differently from Indian "srutis") but also spiritual concepts such as the "mantra" (in his case: small musical entities that literally make a piece happen by their layered and staggered repetition). Stockhausen also used non-musical ideas taken from ascetic traditions - in one of his pieces, musicians are told to retire into an empty room, to not look, listen, speak, eat for three days, then come out, meet again - then take up their instruments and play whatever music they feel expressive now.

In all these appropriations, the real context of Indian music seems to be strangely absent: meditation, drone, melodic fine-tuning and rhythmic concentration - strongly inter-related phenomena in Indian music - are used here and there, in widely different musical context, unrelatedly. This could be construed as a further post-colonial grievance, but to my mind it clearly shows the processes at work in every cross-cultural fertilization of ideas: certain isolated features of one culture seem interesting to artists of another - and in their artistic responses these isolated elements are transformed, adapted and re-fitted for use in the artists' home context.

Westerners are sometimes amused and disgusted by the way other cultures take some aspects of their, say, political system (e.g. elections) and refuse to adapt their own society to the underlying needs for, in their eyes, true democracy (separation of state and religion, freedom of the press, powerful systems of social balance). It is with the same kind of mixed feelings that Indians would look at the use made of Indian music in Western 20th century art music - if, as noted above, they were aware of it. Cultural exchange, as any exchange, does simply not work with wholes, only with parts. And the choice of what part constitutes an exchange is (and can) never made by the giver.

5
Until the mid-sixties, the French and German interest in India remained a matter of highly idealistic circles (even when, as we have seen, their attitudes and methods did not decisively differ from the colonials' approach) - and Indo-European artistic relations could well have inhabited on this level indefinitely.

The Beatles, especially, put an end to this. Their well-known musical involvement with India put the sitar and Ravi Shankar into the vista of the commercial Anglo-Saxon pop circuit. From now on, the audience for Indian music in the West became more numerous - and less appropriative: the parallelism to the German and French Romantics 150 years earlier is striking! Here, too, a young generation distrustful of the way their social, political and aesthetic environment was developing used India as the Other, as a counter-world of ancient truth and unworldliness. The difference was: now the money and the means to bring that music over were at hand.

Ever since, Indian musicians can count on packed audiences at key venues of the Western world. In turn, because the art music world in Europe views any popular music with suspicion, many western composers have lost their technical interest in India's art music. A quote by German composer Helmut Lachenmann illustrates this very clearly: He always sees himself as a mountaineer mastering an unknown peak for the very first time. And looked disdainfully at any attempt to climb this peak once more, to write music the way he writes it. He in essence said: "I was a pioneer, the others are just tourists." Implicitly, pioneers seem to be superior to tourists - a point of view perhaps not exactly universally acknowledged...

India's art music has thus, in the eyes of the Western art music establishment, transmuted since the Beatles' sixties: from the promising land of adventure and unknown delights it has metamorphed into the predictable commercial hustle and bustle of a Goan Beach. Furthermore, the midas-like touch of AngloSaxon Pop has made the material lives of some Indian classical musicians less anxious - and Indian art music in general (and by now all kinds of Indian Music - just think of the British Bhangra, Asian Dub and Dhol movements) has been revived in ways unthinkable before this unexpected influx of foreign money.

The changing socioeconomics of modern Indian society would most probably have led to the destitution and ultimate destruction of many aspects of Indian art music, had not non-Indian esteem shown towards this tradition and the economic success of Indian music in the West demonstrated to influential modernist circles in India that this old-fashioned art music should nevertheless be preserved - if not for themselves, then at least as an export article.

6
What is the situation now ? The Western avant-garde music movement has virtually come to a stop - in the sense that by now, every combination of sound and noise can aesthetically be called music. In another sense also that there is nothing which could be called an accepted canon of musical thinking - a static, polyvalent and multi-aesthetical musical universe given to violent infighting and volatile economic disruptions.

Indian art music, for all its gharanas and internal squabbles, seems at first singularly monolithic in comparison - or, as I would prefer to call it, singularly experienced in incorporating multi-aesthetical discourses. Sometimes I think that Western music has now arrived at the same point in history that Indian music went through in the centuries after Khusro, so to speak: a time where all facets of musical expression were incorporated into a working but undogmatic system of composition that leaves endless scope for individuality without ever leaving the precinct of what every listener clearly understands to be music.

The two approaches to this situation India has developed - the North Indian system of continuous and spontaneous re-appropriation of given musical languages (the raga system) and the Carnatic melakarta system of mathematical classification established by Venkatamathi - both help to frame and understand music that does not yet exist, to give a coherent and reliable place in the ear to the wildest musical explorations.

Again, Western art music would need India at this point: and this time not only as a collection of interesting techniques - but rather as an example of an aesthetical and practical system of musical thought and practice that could effectively incorporate the natural curiosity for the other without having to reject it's own time-tested tradition. That, at least, if not entirely true of the realities of Indian art music life today, seems to be - in my humble opinion - the greatest potential Indian music can offer to itself and to the world.

Not an anxious return to roots that in any case never were, but a refreshed look at the vitality that lies in the power of nourishing the desire for the new with the knowledge of the old, the alien with the intimate - and the realization that, in music, it could for once be the West that invigorates and rejuvenates the East.

My Indian colleagues, listen to Western art music, to all kinds of art music, Chinese, Indonesian, Thai, Vietnamese, Arabian, Japanese, Korean: there will be much that is beautiful "but of no practical consequence to your work." Yet there are will invariably be some musical ideas that can be useful to you. My dream would be, that YOU use the West as the West has used your music over centuries - and make the integrating power of Indian music an advantage: to create an Indian music that can take you beyond because it allows you to better understand your own music as you know it now.

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