source file: mills2.txt Date: Mon, 17 Jun 1996 12:35:26 -0700 Subject: Post from McLaren From: John Chalmers From: mclaren Subject: Indian music -- "Intonation in Present-Day North Indian Classical Music" by N. A. Jairazhboy and A. W. Stone, BUlletin of the School of Oriental and African Music, 1963, pp. 119-132, raises some interesting evidence about Alain Danielou's claims that North Indian music is based on just intonation. Jairazhboy measured the intervals sa-re, re-ga and sa-ga in recorded performances of various ragas. From this information (gleaned by examination of oscillograms), he concluded that modern Indian music does not make use of the 22 microtonal srutis which in various Sanskrit texts are described as the basis of Indian music. Did Jairazhboy dispose adequately of the errors introduced by changes in the motor driving the film through the oscillograph camera, or the changes in speed of the tape recorder motor? Hard to say. He claims to have done so, but I've got my doubts. Moreover, he makes some brash claims: "The ready acceptance and popularity of the keyboard insrument, the harmonium, as an accompiment to the voice, should be adequate proof that the North Indian octave is, in fact, divided into 12 semitones." This doesn't parse. It could equally mean that North Indian popular music is being Westernized, or it could mean that audiences tolerate a distortion of the "correct" sruti-derived svaras for the convenience of chords offered by the harmonium, just as the wide acceptance of the awful-sounding Hammond organs was due largely to issues of cost and conveience, rather than the excellence of their tone quality. In the same way, it has been shown by record company surveys that audiences will consistently prefer a mediocre performance of a classical work recorded in a studio to a superb performance of a classical work recorded live with coughs and sneezes disrupting the listerner's attention. There seems to be a huge amount of controversy surrounding the intonation of North Indian music, and time hasn't dispelled it. Regardless, Jairazhboy concludes: "In view of the findings in this paper, is seems unlikely that musicians would play these fine [just] intervals consistently and accurately enough to form the basis of any such theory, and that this interpretation is closer to fiction than fact." [pg. 132] This 1963 article is worth citing because, remarkably, it's one of the few objective measurement *by an Indian* of the intonation of North Indian music (in English). Virtually everything that's been done wrt the intonation of North Indian music is either by white guys or non-quantitative and largely subject to varagaries of the researcher's opinion. How about it, folks? Isn't it time for some new quantitative studies of the intonation of North Indian music with modern equipment? --mclaren Received: from eartha.mills.edu [144.91.3.20] by vbv40.ezh.nl with SMTP-OpenVMS via TCP/IP; Tue, 18 Jun 1996 00:20 +0100 Received: from by eartha.mills.edu via SMTP (940816.SGI.8.6.9/930416.SGI) for id PAA23303; Mon, 17 Jun 1996 15:20:33 -0700 Date: Mon, 17 Jun 1996 15:20:33 -0700 Message-Id: Errors-To: madole@ella.mills.edu Reply-To: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Originator: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Sender: tuning@eartha.mills.edu