Journal of World Philosophies Articles/1 Introductory Remarks to Mukund Lath, “Identity Through Necessary Change: Thinking about ‘Rāga-Bhāva,’ Concepts and Characters” _________________________________________ DAVID SHULMAN Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel ([email protected]) In order to make Mukund Lath’s thoughts on music and identity accessible to a broader audience, and to call attention to links between Hindustānī musical theory and classical Indian philosophical notions, Lath’s paper “Identity Through Necessary Change: Thinking About ‘Rāga-Bhāva,’ Concepts and Characters” is being republished here with an introduction by David Shulman and explanatory notes.* Key words: classical Hindustānī music; Mukund Lath; rāga; śruti; svara Mukund Lath’s brilliant essay comes much closer to articulating the inner logic of classical Hindustānī music than nearly all earlier attempts to formulate that logic. Much of the Sanskrit musicological literature—a large corpus whose earliest texts go back some two millennia—is concerned with what we might call the grammar of musical production and practice, beginning with the emergence of sounds and proceeding to their organization within intelligible, and teachable, patterns. Mukund is concerned with an underlying conceptual world almost never explicitly expressed even by individual practitioners and teachers in the privacy and intimacy of the teaching space. One is meant to learn by doing. We could also say that his essay addresses head-on the inherent tension in Indian music between the formalized grammars of musical production and the tremendous freedom that the trained individual performer is granted as he or she sings or plays an instrument. In some sense, this tension is a universal one, at work in any artistic domain. Nonetheless, there are distinctive features of the Indian systems, including the highly specific ways that the grammars of sound in its process of becoming audible undergo expansion, amplification, and subversion in musical practice. I will begin with some very elementary concepts that may help the reader to enter into Mukund’s discussion; then I will have something more to say about the thesis or theses that he proposes. To have music, we need audible sounds. But in Indian tradition, as in ancient Greek and in Western medieval and Renaissance musical thought, audibility is itself only the manifestation of pre-existing, pre-audible sets of sounds. Thus we have in Sanskrit sources the notion of a two- fold nature of sound itself, nāda: there is “unstruck” or “unplucked” sound, anāhata nāda, not produced by a quivering of the vocal chords or by playing on a string, and its opposite and complement, āhata nāda, “struck” or “plucked” sound. The former—which, by the way, is also the name of an ancient Indo-Iranian goddess and the source of the modern name Anat—has an existential priority over the latter. The world, according to the Sanskrit musicologists, is composed, literally, of unplucked sounds, tiny quivers that lie far beneath or beyond the threshold of our hearing and that merge, diverge, and solidify into the objects that comprise the world accessible to our senses. This might sound a little too mystical for some readers—though in fact there is nothing romantic or trans-empirical about Indian theories of music, as anyone * Mukund Lath, “Identity Through Necessary Change: Thinking about Rāga-Bhāva, Concepts and Characters,” Journal of the Indian Council of Philosophical Research 20, no. 1 (2003): 85-114. JWP would like to thank David Shulman for agreeing to introduce the text, and Daniel Raveh for his contribution in preparing the article for publication. ———————-- Journal of World Philosophies 4 (Winter 2018): 1-5 Copyright © 2018 David Shulman. e-ISSN: 2474-1795 • http://scholarworKs.iu.edu/iupjournals/index.php/jwp • doi: 10.2979/jourworlphil.3.2.01 Journal of World Philosophies Articles/2 who has learned music from a traditional teacher can attest. Unplucked sounds do form part of the empirical practice of living musicians no less than the barely audible micro-tones that are a critical part of this kind of music. From my own experience I can attest that a teacher might say to a student singing the upper note ni (b in Western scales), “You have to hear, even before you start singing this ni, the silent sa (high c, the start of a new octave) that is playing itself in the world—that has always been playing itself in the world—and is already a part of your ni.” As anyone can see, learning Indian music requires of the student very particular ways of listening. The same could be said for the audience that comes to a Hindustānī concert; they are meant to hear the unstruck sound as it breaks through the surface of audibility and emerges into sensible and perceptible experience. That emergence, in all its proliferating potential patterns, is, on one level, what Hindustānī music is all about, just as classical Indian sculptures always rest upon a pre-visible, potential state or form and still reveal traces of their emergence into the light of day.1 Let’s assume that the transition into audibility has taken place and that we can therefore begin to explore, with the Sanskrit musicologists, the internal organization of sound into recognizable patterns—music or speech. It is important to bear in mind that pure sound precedes speech, and that what we tend to think of as symbolic tokens of meaning—that is, words—are in the views of the philosophical mainstream anything but symbolic; both pre- audible and audible words embody, as potential meaning, the object-to-be. Give them enough time and they will solidify into that object. Such a view radically challenges the notions of referential speech that most of us are used to. In music, the raw stuff of sound is called śruti, “what is heard,” that is, the available musical intervals. However, as shall see in a moment, it is not so simple to define what we actually hear once śrutis come to inhabit or activate the notes of a scale, svara (interestingly, this latter term is derived from a root meaning “to radiate, give off light”— so sounds are meant to be visible no less than audible). We hear svaras whenever a musician begins to sing or play. The śrutis exist somewhere behind or within the svaras and effectively constitute them by an ongoing resonance. Svaras are arranged in scales, similar enough to Western scales, and these scales are relevant to the creation of a rāga, as we will see. A complete (sampūrṇa) scale will have seven svaras, as we would expect. However, any octave makes a selection of seven from a wider set of twelve (minimally), just as we see on our pianos if we count both white and black keys. What is the relation of śrutis to svaras? Before I answer that question, we might ask how many śrutis in fact exist. The answer is: many. Maybe twenty-two (per the great thirteenth- century musicologist Śārṅgadeva), maybe sixty-six (a commonly cited count), maybe an infinite number (according to the Bṛhaddeśī, one of our earliest musicological treatises—mid-first millennium AD). In any given rāga scale, śrutis will be distributed among the svaras in groups of twos, threes, or fours, each such group defining an acoustic range that may also include the svara’s identity as sharp, tīvra, or komal, flat. Thus, typically, we have the following scheme (following the Indian names for the notes of the scale), based on the assumption that there are 22 śrutis in all: sa śrutis 1-4 = the call of the peacock ri śrutis 5-7 = the cry of the cātaka bird ga śrutis 8-9 = the bleating of a goat ma śrutis 10-13 = the note of the krauñca bird pa śrutis 14-17 = the call of the cuckoo dha śrutis 18-20 = the croak of a frog ni śrutis 21-22 = the trumpeting of an elephant This system, crystallized in the medieval handbooks, nonetheless allows for—indeed requires—a considerable flexibility and movement within and between svaras, which can potentially overlap ———————-- Journal of World Philosophies 4 (Winter 2018): 1-5 Copyright © 2018 David Shulman. e-ISSN: 2474-1795 • http://scholarworKs.iu.edu/iupjournals/index.php/jwp • doi: 10.2979/jourworlphil.3.2.01 Journal of World Philosophies Articles/3 or borrow śrutis from adjacent svaras. Such borrowings have their own names: for example, if the tonic sa “loans” its two lower śrutis to the lower ni (in the lower adjacent octave), that is called kākali, an ancient term. Indeed, in a sense, overlapping is the ruling technique, or acoustic reality, in both Hindustānī and Carnatic musical systems. Overlapping makes the microtones— raw śruti intervals—present, audible, and meaningful; it also allows for complex cognitive and aesthetic effects, such as the simultaneous performance of two distinct rāgas whose notes overlap in “bitextual” patterns, just as in South Asian poetry a single sequence of phonemes can often be analyzed or segmented into two or more homophonous, concurrent meanings. Now, again: how do the śrutis relate to the svaras? The brilliant musicologist Kallinātha (fifteenth century) offers several possible analogies, only two of which are, in the end, accepted. The relation is not one of mirroring (svaras reflecting śrutis), since both svaras and śrutis are equally real; nor can we see here the relation of a material cause to its effect, as when mud is made into an earthen pot. The śrutis do not simply disappear into the svaras, as mud does in the pot. One can, however, claim that the raw resonance of the śruti is transformed (pariṇāma) into svaras, as milk becomes curd. Or we can say that the śrutis reveal the svaras, as a lamp sheds light on pre-existing objects.