Persian music influences

[Guest guest]

Predictably, I made many mistakes in understanding what my teacher, Amelia

Maciszewski, is trying to tell me. I sent her a copy of my message to you

concerning Persian music, and she was so good to straighten me out. So

below are her corrections of my many misunderstandings. This is all new to

me, so I'm not beating myself up for not getting it straight the first time.

I should have checked with her before sending you my half-baked information.

Sorry. Sat Nam --- Ellen Madono

 

An ethnomusicologist friend/teacher told me that there are Indian singers

who specialize in getting people into a trance. They are part of the Drupad

 

tradition.

 

The are not Dhrupad singers, but Qawwali singers, who are Sufis.>>

 

Ali Akbar Khan is the most familiar product of that tradition.

 

NO!! It's Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. Ali Akbar Khan is a sarode player; my

guru's father.>>

 

He specializes in what was originally a Sufi style (Persian) and he is North

Indian.

 

Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan was a Qawwali singer (he died in 1997), who belonged

to a lineage of Qawwals, Sufi musicians. Qawwali music likely originates

from a musical/poetic style called Qaul, which may have come from Persia to

what is now Pakistan and North India. Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan was a Punjabi

Pakistani.

 

This <<ethno>>musicologist says that the singing style in our local Sikh

 

Gudawara (Pittsburgh) preserves some arcane styles and is very high quality.

 

Shabad kirtan as prescribed in the Guru Granth Sahib is a genre of

devotional music that is related to dhrupad. This is true everywhere, not

just in Pittsburgh. In the gurdwara here it is performed partly in the

traditional, dhrupad style.

 

It is all part of the Dhrupad singing style. There is little adornment (no

 

fancy trills, the raga are rhythms are basic). <<Dhrupad is a rather

austere, unadorned musical style. The ragas and talas (rhythmic cycles)

prescribed in the Guru Granth Sahib are not at all basic. Some of the ragas

are quite uncommon in concert performance practice, and there are numerous

talas, some of them very complex and, hence, uncommon. Neither ragas nor

talas in this music are 'basic.'>>

 

All of this music is intended to bring the sing-along listeners into a

trance state.

 

No. Only qawwali, not dhrupad or shabad kirtan. (Amie says there is another

kind of Kirtan that the Hari Krishna people sing. It is very simple

repetition. The Gudawara music repeats, but it anything but simple to my

untrained ears.)

 

The musicians don't go into a trance. Their job is to create that music. I

am

 

not sure how much of that is Sufi, but the general focus on creating a

trance state is.

 

As stated above, qawwali music specifically (NOT dhrupad or shabad kirtan)

is meant to create in the listener a state of mystical ecstasy that in some

cases becomes trance.

 

 

My teacher, Amelia Maciszewski, is studying a North Indian female singer,

 

Girija Devi. <<I am studying music under her.>>Except for the top singers,

such female singers have become

 

courtesans because their singing is no longer popular in modern India.

 

You've got this reversed. Until the late 1930s, the only women who were

professional musicians or dancers were courtesans. Courtesans had a higher

social status earlier, when they were court musicians (and in South India,

temple dancers). The collapse of royal and feudal patronage, and well as

legislation that banned many of their customs, pushed these women artists,

whose lifestyles were different than those of conventional women who

married, to the margins of society. Except for a few exceptionally talented

women from courtesan communities, most were unable to make the transition

from semi-private patronized performance to public performance on a concert

stage. Meanwhile, mainstream women began to get acceptance and opportunities

to perform music and dance professionally, and some of them learned some of

the music and dance that courtesans specialized in, only in a "sanitized"

form, devoid of any explicit eroticism. So it's not that courtesans' singing

is not popular today; the classical and light-classical music/dance they had

performed has been co-opted by others. And it is popular among concert-goers

who have highbrow taste. The court no longer exists, and the courtesan's

salon is not longer an elegant place visited by men of taste. Rather, the

clientele is now more interested in sex than songs, leaving the salon

performer (the ordinary courtesan of today) with little choice because she

has to support a family.>>

 

 

 

Giriji Devi's voice is deeply moving: An expression of the holy crone. The

 

whole classical music tradition experienced a decline as secular rulers,

 

starting with the Moghuls who oppressed the Sikhs, used music for sensual

 

pleasure rather than to experience the divine in ourselves.

 

<<This is a bit of religious propaganda. Classical music DID NOT experience

a decline under the Moghuls; performance practice and style changed as the

context moved from the temple to the court, and now the concert stage.>>

 

 

 

 

The only 3HO singer who I have found singing in anything close to an Indian

 

Raga (the system of scales and rhythms) is Sat Kirin.

 

<<Raga is the melodic framework in Indian music; tala is the rhythmic

cycle.>>

 

She has a new release

 

sold on this site. Her music is lovely.

 

 

 

I hope this is clear to you now. Again, please forward this corrected

version to the person to whom you sent the original message ASAP.

 

Yours in the truth of music,

 

Amie