Y'dig?

Shankar Ramani

We can all hear that mostly Westerners can’t but I asked Shankar Ramani, who sings in the Karnatic style, and who happens to be one of the best Indian singers currently living in the USA. He said:

Westerners learn and perform their music through discrete notes and not as curvy phrases or modulations.  In Indian music, notes are very important but when it comes to combining them, the curvy phrase or modulation within the tune concerned is focused on rather than constructing the phrase mentally through a combination of the notes that represent them.  Therefore, one can say that Indian classical music is largely analog in nature or a continuous stream of notes of high resolution, whereas Western music is very often a skillful or deft rendition of a combination of notes.  So when Westerners learn and sing Indian music they seem them more as straight lines constructed from the notes, whereas the Indian Classical musician (after the initial learning stage) learns how to render the phrase or tune as an identity of its own – it is also called as “Gamakas”.  One reason why the keyboard is not used in Indian classical music is due to its limitation on being able to produce these waves or curvy phrases.

The way out is for Westerners to re-engineer their basics of music and learn Indian music afresh with this in mind instead of trying to sing Indian music on their existing musical approach or learning.

Secondly, there is a tendency to align towards throaty singing and more rhythmic emphasis and tend to mix impactful music with loud and often very rhythmic music.  You can also find Westerners getting carried away when clapping their hands with rhythmic bhajans which they think is intense devotion, fact is that most often they are only getting excited by the rhythm rather than the nuance of the musical notes touching their hearts.  No doubt they also appreciate soulful stirring music, but it is much easier to get them excited using rhythm.  Whereas, Indian musicians by nature blend a more uniform proportion of rhythm, tonal modulations and nuances and focus is more on melodious modulation more than on fast paced or good rhythmic type of music.  There are of course exceptions on both sides.

Thirdly, the extent of “heart” and “love” in the music that flows is much less in Western men singing music as compared to Indians, although Western women tend to produce this very easily, in many cases more than Indian counterparts – I think this has some correlation to their childhood upbringing and environment that they live in.

A bit of understanding and focus is all this necessary for Westerners to make the switch deftly to Indian music – we have had a few great Indian Classical musicians who were from the West – there was a guy called John Higgins who was a stalwart at South Indian style of Classical music.

It’s worth noting that for the same reasons, Indians try to do too much when they sing Western music – they can’t just sing straight and be true to the Western style.  Nor are they generally suited for the type of voice modulations that is required by music such as Jazz or blues…assuming rock music is sufficiently degenerate enough* that anyone who renders it in whichever way and becomes successful sets a new standard.

Hope this is enlightening.

* Shivalan’s note. When I was a kid, there was a very funny album called A Child’s Garden of Freburg. One of the tracks had Stan Freberg as a New York rock ‘n roll manager, bring in a teenager off the street and poke him with a stick to produce the whoops and hollers of a 50′s rock star.

Jazz musicians sometimes complain  that audiences applaud when they hear a solo when what is being played is often not technically that difficult, but it contains theatrical moments which appeal to the uneducated ear, i.e. a trumpeter will play some implausibly high notes. The audiences tend not to respond to what is really difficult, for example, ensemble playing where say, a piano, bass, drums and saxophone, will combine to play complex musical phrases as if they are one instrument. If there was any justice, it’d be these moments, moments when two plus two really do equal five, that get the applause, not the solos.