Why can’t Westerners sing Indian classical music?
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.
Awareness, Enjoyment, Knowledge, Meditation, Spirit, Truth, Uncategorized, Understanding, human brain, ydig
Very educative. Thankyou Shanker Ramaniji. Please keep posting something more related to music.
What a great read, thanks for posting it!
i think all singers should read that.
excellent explanation. Bravo
This a wonderful article. I really enjoy the writer’s thoughtful tone when dealing with this subject. I am extremely glad that this was written. Thank you.
I’m from North India. Due to British expansion, etc. Western culture has influenced Indian culture much more than vice-versa. For example, I was born and grew up in India and got trained in everything Western. Our music teacher (in the 60s) was British and I learned a little piano, singing, etc.
As a kid, I used to sing old Western popular songs and immitate the vibrato. However, I was also drawn to the Old Indian movie songs (not today’s flashy Bollywood songs that are poor immitations of Western music). Those old songs were all Classical North Indian (mostly) based on Ragas with a lot of Meend (Glissando to the extreme) and Gammakas (oscillating between notes at high speed). So, I also had a good dose of gliding notes and gammakas as a kid. However, I still used a little Western vibrato to spice things up (as did some of those old Indian movie songs themsleves).
Later when I started learning North Indian Classical, I found that the vibrato I used in Western songs to add colour was really a crutch for being slightly off tune. When I heard the pure unadulterated, dead accurate, non-vibtrato steady note of SAAA .. sung prolonged with the Taanpura, I got hooked on Indian Classical. Furthermore, when I heard the perfect fifth or fourth, the perfect GAA (third) and the other non-equal-tempered, pure just intonation notes that exist in nature, I got hooked even more.
It took a while to kill the vibrato and sing the pure note. With the pure note, you cannot disguise being off tune. Even a cent off the note and it stands out like a sore thumb. By contrast notes in the Western equal tempered scale are off by anywhere from 2 to 18 cents. At least I had the benefit of listening to those old Indian movie songs and the occassional Classical raags over the radio, but for Westerners not exposed to that at an early age, there’s a tendency I notice for Westerners to fall back on vibrato in particular. Even the top notch Western Opera singers rely heavily on vibrato. Although I really love listening to Western Opera singing, I can never really tell the true accuracy of the notes due to the vibrato around them – the vibrato itself could be oscillating several cents back and forth (whose to tell where the center is). It’s actually, much more difficult to sing non-vibrato and stay prolonged on a single note and be in perfect tune. I’ve heard traditional female Irish singers sometimes sing prolonged non-vibrato, but then again the notes could have been equal-tempered. But I think they’d have an easier time learning Indian Classical.
The other thing, is that for those only exposed to Western vocal music, there’s a tendency even in opera to break the notes into discrete steps either using syllables or staccato, whereas (in North Indian Classical vocal) you could start on a single note sing the next 32 or more in a single breadth without breaking it into separate syllables. Instead, you give each note a gammaka grace note of the higher one (or lower sometimes) in the raag, but you smoothly flow across the whole melodic pattern or phrase without breaking continuity. Those only exposed to Western music, are probably not used to hearing this in their music.
Mostly, I found Western music trained listeners like shorter simpler melodies of discrete notes. Whereas those of us heavily into Indian Classical music love complex, unbroken, bursts of melodic patterns that despite their complexity, and the fact that they’re being improvised on the fly, still stay within the ascension / descension rules of the raag and also within the very complex beat cycles. When the singer or instrumentalist and percussionist both improvising intricately beautiful patterns on the fly land perfectly on the SUM (the beat synchronization point), is when we get the big AHAAA !.. feeling.
At the other extreme during the ALAAP (introduction phase in North Indian Classical), we tend to sing very slowly, again with non-vibrato long-long-long-long-long-long-long drawn out notes. Western audiences get bored with that. But for the Indian Listener, this can be the most intoxicating part. Like nursing a peg of whiskey, we savour the purity of each note of the raag. The singer hovers for lengthy periods around the starting note SA, slowly introducing us to each note of the raag as a new guest to the party. Introducing each note is like filling our glass with the next shot of scotch. In North Indian Classical, there’s no meter during this phase, because it’s whiskey nursing time (but Westerners expect all music to be metered all the time). By the time all notes of a raag are gradually introduced the performer and listener are heavily drunk. But this is when the party is about to start. During the ensuing phase the prucussionist enters the fray and with the performer and listener, clean out the bar.
A Korean friend trained in Western music asked my why all this complexity when a simple melody and rythm can hit your soul harder ? My only answer to that was: “The more you drink the more you need to get you drunk”. The simpler melodic patterns and simpler repetitive rythms of Western music are very beautiful, but Indian Classical listener needs more to really get drunk. We need our intricacies of melody and highly syncopated rythm combined and improvised at high speed, we need our glissando extreme (meend) and shaking notes (gammakas) for therein is what hits our souls harder.
Another guy commented on a North Indian singer. “Man!, your singer sure can bleet faster than a complete herd of goats in unison”. My only anwser there was “Man! you sure need a couple of SIEKO pitch detection units installed in both your ears” (free advertisement for SIEKO). Apparently, this individual was so pitch insensitive that he was unable to notice any pitch differences between goats bleeting in the wilderness and Raag Malkauns (a simpler pentatonic raag). I think the speed of the gammakas notes confuse Western listeners they can’t correctly distinguish the pitch (unfortunately distracting images of sheep and goats invade the mind). Also, perhaps, Western listeners hear the sliding itself as a bunch of out of tune notes. Actually, it’s no different than Pavorotti performing a glissando, just that it’s done much much more. In other words, it’s not out of tune to slide from one note to the other, provided you don’t stop on a pitch that’s not a note. During gammakas, you can only shake between two pitches that are notes in the raag being sung. Though sometimes we do intentionally oscillate a note between its true pitch and a slightly flatter pitch (microtone) to create certain intoxicating effects (similar to the blues singers).
I’m just a hobbyist, and all these are my highly subject thoughts, but I think Western listeners would need to study and understand some theory of Indian Classical music and approach it without the baggage of pre-conceived Western notions of what music ought to be, in order to benefit from it. What’s the benefit a Westerner may ask. I’d say “Yoga for the Mind (at the risk of losing your day job)”. Yes, if you really have the inclination and patience to get into it, you can become so totally intoxicated in the end that nothing else in the world matters. Even if you lose your job, you’ll be happily unemployed. But jokes aside, this is really a great stress reliever and induces a beautiful meditative state. Think of it this way, you will never need liquor or drugs to escape anything. Indian Classical music will do it for you with mental and therefore physical benefits.