What Is a Raga? The Framework Behind Indian Classical Music

Two ragas can use exactly the same seven notes and be completely different pieces of music, because the identity lies in how the notes are used rather than in which are present. The elements that define one include:

• •The ascending and descending lines, which are often not mirror images, so a note present on the way up may be omitted or approached differently on the way down
• •The vadi and samvadi, the most important and second most important notes, around which phrases gravitate and on which the line comes to rest
• •Characteristic phrases, short melodic figures that are the raga's signature and that a knowledgeable listener recognises within seconds
• •Ornaments, since each note may carry a specific treatment, a slide, a shake, a grace note, and using the wrong one changes the raga
• •Notes treated as weak or forbidden, which must be passed through rather than dwelt on
• •Mood and, traditionally, a time of day or a season at which it is properly performed, so that some are dawn ragas and others belong to late night or to the monsoon

Indian classical music is built on a drone, usually supplied by a tanpura or an electronic equivalent, sounding the tonic and the fifth continuously throughout a performance. Everything is heard in relation to that fixed reference, which is why the music can sustain a single tonal centre for an hour without monotony and why the precise tuning of each note against the drone matters so much. The system recognises twenty-two microtonal intervals, the shrutis, from which the twelve notes of a practical octave are selected, and the tuning is just rather than equal-tempered, meaning intervals are pure ratios rather than the compromise a piano makes. A consequence is that this repertoire cannot be played properly on a keyboard, and that a singer or a sitar player bends between pitches continuously in a way that Western notation has no good way to write down.

A full North Indian performance follows a shape that moves from free time into increasingly propulsive rhythm. It opens with the alap, unmeasured and without percussion, in which the performer introduces the raga note by note, exploring its low register first and gradually opening out its full range, a section that can last twenty minutes and is the part in which the raga's character is established. The jor follows, introducing a pulse without a drum cycle, and the jhala accelerates it. Then the percussionist enters and the composed section begins, set to a rhythmic cycle called a tala with a fixed number of beats grouped in a particular way, of which the sixteen-beat teental is the most common. From there performer and drummer improvise in alternation, returning repeatedly to the first beat of the cycle, the sam, which is the point of arrival everything is aimed at and the moment an Indian audience audibly reacts.

The northern Hindustani and southern Carnatic systems share the underlying concepts and diverge substantially in practice. Hindustani music, shaped by centuries of contact with Persian and Central Asian culture through the Mughal courts, emphasises long improvisation, the slow unfolding of a single raga, and instrumental traditions on sitar, sarod, bansuri and sarangi alongside vocal forms. Carnatic music is more composition-centred, built around a repertoire of pieces by named composers, above all the three saints of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with improvisation woven around those compositions, faster tempos, denser ornamentation and the violin, adopted from Europe and retuned, as a central instrument. The two systems classify ragas differently as well, with the Carnatic tradition organising them into a systematic scheme of seventy-two parent scales and the Hindustani tradition using a looser grouping of ten families.

Transmission is oral and personal. The traditional relationship is between a student and a teacher within a gharana, a lineage with its own repertoire, style and interpretive preferences, and the training takes years of imitation before any independent improvisation is permitted; notation exists and is regarded as a memory aid rather than a score. That system has been strained by conservatories, recordings and mass audiences, and it survives in modified form. Outside India the music reached Western listeners through Ravi Shankar's collaborations in the 1960s, with George Harrison, with Yehudi Menuhin and at Woodstock, which is why a sitar sound briefly became shorthand for exoticism in popular music, and through the influence of the drone and modal improvisation on John Coltrane, Philip Glass and Terry Riley. The framework itself, a set of constraints tight enough to give an improviser an identity and loose enough to allow an hour of invention, is one of the more sophisticated solutions any musical culture has found to that problem.

A raga specifies not just which notes are available but which are emphasised, how the line ascends and descends, which ornaments attach to which notes and which characteristic phrases identify it, so two ragas with identical notes are different music. Everything is heard against a continuous drone in just intonation, a performance moves from unmeasured exploration into a rhythmic cycle with improvisation aimed at the cycle's first beat, and the northern and southern traditions differ in how much is improvised and how ragas are classified.