Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow

How the hidebound world of Hindustani music is learning to befriend technology

‘My name is Gauhar Jaan,’ screams the voice as the recording ends. The first diva of Hindustani music was also the first voice to be recorded in India, when FW Gaisberg came to Calcutta on his recording expedition in 1902. At the end of each three-minute recording, Gauhar Jaan identified herself in English. The reason was simple. The recordings travelled back to Germany where the records were made ready for sale; the only way the technicians in Hanover could differentiate between artistes was from the proclamations of identity at the end of the recordings. The imported records became popular, but the relationship between Hindustani musicians and the act of recording remained tenuous. There are stories of how vocalists (Ustad Alladiya Khan, most notably) refused to be recorded. Their reasons might now have assumed apocryphal proportions—fear of the voice being sucked in by the microphone or losing the sur in one’s voice—but it was not until much later that musicians at large found comfort in recording.

In 1959, India’s first record factory came up at Dum Dum in Calcutta. The cassette had arrived by the late sixties, the compact disc by the nineties and about a decade later, YouTube. Like any other discipline, Hindustani music too has been influenced by the determined march of technology. For a tradition that is notoriously resistant to change (or at least feels the need to fashion such a resistance), it has welcomed and even adapted to the shifts that the advancements have brought about.

The most apparent changes have been in dissemination. With the arrival of YouTube, many zealous guardians of private recordings have turned charitable. Rare 78 RPMs and EPs, unobtainable now for love or for money, are being discovered by a generation for the first time. Live recordings from as far back as the sixties are suddenly, unbelievably, available—a four-minute clip from a Puriya Ustad Vilayat Khan played in his twenties can inspire week-long delirium, and similar rarities abound. The AIR (All India Radio) authorities may not be too happy with the online proliferation of their unreleased recordings, but it probably serves them right for being stingy with their archival wealth. There were listeners who diligently recorded AIR broadcasts and there were enterprising disciples who sneaked in recorders to AIR studios while accompanying their gurus. The internet has somehow inspired these custodians to share their recordings in spite of the rigour involved in digitising them.

The internet has also encroached on the sacrosanct domain of teaching. Talim forms one of the two pillars of Hindustani music (the other being riyaz). In a tradition where a musician’s final appraisal includes an assessment of his disciples, talim is as vital to the student as it is to the guru. Hindustani music is not systematically documented, and reading notated bandishes or taans off a book or notebook does not catapult a student onto the stage. Even today, there are Hindustani musician gurus who would rather die than pass on material to undeserving (often a synonym for non-family) students. This has ensured that the value of the oral tradition has not diminished. 

In this context, the idea of an online gurukul—even the very proximity of the two words—would seem bizarre. But such teaching forums have mushroomed. The initial target disciples were NRIs who learnt in India during vacations and could continue with their lessons when they went back. Now, new students are inducted online. Their first exposure to Hindustani music is through Skype. The sessions could be personalised: sitar player Sanjoy Bandopadhyay, who is a professor of music at Rabindra Bharati University, runs an online gurukul that only conducts one-on-one classes through Skype. The school has a group of teachers, and depending on what a student wants to learn (sarod, sitar, vocal), s/he chooses and sets up personal appointments with the teacher. Pandit Ajoy Chakraborty does it differently.

His school in Kolkata, Shrutinandan, introduced online classes six months ago. He conducts a class at the school in Kolkata, and a webcast of the class is available to registered users for a month. A 12-month ‘subscription’ comes for $650/Rs 9,000; six-month for $350/Rs 5,000.

Whether or not these classes can produce performers is another question. Beginners and music aficionados will doubtless find it useful. It might even be a welcome bridge for the NRI who feels cut off from his music. But the system has not quite factored in a way of monitoring the students’ riyaz, so vital to making the grade to performer. Practitioners of music often agree that more than in class, it is when their gurus interrupt their riyaz to correct nuances that a lesson is really learnt. Then again this too could be old-world cynicism—a decade down the line, there might well be a professional musician of note who says he received most of his talim online.

Apart from direct learning, musicians are today in a position to pick up tips from the host of recordings available online. There is software too that makes the process easier. ‘Amazing Slow Downer’, for example, allows you to fiddle with the speed of a piece so that the nuances, blurry in real time, register. It also allows you to change the pitch of a recording. A sarod player who tunes his instrument in C and wants to pick up, say, a Shyam Kalyan by Ustad Shahid Parvez, who tunes his sitar in D, can do so without having to constantly make the tonic shift in his head. More than anything else, though, the app is a great toy, offering the cheap make-believe thrills of making Kishori Amonkar sound like a man or accelerating Ustad Vilayat Khan’s taans (it finally took a machine to trump the late maestro’s speed). Not surprising, then, that this app is a part of the iTunes artillery.

The more popular iTunes app for Hindustani musicians is the iTanpura. The electronic tanpura has long ceased to be a novelty. All Hindustani musicians, whether or not they simultaneously use the actual tanpura, use the electronic version both for riyaz and in concerts. Since its first wooden version, which could be used, for both size and sound, as a murder weapon, the electronic tanpura has come a long way. Radel was the pioneering company and Raagini followed; both now offer versions that are compact and produce excellent sound. But, as with so much else, Apple’s iTanpura has raised the bar. It can be downloaded onto an iPhone or an iPod Touch and the sound is sourced from actual Hemraj tanpuras. The overtones don’t get distorted; raga choices can be programmed, so that the tuning of the ‘strings’ automatically changes with a selection; the pitch can be manually adjusted for greater nuance. There is also an iTabla app, again an improvement on available electronic tablas that musicians use for riyaz.

Perhaps the most significant impact of technology in the world of Hindustani music has been the changes it has wrought in the quality of sound. Any amplification implies a shift, however minute, from the original sound of a voice or an instrument, but with better microphones and more advanced sound engineering, musicians can control the quality of amplified sounds. Many artistes now carry their own mikes; many know exactly what permutation of bass-mid-treble will give them the desired projection. For musicians from other traditions, these might seem obvious; sadly, sound engineering has never quite received the importance it should have in the world of Hindustani music. Most concerts continue to be held in spaces with terrible acoustics. The interaction between an artiste and a sound engineer (a mikeman, mostly) is usually restricted to ‘treble thoda kam karo’. In a recent festival at the Sangeet Research Academy, Kolkata, the fact that Aruna Sairam reached the venue early to do a sound-check became a talking point.

Along with these enhancements in the transmisson and reproduction of sound, there are manifest changes in the very nature of traditional sounds. These experiments are still nascent, but the trend is bound to spread. Niladri Kumar regularly performs on the electric sitar (what he calls the ‘zitar’); Prattyush Banerjee has come up with an electric sarod, called the Jyotirdhwani. Soumik Datta has introduced a new bridge to his sarod. The bridge acts as a pickup, so Datta’s is the first electro-acoustic sarod. These instruments are used only in collaborative music, not in pure classical recitals. But with collaborative music gaining currency, and with Indian classical instruments having become familiar strains in a global soundscape, there might come a time when these instruments acquire dual identities. A listener who only hears the sitar in an electronic context will associate that sound with the instrument; not all listeners across the globe, or even in India for that matter, would know that the instrument has an ‘original’ version.

The need to create electronic versions of traditional instruments arose from an obvious problem: volume. When placed next to an electric guitar, an acoustic sitar has little chance of being heard, more so if there is an entire band playing. Ustad Ali Akbar Khan and Pandit Ravi Shankar, among many others of their time, also collaborated with international musicians, but mostly in an acoustic context. Current trends in global music have forced Hindustani instrumentalists to innovate with their instruments, and available technology and enterprising craftsmen have come to their aid. More than anything else, they have been encouraged by the knowledge that it is possible to jerk an instrument out of its traditional context and place it in a fuzzy, experimental, global soundscape. A Raga Jog is no longer confined to an hour-long presentation on the classical stage. Strains of the raga can appear as a snippet in a jazz piece, its play on the two gandhars can provide sudden lyrical relief in heavy metal. At the end of the day, if technology has inspired the exploration of a new aesthetic, that would have to be its most significant effect on Hindustani music.

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