From East to the Western Ind

 

What is the very first thing that strikes your mind when you think about style, passion, music, and craze? A guitar! A drum! May be even a violin, piano, bass! Western music has throughout the 1930s and 1940s become widely popular through the romanticization of thecowboy and idealized depictions of the west in Hollywood films. However, by the 1960s it was already in decline! Well, other than cowboys such as Michael Martin Murphey or prolific and prominent composer, Joseph Hayden, what is Western music, but screaming phrases and words at the very top of your voice, keeping in mind the seven folds of melody! This, meaning no disrespect to foreign or Western classic singers. But when you have slogans against the current happenings of society or phrases diminishing the immorality of the government, you compulsorily need two guitars, a bass, cymbals and toms and a violin or piano to fill up the vacuum.

It was once upon a time when Western classical music history was understood to have been the descendant of Gregorian chant, and now our elders having weak hearts would press their ears while we increase the volumes of Avenged Sevenfold or Metallica. How much kudos do we find in listening to J. S. Bach, "Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme" or Handel, Messiah: "All we like sheep have gone astray". We have developed to heavy metal and thrash metal popularity with immoral videos or scantily clad women dancing to the “melody”. And there comes the popularity of tattoos and abuses, of twelve string guitars and Archtop Guitars, of Synyster Gates’s Schecter Guitar and Johnny Christ’s Bass Gear Rig, and many more to speak about. And somewhere in between comes in a fusion between the west and the east…

Acoustic Guitar was one type which we used to play as newborns in the field of music. Consequently our parents handed us solid bodies with no sound box, but with plugs and amplifiers and called it an electric guitar �" the workhouse of rock, blues, jazz and pop music. We could easily notice the thinner strings closer to the neck in the electric guitar, the design undetermined by the need for deep resonance, but by the need of the modernist approach and hence contoured and thin bodied electric guitar appeared. And then… what is metal without some distortion, clarity and warmth! And when electricity adds to the necessity you have had the best form of music to put the stage on fire! The sustain, sensitive pickups, low action, and thin strings make the electric guitar no less than an ideal instrument for fret tapping.

 What would it have been like, if there was no beat to accompany the rhythm, no style to show off in the backyard of a trendy composition, no passion or swap in the tempo �" and what else could bring these together but the oldest and most ubiquitous member of the percussions! And thus came up basses, cymbals, snares, hi-hats, toms together for a person with perfect coordination and synchronization skills.

The first recognizable ancestors of the modern drum kit were born in the Vaudeville era and by World War I drum kits were characterized by very large bold marching bass drums and many percussion items suspended on and around them, and they became a central part of jazz music, specifically dixieland. And thus they matured from the very first cymbals in 1100 BC to Electric Drum set in 1973, with triggers and trigger pads, all set to rock and roll the stage with diddles and paradiddles, drags and flams, with inverted flam traps and single draga-diddles...

And to accompany the drums came up basses, the best producers of low pitched tones and with the ability to cover a wide range of musical roles and the best part of the bass is that it is difficult to categorise it. There are different categories of bass depending on what it is needed for. For an instance, the double bass from the viol family, bass guitar, which is shaped and held like a guitar, bass horn fromthe wind family, keyboard bass �" and alternative to bass guitar or double bass, washtub bass or a bass drum.

The most surprising obsession about heavy metal or alternative rock, I found, was the widespread use of violins. You don’t always expect a shrill resonance to be hidden behind shouts and screams. But, just as politics in India is incomplete without corruption, metal or rock, seems deficient without a violin.

It is hard to believe that this small instrument, made of simple pieces of wood cut out and glued together, consisting of only four cords, and whose sound range and volume are relatively low, has acquired such prominence in the world of music. The prodigy is one of the incomprehensible phenomena of the history of mankind!

Bowed instruments may have originated in the equestrian cultures of Central Asia, such as the ancient Kyl-Kobyz! It is believed that themodern European violin evolved from various bowed instruments from the Middle East and Byzantine Empire, most likely from therebec, the Renaissance fiddle, and the lira da braccio.

It is interesting how the voice of the string instruments depend on their construction, shape and the kind of wood they are made of. But the more interesting fact of a violin is that, it has no frets to stop the string! A show totally depends on the players skill and ability to know where exactly to place the finger on the string to avoid rotten tomatoes.

From the oud to the Moroccan oboe, Middle Eastern music spans across from Eqypt to Iran. Influenced greatly by the music of Greece and India consists of a widespread variety of string, percussion and wind instruments. Indian music includes a multiple variety of folk, pop, and mainly classical music. While most of western heavy metal is related to drugs and frustrated sentiments, Indian classic is closely related to culture and mankind.

Indian classical music, an all-time favourite of both Indians and foreigners, seems unfinished without the Ta-Ghe-Tin-Dha of a membranophone percussion instrument. With a pair of hand drums of contrasting size and timbres, the playing techniques involve extensive use of fingers and thumbs in various configurations to create a wide variety of sounds, reflected in the mnemonic syllables.

Now let’s move on the wind instruments. Some more interesting facts lies on the development of the Sarod! But I am so not set to make a Wikipedia here! But what interests most is the lack of frets and the tension of the strings that makes the sarod a very demanding instrument to play, as the strings must be pressed hard against the fingerboard. Mainly used in Indian classical music, along with sitar it is the most popular and prominent instruments in Hindustani classical music. The sarod is known for a deep, weighty, introspective sound, in contrast with the sweet, overtone-rich texture of the sitar, with sympathetic strings that give it a resonant, reverberant quality.

Talking about sarod, the next instrument that strikes our mind is the sitar. The plucked stringed instrument used mainly in Indian classical music. It is believed to have been derived from the veena, an ancient Indian instrument. Used widely throughout the Indian subcontinent, the sitar became known in the western world through the work of Ravi Shankar beginning in the late 1950s and early 1960s after the Kinks' top 10 single "See My Friends" featured a low tuned drone guitar which was widely mistaken to be the instrument. The sitar saw further use in popular music after the Beatles featured the sitar in their compositions "Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)" and "Within You Without You". Their use of the instrument came as a result of George Harrison's taking lessons on how to play it from Shankar and Shambhu Das. Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones also used a sitar in "Paint It, Black" and a brief fad began for using the instrument in pop songs.

 It would be quite wrong to say that Indian music is only limited to classics. It is quite noticeable how closely it is related to jazz, one of its similarities being that they both involve improvisation. From this discovery evolved the collaboration between Indian classic and Western jazz music, in 1940, named Indo Jazz.

 “From the East to the Western Ind”, jewels like Rosalind and perhaps far better could be easily met and married, but music itself is one thing that can touch the deepest emotions of love, desperation, anxiety, frustration... what not! Expressions through mediums of sound and silence... pitch rhythm, dynamics and sonic qualities, varying from culture to religions will forever remain within us... touched by the deepest emotions of our heart.

© Aritra Ghosh