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Thread: Mando in indian music

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    I wonder how the mandolin became an important instrument in Indian classical music. I am interested in the story. Also, tuning and scales.
    Gene Jusrag

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    Registered User Nathan Kellstadt's Avatar
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    Along the same lines, I would love to know of any books that detail a variety of scales and modes. I've seen some that contain plenty of variations on the minor scale and the standard modes, but haven't found any with a more international/ethnic flavor.

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    Registered User groveland's Avatar
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    I can't answer the first question. I'm not sure the second question is on the same lines, but now that you ask, this guy's got an encyclopedic approach to the mode thing... here... I think I may have found an error or two, but it's so hard to tell with these things... (I even saw a site where the guy says that harmonic minor is the relative minor of harmonic major - I'll bet that confused someone. Always gotta double check things on the web.)

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    Café habitué Paul Hostetter's Avatar
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    Carnatic (south Indian) mandolin pretty much devolves from one guy. He was referred to as "Master" because he was prepubescent, not because he was a master at the time. He's not a prodigy anymore because he's in his 40s. And he hasn't played a mandolin since he was a little tyke (note soapbar pickup):



    What he has played most of his life so far is a child's electric guitar tuned EADGG or equivalent, in five single courses. The only thing that connects it to mandolin is the approximate size. Mr. Srinivas has a coterie of followers now, all playing the same toy guitars. Once you get past the unfortunate labels and misconceptions you can just listen to his music and see if it floats your boat. He's no slouch. Lots of recordings to choose from, and he tours the US from time to time, which is of course the best way to connect with this music.

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    Café habitué Paul Hostetter's Avatar
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    PS: tuning and scales in Indian music are a life's work unto themselves. Why a mandolin? Indians love the Next Big Thing as much as anyone. Any musician needs some little thing to distinguish himself in the marketplace, and this was his. Or at least his parents'. Believe it or not, the modern sitar and sarod are not that old. The music is old, but the instruments have been evolving.

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    ISO TEKNO delsbrother's Avatar
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    Paul, get with the program! It's a five string mandolin with six tuners in an alternate tuning!

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    ISO TEKNO delsbrother's Avatar
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    How are violins tuned in Indian music? Just as in the West, or as Srinivas tunes his mandolin? BTW, according to his website and emando.com, Srinivas uses CGCGC.

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    Café habitué Paul Hostetter's Avatar
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    I quoted Srinivas directly on his tuning, although I took it from a bizarre little essay on the history of the mandolin which he wrote, and which I found to be so nonfactual and so fantastic that I wonder if I should trust any part of it. To this particular point, he said:

    Quote Originally Posted by
    The Mandolin has got four pairs of strings ( 8 strings). With these pairs of strings it is not possible to use it for Carnatic music. It is difficult to produce Gamakas (the prolonged notes), which are very important to bring out the nuances of classical music in the instrument in vocal style. So I replaced these four pairs of strings with four single strings and started practicing Carnatic music. And on my father's advice I added another string, the fifth for the base (Mandra sthayi). So now, there are totally 5 strings for my Mandolin - E, A, D, G, G.
    Totally. One usually lines out tunings low to high. Who knows what he meant by this? In any case, his recordings don't sound as though he uses a tuning anything like this at all, either low to high, or otherwise. 1-5-1-5-etc. is a typical way to tune Indian instruments, including violins and so on. The pitches aren't important, but the intervals are. CGCGC, or GDGDG, or AEAEA would be the same. And it's probably what he really uses.

    In the aftermath of a similar thread a month or two ago here, I relistened to a bunch of Srinivas stuff and refreshed my memory why I don't listen to him. It's not very good music, period. The electric cheapness of the sound negates all the subtlety I associate with good Indian classical music. Even if he was playing an acoustic instrument that had the capacity for a broader palette of nuances, his ideas aren't very good and his execution and intonation are just so-so. There are so many better musicians in India. The real puzzle for me is why people are so willing to buy into the idea that he's playing a mandolin. It's a toy guitar. His gamakas are prolonged by electronics. Italians prolong theirs with tremolo. Even other Indian musicians who play instruments like santoor manage to do the same: good technique, no gimmicks.

    .
    ph

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    If you want to dig deeper into ragas, there is a very comprehensive book entitled "The Raga Guide." It details 74 common hindustani ragas. It is almost like a textbook. Be forewarned- the ragas are more like demos, and not live performance pieces. very good and enlightening, and IIRC, it even delineates the notes of the raga on the staff. Just google the raga guide and you can find it or look it up on Amazon.com. I have it and dig it.
    best,
    Max
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    Paul is bolder than most. I listened to a few U Srinivas recordings and they didn't float my boat enough to use my emusic download credits, but i attributed it to my total lack of knowledge of Indian music. On the other hand, the flutist Hariprasad Chaurasia totally floats my boat. I can listen to him for hours - very trippy. (Flute is really my main instrument, although i've been pretending to be a mandolin player.) If i understand it correctly, what these 2 guys are attempting to do is to adapt vocal styles of Indian music to their instruments. Maybe the flute is just closer to the voice and works better. But i do consider Hariprasad to be one of the world's great flute players.
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    Café habitué Paul Hostetter's Avatar
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    I bought my first Indian music records in 1960 and saw both Ravi Shankar and Ali Akbar Khan live within the next year or two. I've been an avid fan of Indian music ever since and have attended hundreds of live concerts, which has been easy to do in the places I have lived. 47 years is enough time to form a few opinions, non? Hariprasad Chaurasia is indeed one of the bansuri greats (but check Pannalal Ghosh), and some of my other favorite musicians at the moment are Shujaat Khan, most of his famous relatives (Vilayat, Amjad), Shivkumar Sharma (check his Call of the Valley, a pioneering album from the 60s that included Chaurasia and the first slide wizard Brijbushan Kabra), sarod players Pandit Buddhadev Dasgupta and Rajeev Taranath. Not to ignore Ali AKbar Khan and his sons, and Zakir Hussein, the Yo-Yo Ma of percussion. These are Hindustani and Carnatic classical players, but there's also Qawwali, urban brass band, Baul, filmy music, a million flavors of local folk and temple music, dance music, it's just huge.

    The real deal about any Indian instrumental music is its likeness to the human voice. The ability to glide from one pitch to another as a singer can do is everything. The violinist and the sarod player have no frets to complicate things, the modern sitarist can bend notes. Flutes can bend. The santouri was a tough nut to crack but Shivkumar did it very successfully, coming from essentially Persian roots. The only successful guitar has been slide guitar. Srinivas can get the glissando sufficiently, but the music is so clunky compared to these other folks.

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    It must be, Paul. I haven't lived 47 years yet.

    Yes, Ravi Shankar is amazing, and he has a couple of talented (and pretty) daughters! You're fortunate to have been able to see all this people. I consider Hariprasad Chaurasia one of the greatest flute players, because in my view there is more in common than different in the playing of the different kinds of (fipple-less) flutes. The range of technique is large, but it's more like a large ocean than a lot of separate ponds. Fippled flutes are not that different either, they just make two of the variables (the direction and shape of the airstream) into constants, but all the other variables are still there.

    Besides the classical Hindustani or Carmatic religious music that's based on the voice, there must be purely instrumental styles of Indian music too, no?

    And of course Indians are very good at incorporating the most unexpected foreign instruments, like the harmonium, for example.

    The whole Bollywood thing is fascinating too.

    Altogether, just too much stuff for me. India is vast. I must check P. Gosh.



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    If there are purely instrumental styles of Indian music that don't connect to the voice, I don't know what they'd be. Maybe the brass bands, a little (they are after all an artifact of European colonialism) but even they have that swooping glissando. Anything with discrete notes, like a piano or a rigid fretted instrument, just doesn't fit, which is why they're not part of mainstream Indian music. Harmonium is seldom heard as a solo instrument, but it sure works well accompanying singers. I was listening this morning to Khadri Gopalnath, a south Indian saxophonist. He's made a niche for himself like so many others playing unusual instruments, and it's not the most peaceful music, but it's good, and he sure knows how to evoke the voice, even on that crazy instrument.

    .
    ph

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    Out of interest, Paul, what do you think of Shakti, and indeed John MacLaughlin's music in general?
    David A. Gordon

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    Quote Originally Posted by
    It's not very good music, period.
    Wow. Wow. Wow. Wow. Wow.

    There's a big difference between not liking something, as a matter of opinion, and judging it's worth as music. 47 years of listening or not. Wow. Bow Wow.

    Remember Shakti. You don't have to like it, but to call it "not very good music" is just beyond reason. Or just flame bait.



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    BTW Tiny Moore and Johnny Gimble both played a five string electric instrument and they called it a mandolin. U wouldn't tell them they weren't playing a mandolin.

    I really love U Srinivas.
    Aaron Garrett

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    Registered User Steve Davis's Avatar
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    Don't forget the amazing Chatur Lal on tabla.
    Steve Davis

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    Café habitué Paul Hostetter's Avatar
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    I don't like everything John McLaughlin's ever done, but he sure is a good musician. Some people just riff and fake it when they're trying to sound Indian, but he's really done his homework and plays from deep inside the music. I like one of the Remember Shakti lineups better than the older sessions, partly because the recordings I have are live and the instrumentation more agreeable to me: Hariprasad on flute and McLaughlin on simple guitar plus Zakir and Vikkur Vinayakram, the ghatam guy. Gorgeous stuff. Didn't care for the iterations with either Srinivas or Shankar, both of which I found frantic and show-offy.

    I've had some fine times with Tiny Moore, a gentleman and a marvelous musician, very much missed by everyone he ever touched. But if you hear him playing his Bigsby on a recording and you don't know it's him playing that, it just sounds like an electric guitar. You would never know it was tuned in fifths, or took up so little space onstage. Which is fine: it's good music, it's not supposed to be a mandolin statement. Jethro Burns played the mandolin, and there was no mistaking that. I love the stuff they did together.

    I'll never forget Chatur Lal. He was the first tabla player I ever saw perform live.
    .
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    Paul, later on in his site he lists the CGCGC tuning, and since it's palindromic you can't tell if he's going low-high or high-low. I understood the EADGG thing to be an attempt to describe "regular" mando tuning, hi-low (uh...with an added G?). But then again there's a lot on that site that defies understanding..

    As for the rest of your assertions...

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    Café habitué Paul Hostetter's Avatar
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    Assertions? You want me to assert something?
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    I'm a virtual ignoramus when it comes to Indian music, so I don't have a clue about whether the music U Srinivas plays is any good or not, but I kind of like the noise that it makes. I don't really care that it isn't the real deal. Lots of music I like isn't the real deal, either. In fact I often find that some of the most interesting stuff occurs when folks are bending, breaking, or ignorant of the proprieties. It might not be good music, but I kind of like it anyway.

    And with all due respect to Paul H's wisdom and experience, the debate about whether the instrument that Srinivas--or any electric, single-course mandolinist--plays is a mandolin or not reminds me a bit of Segovia's rants that electric guitars--or even the steel-string guitars--weren't real guitars or Hugo D'Alton's declarations that the Gibson F-5 was an abomination that had no place in mandolin music. If the guitar world can embrace everything from Martin D-18s to archtop tenors to Keith Richard's five-string Telecaster with open tunings to Charlie Hunter's fan-fretted, seven-string to Rickenbacher electric 12-strings, then I'd vote for accepting a little latitude in the definition of the contemporary mandolin, too.

    Just one guy's opinion.





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    If it's a half-sized electric guitar with 6 strings not tuned in fifths, why call it a mandolin? Names are more useful if they help describe the object. why does it matter anyway? Why are we so stuck on the gear?
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  23. #23
    Café habitué Paul Hostetter's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by
    Why are we so stuck on the gear?
    Or even names, for that matter. Well, in the case of certain people, I can surmise. Maestro of the Toy Guitar just doesn't have much snap, does it? Hard to get an agent.

    Segovia's rants are legendary. He advocated extermination for all gypsies for defiling the guitar just by how they played it. He devoted his life to redeeming the guitar from the grubby beasts in Jerez. Then he was massively upstaged by Django when they both played for the King of Spain. Django played Bach. That's a very funny story and there's more to it. Both men were playing acoustic six-strings tuned EADGBE.

    Hugo D'Alton may have been pissed off about the American mandolin, but the fact remained that it had four courses of eight strings tuned GDAE. It involved the same playing technique and it could play the same music.

    Srinivas's instrument doesn’t look like a mandolin. It isn't tuned or strung like a mandolin. It isn't played like a mandolin. It doesn't sound anything like a mandolin. Nothing about his playing technique overlaps mandolin much except in the vaguest sort of way: you pluck a string. It's not morphologically at all like mandolin: different body type and shape. Nothing about it says anything but solidbody electric toy guitar, which it always was. Except he chose to call it a mandolin, and his "explanation" of his changes, linked above, speaks for itself. As with Tiny Moore’s nifty li’l thing, if you simply heard it played, you would never in a million years think it was a mandolin. Even if you saw it being played, you’d still never think to call it a mandolin. Only because the guy playing it is hyped as a mandolin player does anyone think it’s a mandolin.

    Here's an Indian banjo:



    I kid you not, that’s what it’s called. You strum all the strings with a flatpick in your right hand,and push buttons or keys with the other. Here's another one:



    Does calling these things a banjo make them so?
    .
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    Cute. A cross of a banjo and an autoharp, two of the most deadly instruments known.
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    Café habitué Paul Hostetter's Avatar
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    What about these things even slightly suggests banjo (beside the name)?

    FWIW, they also have an Indian name, less commonly used: bulbul tarang.

    .
    ph

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