The starting point for musical art in different civilisations is the role attributed to music. The music of India, like that of ancient Greece, tends to create an emotional climate, to provoke states of mind in listeners, to make them enter into a ‘rêviere’ that acts profoundly on them by detaching them from everyday worries, rather like a drug would do.
The system of organisation of sounds chosen to achieve this end is the modal system, which consists of a scale established in relation to a fixed beat, the tonic. The advantage of this system is that each note in the scale of the chosen mode corresponds to the same sound, at the same frequency. This means, for example, that a certain minor third, to which a particular expression is attributed, always corresponds to the same frequency, the same note.
This sound, repeated and expected, acts little by little on the auditory system and its mental correspondences. The ear becomes more and more sensitive and this in order to put a precision in the expressive range unknown in other systems. This is how Indian music can, for example, distinguish three types of minor thirds, one of which is melancholic, the second affectionate and the third expansive.
The musician mentally establishes the framework of the mode, of the raga, which involves not only the notes of the scale but also their frequency, their scrutiny, the ways of approaching and embellishing them. The musician improvises, that is, walks through the notes of the raga, forming arabesques, evanescent melodies, rhythmic formulas. There can be no fixed melody in a truly modal system because the vertical consciousness of the raga's overall structure is destroyed by the horizontal memory of pre-established melodic lines and the mode loses its precision and intensity. There are therefore no musical works, no songs that can be transcribed and repeated in Indian music. It is the musician who lives and brings to life this ephemeral music. Indian music is therefore in a way closer to jazz than to western classical music, because in jazz it is the musician, the performer, who creates the mood and not so much the piece or the theme, which are often insignificant in themselves.
Indian music is an emotional experience that one must know how to surrender to, that one must know how to undergo without trying to analyse it. Listened to in this spirit, it offers a new dimension to the possibilities of the art of music and allows one to reach a level of emotion not found in any other music. It then appears as the very language of the soul.
Alani Daniélov
