raga

The tradition & historical record

A raga ( RAH-gə; IAST: rāga, Sanskrit: [ɾäːɡɐ]; lit. 'colouring', 'tingeing' or 'dyeing') is a melodic framework for improvisation in Indian classical music akin to a melodic mode. It is central to classical Indian music. Each raga consists of an array of melodic structures with musical motifs; and, from the perspective of the Indian tradition, the resulting music has the ability to "colour the mind" as it engages the emotions of the audience. Each raga provides the musician with a musical framework within which to improvise. Improvisation by the musician involves creating sequences of notes allowed by the raga in keeping with rules specific to the raga. Ragas range from small ragas like Bahar and Sahana that are not much more than songs to big ragas like Malkauns, Darbari and Yaman, which have great scope for improvisation and for which performances can last over an hour. Ragas may change over time, with an example being Marwa, the primary development of which has been going down into the lower octave, in contrast with the traditional middle octave. Each raga traditionally has an emotional significance and symbolic associations such as with season, time and mood. Ragas are considered a means in the Indian musical tradition for evoking specific feelings in listeners. ¹

The Sanskrit word rāga (Sanskrit: राग) has Indian roots, as the Indo-European root *reg- connotes 'to dye'. Cognates are found in Greek, Persian, Khwarezmian, Kurdish. The words "red" and "rado" are also related. According to Monier Monier-Williams, the term comes from a Sanskrit word for "the act of colouring or dyeing", or simply a "colour, hue, tint, dye". The term also connotes an emotional state referring to a "feeling, affection, desire, interest, joy or delight", particularly related to passion, love, or sympathy for a subject or something. In the context of ancient Indian music, the term refers to a harmonious note, melody, formula, building block of music available to a musician to construct a state of experience in the audience. The word appears in the ancient Principal Upanishads of Hinduism, as well as the Bhagavad Gita. For example, verse 3.5 of the Maitri Upanishad and verse 2.2.9 of the Mundaka Upanishad contain the word rāga. The Mundaka Upanishad uses it in its discussion of soul (Atman-Brahman) and matter (Prakriti), with the sense that the soul does not "colour, dye, stain, tint" the matter. The Maitri Upanishad uses the term in the sense of "passion, inner quality, psychological state". The term rāga is also found in ancient texts of Buddhism where it connotes "passion, sensuality, lust, desire" for pleasurable experiences as one of three impurities of a character. Alternatively, rāga is used in Buddhist texts in the sense of "color, dye, hue". ¹

The term rāga in the modern connotation of a melodic format occurs in the Brihaddeshi by Mataṅga Muni dated c. 8th century, or possibly 9th century. ¹

Indian classical music has ancient roots and developed to serve both spiritual (moksha) and entertainment (kama) purposes. Conceptions of sound can be traced back to the Vedic period. Sound is thought to carry a metaphysical power, thus the memorisation of Vedic texts also required precise intonation. Raga, along with performance arts such as dance and music, has long been an integral part of Hinduism. Most Hindus do not regard music as merely entertainment but as a spiritual practice and path to moksha (liberation). In this tradition, ragas are believed to have an inherent natural existence that is discovered rather than invented by artists. Music resonates with human beings because it reflects the hidden harmonies of the ultimate creation. Ancient texts such as the Sama Veda (~1000 BCE), which also arranges the Rigveda to melodic patterns, are entirely structured according to melodic themes. The ragas were envisioned by the Hindus as a manifestation of the divine, with each musical note treated as a god or goddess with complex personality. During the Bhakti movement of Hinduism, which dates to about the middle of 1st millennium CE, ragas became an integral part of the musical expression of spirituality. Bhajan and kirtan were composed and performed by the early pioneers in South India. A bhajan is a free-form devotional composition based on melodic rāgas. A kirtan, on the other hand, is a more structured team performance, typically with a call and response musical structure, resembling an intimate conversation. ¹

A raga is sometimes explained as a melodic rule set that a musician works with, but according to Dorottya Fabian and others, this is now generally accepted among music scholars to be an explanation that is too simplistic. According to them, a raga of the ancient Indian tradition can be compared to the concept of non-constructible set in language for human communication, in a manner described by Frederik Kortlandt and George van Driem; audiences familiar with raga recognize and evaluate performances of them intuitively. ¹

The attempt to appreciate, understand and explain rāga among European scholars started in the early colonial period. In 1784, Jones translated it as "mode" of European music tradition, but Willard corrected him in 1834 with the statement that a raga is both modet and tune. In 1933, states José Luiz Martinez – a professor of music, Stern refined this explanation to "the raga is more fixed than mode, less fixed than the melody, beyond the mode and short of melody, and richer both than a given mode or a given melody; it is mode with added multiple specialities". The raga is a central concept of Indian music, predominant in its expression, yet the concept has no direct Western translation. According to Walter Kaufmann, though a remarkable and prominent feature of Indian music, a definition of rāga cannot be offered in one or two sentences. A raga is a fusion of technical and ideational ideas found in music, and may be roughly described as a musical entity that includes note intonation, relative duration and order, in a manner similar to how words flexibly form phrases to create an atmosphere of expression. In some cases, certain rules are considered obligatory, in others optional. ¹

Rāginī (रागिनी) is a term for the "feminine" counterpart of a "masculine" rāga. These are envisioned to parallel the god-goddess themes in Hinduism, and described variously by different medieval Indian music scholars. For example, the Sangita-darpana text of 15th-century Damodara Misra proposes six ragas with thirty ragini, creating a system of thirty six, a system that became popular in Rajasthan. In the north Himalayan regions such as Himachal Pradesh, the music scholars such as 16th century Mesakarna expanded this system to include eight descendants to each raga, thereby creating a system of eighty four. After the 16th-century, the system expanded still further. In Sangita-darpana, the Bhairava raga is associated with the following raginis: Bhairavi, Punyaki, Bilawali, Aslekhi, Bangali. ¹

The North Indian ra… ¹

The text above is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Raga”, available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence. ¹

raga is melodic mode in Indian music, according to the structured record cited below. This entry was generated automatically from that record and has not yet been reviewed by a person familiar with the tradition. ²

The source record links this tradition to 25 external registers, which can be verified through the citation. ²