Hindustani Classical Music

 (Written by Sarayu Narayan and Venkat Narayan)


"The world by daylight stands for Western music which is a flowing concourse of vast harmony, composed of concord and discord and many disconnected fragments. And the night world stands for Indian music: one pure, deep and tender raga. Both, touches our heart, and yet both are contradictory in spirit. But this is natural. Nature, at the very root is divided into two, day and night, unity and variety, finite and infinite.”
– Rabindranath Tagore




One of the more complex and comprehensive of music systems, Indian classical music has roots that trace back to the 2nd millennium BC. There are two main traditions of Indian classical music: Carnatic, popular in the southern parts of India, and Hindustani, prevalent in the northern and central parts of the Indian subcontinent. These two forms, while sharing common roots, began to diverge around 13th century AD. Carnatic music flourished in relative isolation, retaining its purity in solely Indian roots. Hindustani music, much like plural India herself, ripened syncretically, as it met with and embraced the cultures of Persia and Central Asia.




In common with Western classical music, Indian music shares similar structural design, attention to detail, and instrumental variation, amongst other more “specific” categories. Standard pitch temperament is based primarily off of octaves that are divided into 12 semitones for both styles of music. There are ingrained scalar systems, rhythmic meters, composition styles in classical Indian music, similar to structural conventions of Western Music. Scales and meters in Western theory may be considered loosely analogous to ragas and taals in Indian music.




In contrast with Western music, however, the base frequency of the scale in Indian music is not fixed. As Tagore expressed, the primary focus of the two music forms differ - while Western classical music is the epitome of harmony, focused on chords and group arrangements, Indian classical music is the ultimate exponent of melody, focused on individual expositions of emotions and moods