Baton swings to a different beat as two great traditions meet

East, West Meld In A Much-Awaited Concerto By Zakir Hussain. Will His Tabla Fusion Rock?
MUMBAI: Conductors, one suspects, aren’t too fond of concertos. Unlike in symphonies, where they steal the limelight, in concertos they have to share it—with soloists. There’s another thing. Soloists, usually pianists or violinists, come with their own ideas about music. That only cymbals clash on stage, and not personalities, is perhaps because composers took great pains to put every notation on paper, down to the lengths of the pauses.
Since concertos can be such tricky affairs, one must consider the piece conductor Zane Dalal has before him with more than a tittle of trepidation. For, it is a concerto with a quirk: only the orchestral parts are on the score. The soloist’s measures are almost blank. “Zakirbhai hasn’t written it out,” says Dalal, smiling. “He just says this is where the tabla part is.” But allaying fears of stage-fight, Dalal says it’s the audience which has over time transformed the conductor into “some wizard with a wand”, and in reality the conductor is merely “in the service of the music”.
Reassuringly for the piece on hand, it turns out that composer and soloist are one: Zakir Hussain; Peshkar, his tabla concerto, will have its world premiere later this month with the Symphony Orchestra of India (SOI), which commissioned it, and will be the showpiece during SOI’s tour to Switzerland in January.
While amiability on stage is ensured, there are murmurs of unrest among the presumed audience. ‘What kind of a concoction is a tabla concerto?’ purists seem to be asking with rhetorical flourish. ‘Beethoven must be turning in his grave.’ Well, Ustad Vilayat Khan certainly is. Keep the raga separate from the Moonlight Sonata—he had famously admonished. Dalal himself is no advocate of East-West musical melding, but this time he urges caution, saying that the tabla maestro’s concerto is no run-of-the-mill work of fusion. For Hussain, who was an essential part of the ’70s Indo-Jazz fusion act Shakti, the concerto marks a shift towards a far more ambitious project of synthesis.
“About three months ago, we had dinner in California,” Dalal says. “He said, ‘You know, people are asking I’m writing a new concerto? It must have a melody and you must develop it.’ He said no; the tabla is not a melodic instrument, though there’s pitch in the right drum. So it’s not got melody that someone can hum. It is pulse, suggestion, colour and points of sound.”
Some musicologists say that it is for the very reason that the tabla is not a melodic instrument that it is suitable for fusion with Western music, which fundamentally differs with Indian music in the way melody is constructed and rhythm is approached. In Indian music, the notes come on a single line, one after the other, with intricate rules governing the arrangement, but in Western music they can be bunched vertically into chords. The notes are different too. While Western music has 12 tones—the number of white and black keys in an octave on a piano’s keyboard—Indian music has in addition several notes in between, known as microtones. As for rhythm, it is much more complex in Indian music.
American composer Payton MacDonald, who has studied both traditions, tells TOI, “In terms of orchestration, harmony, the notation system, and the large ensemble, no culture can touch the European classical tradition. It is far more sophisticated than anything any other culture has developed in those parameters. But as far as the science of raga goes, the Indian tradition is without peer.”
Dalal says there’s no way one can join the melodic systems of the two traditions. “Because what appeals to Indian music and what appeals to Western music upsets and disgraces the audience on either side.”
In other words, when East and West meet in music, the result often sounds like a fake accent, where the vowels may be, say, American, but the consonants are decidedly Indian. But joining the melodic governance of one tradition with the rhythmic rules of the other is not so painful to the ear. A fusion of tabla and orchestra, for example, is in effect a joining of rhythmic richness and harmony.
Sri Lankan-born composer Dinuk Wijeratne says the difficulties in creating fusion lie very much in arriving at the right material or context. “It’s very easy to go one way or the other, but it takes a huge amount of work to find what I call the ‘third solution’, where both traditions are respected and the result is something that is hopefully greater than the sum of its parts,” he tells TOI.
Nevertheless, the question arises, why create fusion when the two traditions, by themselves, are vast and rich? The answer may lie in the effort to bridge their different philosophies. “Our music draws the listener away, beyond the limits of everyday human joys and sorrows, and takes us to that lonely region of renunciation which lies at the root of the universe, while European music leads us to a variegated dance through the endless rise and fall of human grief and joy,” wrote Rabindranath Tagore. It is no coincidence that as the 20th century wore on and the dichotomy of Eastern and Western societies as ‘contemplative’ and ‘practical’ started disappearing, more experiments in fusion started being done.
A case can also be made that the quest for fusion has for long been to tide over the ‘shortcomings’ of the two traditions. For example, about the tabla, MacDonald says, “The solo tabla repertoire is typically expressed with the use of a lahara or nagma, the repeating melody that delineates the rhythmic cycle. The problem is that no matter how good the tabla drummer is, it gets irritating to hear that same melody over and over again. This is where Western music can be useful.” In his own compositions, he uses Western orchestration “to create laharas that grow and change and reinforce the build-up of energy from a master tabla drummer”.
Dalal mentions the concept of rasa, something fundamental to Indian music, but which, he says, Western music last had in the plainchant of medieval monks. “Rasa is that extra bit all music should have... But the moment the lines of harmony appeared, the instinctive progress of Western melody was straightjacketed. There’s nothing instinctive about Western music anymore. It has become this glass perfection, a Swarovski crystal box. All we do is end up polishing it. But an Indian performer, a single voice, can instinctively project music. We can learn a lot about that spirituality that has been lost, but which is still part of Indian music.”
RHYTHM AND HUES: Conductor Zane Dalal will lead the Symphony Orchestra of India in the world première of Zakir Hussain’s tabla concerto, Peshkar, at the NCPA, Mumbai, on September 25, 2015
Quote:
The world by day is like European music; a flowing concourse of vast harmony, composed of concord and discord and many disconnected fragments. And the night world is our Indian music; one pure, deep and tender raga. They both stir us, yet the two are contradictory in spirit. But that cannot be helped. At the very root nature is divided into two, day and night, unity and variety, finite and infinite —Rabindranath Tagore
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By fusion, you retain the rich traditional compositional genres in tabla drumming, but get a more powerful expression of those ideas as the accompanying ensemble is integrated into the flow of energy in a much more direct and creative way
Payton MacDonald | Composer