In Conversation with Amit Chaudhuri Pt. II

IN CONVERSATION WITH

Amit Chaudhuri
Part Two

13 June 2024

Marthe Lisson
In your book Finding the Raga you write that your discovery of classical music and of the raag was like a religious conversion and ‘a new regime and a way of looking at the world’. This ‘new way of looking at the world’, I would like to know more about. How can or did the raag change your way of looking at the world?

Amit Chaudhuri
It was easy for me to say something like that because it’s easy to posit that statement as an ironical statement which also has its own truth, because the raag, after all, is not religious. Indian classical music, whatever people might want to think, is not religious. And in fact, a great deal, I think, of Indian thought which is identified with religion doesn’t have anything to do with God as we think of God according to Western or Judeo-Christian terms.

The way of looking at the world that I’m talking about, that changed for me, I suppose, had to do with personally feeling a great connection between the raag and the time of day or season (and, as a consequence, location) at which it was supposed to be sung at: a connection between the raag and the world that was conceptually new to me. This idea that the raag needs to be sung at a particular time of the day, or the seasonal raag at a particular season, made me begin to think of the music as a fabric of which the world is a part and vice versa.

It made me think of art as a fabric of which the world is a part rather than the world being the object – or subject – of that fabric (as in the idea of a ‘theme’, or description, or in a portrait), which is the way I had grown up thinking of art, as a representation of ‘reality’ (inner our outer), because of the ways of thinking that were around me and that I’ve been educated in. Art is about the world, I was told, it’s a representation of the world or of some aspect of the world; if not the physical world then the mental world, the psychological world. And some part of me would, whatever my actual experience as a practitioner or a singer, talk about or think about music in the same way. That it is an artefact. It contains something that’s about something out there, which is the ‘world’.

And the raag made me begin to realise that the world is incomplete without it, and the raag incomplete without the world. The raag is not a standalone artefact, like a painting on a wall. And it is incomplete without the world because of what we are discussing now: the raag and the world (time of day, season) comprise a continuous fabric of language. And the purpose of language is not, in this sense, to occupy a separate compartment, severed from the world precisely in order to be able to represent, comprehend, and describe it. That is how we have come to understand language and its role. But the purpose of the raag is not representational. And it reminds us that the purpose of language is not only representational. It is to be habitable. Language is to be aware of existing in the world. A continuity of language we exist in, which also confirms our existence and reminds us of it.

This was a kind of movement away from my earlier acceptance of the model I had grown up with, to do with what we generally call language’s ‘relationship with the world’. According to that model, I exist in the world; I have language; I’m going to use to talk about, or refer to, the world. With the raag, the world became part of language, and not a referent outside it. That is, morning is as much a part of the text of the morning raag Gujri Todi as the notes themselves (that is, the tonic, the flat second, the flat third, the sharp fourth, and the flat sixth) and the words of the composition I’m singing. Raag Gujri Todi is not ‘about’ the morning. The morning on the day I sing it – the light that morning, bright or dull, and its sounds, natural (birdcall) and artificial (machinery) – is as much part of the raag at the moment of singing as the notes of Gujri Todi and my approach to those notes in that moment. In this way, I began to arrive at a less subject-oriented idea of speech and speaking and music and art as I began to learn and think about the raag.

ML
The other day I was listening to a conversation between two musicians on BBC Radio 3 and one of the questions they asked each other I thought was a very interesting one: when you are on stage performing, what are you thinking about? Are you thinking of anything at all?

AC
North Indian classical performance is slightly different from the other kind of stuff that I do, although there’s improvisation in both. With Khayal, you know you’re plunging into something that remains an unknown, however many times you do it. In contrast to a classical performance in European music, there is no sheet music before us. What we have is knowledge, and, once again, an idea of where the possibilities of the raag, the time cycle, and the compositions sung that particular day will take us. But the North Indian classical performer is also, as they begin, starting, as it were, from scratch; this is why no two performances of the same raag will ever be identical. It’s why there are some singers who will say a little prayer before they start. It’s as if you’re thinking, well, “I hope I survive this”.

You are listening to yourself. You’re trying to be absorbed in what you’re doing. You’re thinking of technicalities, of course. You’re aware of distractions or of somebody in the audience. Maybe you are thinking of the monitor speakers. Maybe you’re assessing the kind of sound they give to you of the performance. You’re thinking of your accompanists, whom you may have never met before. And, crucially, at the same time, you are also trying to remove these obstructions of thought in order to be able to enter the raag. You’re doing all of that. Besides, of course, thinking, because it’s this particular kind of performance, about how your voice is doing because of the nuances that you want to bring in. You have time to think because it’s so expansive. You have opportunity to think of some of these things from time to time. The main thing is trying to get into the raag itself. To not completely go through the motions of elaboration, to actually feel afresh about how you’re going to progress.

ML
I would like to talk about your interaction with the musicians who accompany you on stage. What are their roles? Are they improvising as well or are they responding to what you are singing?

AC
There are times when one may not be aware right to the last minute which raag one is going to sing. But whatever raag I sing, one would expect that the harmonium player is going to be replicating and responding to the notes that I am singing on the harmonium in order to create the atmosphere in which I do further elaborations. One would assume that they know these raags. The tabla player knows that I’m going to be singing within rhythmic parameters and time cycles of a fairly limited repertoire. There might be 15 or so time cycles; if you include tempos then more. And they would need to be trained in those time cycles. So, I sit down to sing.

It’s wonderful that you’ve reached, after years of training, a place where you can play with each other in this way without knowing each other, and after meeting for the first time. It’s a wonderful thing which, I think, we in India, in classical music, take for granted and do not fully see the impact it has on the way we experience and perform our music.

With the harmonium player, there could be a certain degree of virtuosity in which the more complex things that I am doing could be replicated by them, or added to. In some cases, if there aren’t many available who are trained to that extent, which could happen in a place like London, then, you know, it’s fine. You just want that person to do what they can do without distracting you from what you are doing. With the tabla player, especially if you are the kind of performer who creatively plays around with time, you would want them to respond. There are little bits of playing around. Again, these are not premeditated. These responses aren’t necessarily different in the case of a tabla player who played with you yesterday or a tabla player who’s never played with you, although each musician has their own style, of course. They’re all having to respond in the moment.

ML
From the outside, it sounds like a very nice experience. Three people or more are coming together to create a particular raag in the moment. Which, I guess, makes the unknown waters even deeper. Because you don’t know exactly what the harmonium player will do, even less so the tabla player, or how the dynamics between you will play out.

AC
Generally, the tabla player and the harmonium player are there to support you. What is happening with khayal is, especially in the ultra-slow sections, the tabla is keeping slowed-down time. The slowing down of the tune that the raag represents, and the khayal takes to a greater extremity, is also true of the time cycles that the tabla player is playing in. Recognizable time cycles through khayal have been made unrecognisable. They have been slowed down…

ML
One last question. How do you choose the instruments that accompany you. On 11 October 2023, at UCL’s East Campus, you were accompanied by a tabla and a harmonium player. On 13 October, in the Haldane Room at UCL, you played with piano and saxophone.

AC
The simplest way of saying this is: on 13th October, I was recontextualising stuff, including the raag, in harmonic contexts. It’s not fusion. I’m not setting a raag to chords. I am exploring what kind of explorations and improvisations might be possible in the raag and through the raag or another structure within certain harmonic contexts and ideas. ‘Summertime’ is a harmonic idea. It is a harmonic idea for a jazz musician, giving them the space, let’s say, to improvise on that form. But I’m using that form to improvise on the raag Malkauns, because there was a point of convergence between the blues pentatonic and Malkauns’s pentatonic that led to that possibility presenting itself to me.

I’m looking at contemporary modern recontextualisations within forms of thinking which usually the art song or jazz allows for. It’s not me saying, “Let’s have a bit of raag and let’s have a bit of saxophone”. It’s like, “Let’s have this particular framework. The framework is ‘Norwegian Wood’. Let’s improvise on raag Bagheshri in ‘Norwegian Wood’: not because I wanted to one day, but because, one day, an overlap in notes and structure that presented itself as an improvisational and creative opportunity. And then, once it presents itself, I will explore that opportunity within the repertoire and vocabulary of this particular project.

ML
I could ask many more questions, but it’s getting late in India. Thank you, Amit, and see you again soon.

AC
Thank you so much. That was great, I really enjoyed it. See you again soon.

Raag or Raga?

Raga is an ‘anglicisation’ of the word raag; according to Amit Chaudhuri, a necessary one. Raag is spelled raga in English in order to indicate that North Indian words, which end with a consonant, do not end abruptly or completely. It is not just raag. It is pronounced RAH-guh, which in English can sound like RAH-ga.

---

In a talk and performance on 11 October 2023 at UCL East, Amit Chaudhuri continued his search and exploration of the question ‘What is the raag?’ Two days later, on 13 October 2023, Chaudhuri was in concert at UCL’s main campus, performing compositions from his celebrated musical-conceptual project and album of the same name This Is Not Fusion.

AMIT CHAUDHURI is a leading novelist, essayist, poet and musician. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. His North Indian classical recordings were first released in the 1990s by HMV in India; his experiments in ‘not fusion’, in which he brought jazz, blues and other kinds of music together with the raga, were released by Times Music and EMI in India and Babel Label in the UK. The second CD in this genre, Found Music, was on allaboutjazz.com’s Editor’s Picks for 2010. His book, Finding the Raga (2021), about his relationship with North Indian classical music, won the James Tait Black Prize in 2022.

MARTHE LISSON is the Editor of Think Pieces and a musicologist and singer by training.

***

Lead Image: Archive of Amit Chaudhuri