Westerners have usually classified the elements of music as melody, harmony, and rhythm, but a raga is different from all three, and it expresses ancient Indian assumptions about what music is. Indian classical music is based on the raga, which has sometimes been roughly translated as a series of notes, but it’s not just an abstract scale. It’s more like a mood, and like rasa in theater, it’s associated with the whole universe and higher levels of consciousness. Notes, their sequences, and the ways in which they’re played emanate from something more primary, nada. This is a primeval sound that’s unified and too subtle for the ear. It later differentiated into the ragas.
The guitarist Sanjay Mishra wrote that a raga’s mood can take years to understand. Notes aren’t just played like striking a middle C on a guitar or piano. Instead they’re often raised to higher pitches by bending strings, sliding the finger up from a lower note, or running a metal or wooden slide up and down the strings. Electric guitar players do these too, and some, including Buddy Guy, Jeff Beck, BB King, Eric Clapton, Peter Green, Paul Kossoff, Duane Allman, and Derek Trucks have been revered as masters of bending strings and using vibrato to increase the expressiveness of notes. But most electric guitar players can only bend a string up to a major third unless they use a tremolo arm, which wiggles the bridge of a guitar so that a string’s tension increases and decreases to raise or lower the pitch. Many Indian stringed instruments allow notes to be raised to higher intervals without moving the bridge. A note can thus sound more like an energy that’s in flux than a single entity with a static identity. It seems more in the process of being created or transformed than existing as a permanent object.
The idea that a note is a consciousness-transforming energy is enhanced by another playing technique. Westerners who play stringed instruments frequently skip between several strings while playing a melody. But Indian sitar and vina players usually play the melody on only one string by sliding the left hand up and down the neck and by bending the string to reach higher notes. Because they keep the left hand on the same string, there is a continuous sound as they play a sequence of notes. Notes thus don’t sound as distinct as they usually do on Western instruments. They sound more like ripples in the same stream.
Indian music also uses drone notes that are sounded by open strings, which sitars and vinas contain. These strings aren’t meant to be pressed onto the fingerboard. Instead, they resonate with strings that are and also with each other. So the notes that a person plays ring against a continuous background of drone notes as though they’re emerging from a larger field that is more unified.
A listener’s consciousness is supposed to be brought closer to the origin and unity of the universe. I saw Ali Akbar Khan play a sarod (a northern stringed instrument) in Berkeley with the percussionist Zakir Hussain. Each raga lasted about 30 minutes and gradually increased in tempo. Towards the end of the raga, the tempo became manic and everyone in the audience moved their legs, arms, and torsos in rhythm with it. It seemed as though we were a wave of cosmic energy that joyfully danced. Ali Akbar Khan, the sitarists Nikhil Banerjee and Vilayat Khan, the vina players Chittibabu and E. Gayathri, and the flutist Hariprasad Chaurasia are excellent introductions to Indian classical music.