The art of learning classical music

Feb 7, 2010, 12.00am IST
BINDU CHAWLA.


Learning Hindustani classical music was a creative process working at the level of the subconscious mind, beyond the rational mind that turned into a deeply profound and spiritual experience.
The ustads or masters had unusual methods. A traditional practice in the initiation ceremony of a newborn baby was to sing into his ear when he was sleeping, a kind of baptism. A tabla maestro would baptise with the baby lying on his chest and beat the rhythms of a taal or beat-cycle on his back, letting the sound sink in. This would be done often, and eventually, the child might express a craving for the music and rhythms. However, only when he wept for it, or expressed an intense hunger for the sounds, would he be taught, the approach being not to 'feed' a child whose spirit had not awakened.


Learning was a soul-to-soul process, the ustad being like a clear mirror before the student. Facing the teacher each day, the student came to face his own inner obstructions and as the learning proceeded, those obstructions would come up like scum on the surface of the student's mind, making him extremely uncomfortable. In fact, the ustad would keep a hawk's eye to watch what was making the student uncomfortable, and then make that discomfort as obvious to him as possible. This was the technique; and many a master of old would then metaphorically 'beat the devils out of the soul', which could be traumatic. But nothing more than that. Allauddin Khan Saheb of Maihar was well known for this, but most of his students loved him all the more for it.


The road to creativity could be a monotonous one. Long hours of repetition would be followed by the ustad asking the disciple to repeat some more, because the swaras or notes had not yet been honed to a celestial shine well, not as yet. Repetition was the stuff life was made of.


However, inherent in the repetitions was the idea that the creative process was unravelled by the method of suffocation through sheer monotony. In a lecture, Pandit Amarnath of the Indore gharana explained this technique as an expression of one of the highest principles of creativity. He asked one of his students to sing a palta or exercise in a raga 50 times over, before an audience. By the time she had reached the eighth time, she changed the exercise a wee bit, on her own, out of the desire to escape from the monotony, just a wee bit, and he asked her to stop then and there. "Enough, this is all I wanted!" Panditji was totally against the 'rationalisation' of the learning process in universities. Music is not a subject but an art, a vidya realised in the soul, not crammed through textbooks. For this reason all old gharana masters were wary of textbooks not because they were themselves illiterate or ignorant.


In the impressionable years the disciple was debarred from listening to the music of ustads other than those of his own tradition. First equip yourself to appreciate your own tradition, as deeply as possible, and then only you would be equipped to appreciate any other.