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<h1>
Full text of "<a
href="/details/WayMusicRudraVeenaTheoryTechniquesOfTantricMusicThomasMarcotty">Way
Music Rudra Veena Theory & Techniques Of Tantric Music Thomas Marcotty</a>"
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<pre>
How to conjure
with sounds
Rudra Veena:
The Theory and
Technique
of Tantric Music
with a C-90
musicassette
s/
The Way-Music
K. GO R tt fl
teaz 5
hemin de Rov6r
£H-1012 LAUSANNE
land
\
To the rickshaw
and the taxi wallahs of
Calcutta, without their
helpfulness and familiar¬
ity with all places this
book could never have
been completed.
Thomas Marcotty
The\^y-Music
DEC1SIO-EDITRICE
Rudra Veena:
Marcotty, Thomas
Title:
“The Way-Music”
Subtitle:
ISBN 88-900002-0-1
Publisher:
Copyright 1980:
Thomas Marcotty
Contents
2. Invocation . . . .. 9
3. The Method .H
4. The Respondents.13
5. On Occult Teachings.15
6. Styles of Thinking.17
10. Tantra.36
21. Notes.HI
■
Ragamala painting , Western
style , gouache on paper , de¬
picting the sound-wave-for -
mation Ruga Todi.
1. Foreword
7
Unlike many of our friends visiting India to get a glimpse of Indian music—
some to study the sitar, Thomas Marcotty could be called an exception as he
took the unusual step at the very outset in concentrating on the technical side
of Indian music and musical instruments. Often one would find him sitting in
the small shops of instrument makers discussing many technical points such as
the diameter of the strings, different qualities of woods, strength of glues used
to make instruments and so on.
for the first time in relation to Indian music. (The Jawari is the process of
filing
the bridge of the Indian stringed instruments in order to enrich its sound with
overtones).
It is not unusual to find many of our foreign friends who study Indian
music and have initial keenness but lose interest after sometime—maybe because
they find Indian music too different from the systems they are used to, or the
conditions in the country not palateable. But, Thomas Marcotty never relented.
No sooner he found himself challenged by the intellectual and technical riddles
of our music, he probed deeper and, in fact, started playing one of our more
difficult instruments—the Rudra-Veena. In other words, he doubled his efforts
on both directions i.e. instrument making and instrument playing and this cer¬
tainly is not the usual traditional manner in which students of Indian music
proceed. As a journalist by profession he preferred to apply literary and demos-
copic techniques to discover Indian music—not an easy task considering that
our traditions find their roots into distant history thousands of years away.
2. Invocation
Lord of wisdom.
3. The Method
11
The type of magic described in this book has its origin in India. It ranks
among the highest developed magic systems which exist at all. \et this system
is not based upon the common form of sacrificing—best known in the form ot
C
the slaughtering (crucification) of a human being or of a white cockerel—but
instead in the way of sounds, of music. At the same time it is not a matter of
purposeless musical art the way you hear it in the radio or performed in a concert
hall, but it is applied music, signal music, a ‘way music’, a ‘music of the path’
(1)
of a kind hardly known in the West.
i —
known these instruments by hearsay at best. In the literature on music the word
veena first appears around Zero A.C. in a handbook for the directors of roving
theatre companies. The author of it, a man by the name of Bharata (7), describes
m such detail how to play the veena that the reader of liis book soon realizes:
what he delineates here is—a change in words ?—a bow harp, but not the rudra-
veena which belongs to the family of stick zithers.
4. The Respondents
13
In view of these facts the situation was asking for brightening up that
peculiar twilight about the veena by way of interviewing experts on the subject.
In doing so, the foremost question arises how to trace them provided there still
are any experts. The rudra veena used to be played only in the North of India.
This means the triangle marked by Bombay, Kashmir, and Calcutta, thus essen¬
tially the Ganges region or indeed the very area were Hinduism, Islam, and the
diamond vehicle Buddhism of Tibet have merged.
Within this still vast area—for hours on end the traveller will see nothing
but paddy fields, children, and water buffalos—there are only a few promising
places for this kind of survey, namely the cities of Bombay, Delhi, and Varanasi,
but above all Calcutta. Calcutta with its alleged eight million inhabitants plays
in India a similar role as do New York for the United Staates. Amsterdam in
Holland, and for Germany Munich: if you are in search of what is rare, particular,
absurd, and obscure than you might find it in Calcutta rather than elsewhere.
So the nearest thing to do was to start in Calcutta and look for the experts
there. This was done by way of placing advertisements in the bi g local newspapers
like the ‘Jugantar’ or ‘Amrita Bazar Patrika’. These classified advertisements,
shyly placed sandwiched between the marriage market—‘Young Brahmin girl
desiring . . .’—and the Government of West-Bengal invitations to tender, scored
anything up to 30 replies each. However, only a small fraction of the respondents
were suitable to be used as suppliers of information. Either they had not
sufficient
knowledge and could thus hardly contribute anything to the subject; or they
could only express themselves properly in minority languages like Urdu or Orya,
or there were other reasons—illness, advanced age, lack of a common basis of
understanding—practically excluding them from being interviewed.
In the course of time—the actual survey (10) could, mainly for climatic
reasons, only be conducted always in the month of December—a group was
forming which consisted of three professional musicians, a dhrupad (11) singer,
two musical-instrument makers, one dethroned prince, a professor of music, a
lawyer, one archaeologist, a non-medical practitioner, an export trader, a drum¬
mer, an indologist, plus one artist who could, all of them, properly express them¬
selves in English, who had some precise knowledge of one or the other section
of veena- playing, and who were last but not least also to furnish information.
The question is, can occult teachings be the object of a survey by inter¬
views at all ? Is it not rather their characteristic to be kept secret and thus not
be passed on ? However, this question—it practically never arose in the course
of the survey, by the way—should be put differently: occult teachings used to
be and still are almost invariably the property of secret societies. Such secret
societies—otherwise sanctimonious communities—are associations of minorities
aiming at protecting each other against the threat of some governmental power.
Among this type in Europe one would count religious sects such as the jGnqstics
and the Cathars who, as a safety precaution, had to keep their convictions con¬
cealed. Or they are guilds or similar guild-like associations who for reasons of
amassing money or power withhold some special knowledge. To this second
group of secret societies belong the masons, the Greek mystery leagues, the alche¬
mists, the Italian mafia, the Theosophical Society of Madras, the Ku-Klux-Klan,
and in the old days apparently also the veena players’ guild who used to be organ¬
ized in so-called gharanas (12).
5 . On Occult Teachings
15
All secret societies—although the protective and the profit making aims
may converge of course—look very much alike. Who wishes to become a member
must undergo an initiation ritual. As far as the veena-players are concerned—
more about this further down—the initiation is partly identical with learning
how to play the veena. In addition to this, the secret societies are generally run
in a rather authoritarian way meaning that obedience, including unreasonable
obedience, is one of the characteristics of the members of secret societies. And
thirdly they use a more or less occult language by which they will recognize
eachother. Yet lastly they have at their disposal some secret knowledge con¬
sisting of information they will hesitate to pass on to outsiders.
This actually secret knowledge comprises to a certain extent procedures
of craftsmanship such as the problem of how to produce a certain shade of ox-
blood red when glazing and baking pottery. Along with this will then go magic
agreements, common customs, and cosmologies. And this also applies to the
veena- players. Their secret science is to a lesser degree based upon
craftsmanship,
thus for instance dealing with problems of instrument-making, with techniques
of touch, with the selection of the strings and the preparation of the veenas in
order that the instruments shall produce the desired spectra of sounds. By far
the larger portion of the secret science should best be imagined to be something
like a puzzle i.e. like a multitude of elements, a concoction of astrologv, theory
of music, mathematics, palingenesis doctrine, a mother cult, yoga teachings,
a wave theory, animism, i.e. the belief in a nature to all of whose phenomena
living is attributed, a theory of arts, a mythology, but above all a multitude of
magic practices.
16
repression. As far as is known they had never been persecuted, not even by the
islamic rulers and their mullahs. On the other hand—as opposed to former times—
playing the veena to-day is no longer a means of making money and gaining
power. In short, the basis for secrecy has become void.
But there is yet another reason why secrecy has become pointless: all
secret teachings—paradoxical as it may appear at first sight—are mostly not at
all secret in the proper sense of the word. They just do not contain any informa¬
tion that you could not find in the Ecyclopaedia Britannica or Germany’s ‘Grosser
Brockhaus’ or buy for ten rupees in Calcutta’s Central Avenue. To put it in other
words, this secret teaching does not consist of its contents, such as astrological,
mathematical, or magic knowledge. The actual secret about it is the way in
which this partial information is combined, the system behind it. What is con-
ceiled is not the teaching, it is the key which is hidden, the ties, the context.
6. Styles of Thinking
17
vast, unlimited concepts. To give a clear idea of these figures of thought which
are essential for the understanding of the doctrine a number of little exercises
might be interposed at this point.
When hearing this little story the average Westerner will be lead to assume
that the invention of the veena was going back to ancient history, in other words
should be dated about 2.000 B.C. or even earlier. Since, as you will immediately
presume, a story as vague as this one could if at all only have occurred prior to
the beginning of historical research. Working on an assumption of plausibility
like this you would at once commit several errors and bar yourself the entrance
to the secret teaching. On the one hand you more or less tacitly presuppose that
to-day Shiva is dead, implying that he may at best have had the idea of the
veena while he was alive. It would be more correct and beneficial to understanding,
however, to imagine that Shiva is still alive, not having thought out the rudra-
veena once upon a time but continuing to invent it again and again as long as
this instrument keeps being built—something that has become fairly rare in our
day anyway.
18
Let us sum up: playing the veena is a secret science. This secret teaching
consists to a lesser extent of regularly secret knowledge, i.e. withheld
information.
It much more and preponderantly consists of familiar and in parts trivial subject-
matter. The secret teaching, however, becomes transparent once you group
these contents according to certain rules and rearrange them in a way unusual
to everyday thinking. These rules are all based upon the principle of dissolving
taught relationships and putting the contents together to form differently shaped
figures, i.e. to think and to perceive differently. Part of these rules is that
ahis-
torical, not stratiform conception of time with neither before nor after, that
unqualified substantive perception, and thirdly operating with limitless notions.
7. On Asian Arts
After all that you may tend to suppose that learning to play the veena
must be something of a rather jphantastic nature. But this is not so. Looking at
it purely from the outside veena lessons to-day do not extremely differ from
private music lessons,in the West. This means, the teacher and his pupil are
sitting opposite eachother in a room whitewashed in green colour—in India
most rooms are painted green. The teacher plays to the student and he in turn
20
repeats. The only discussion will generally center around questions of practical
performance of modal music (15), in this case mostly micro-tone problems which
will be dealt with later.
the opus and its production are in the background. In other words, the
aim is not to produce an oil painting nor the capability to play fluentlv
and flawlessly a sonata from the music-sheet on a violin. What matters
is much more the intention to change the personality of the student —
23
Asian arts are copying. This means that the student may for years if not
forever be busy copying exactly and imitating certain examples — <L
this in turn means, Asian art is opposed to innovation. The pupil should
orient himself by the old ahistoric examples but not at all create something
novel, by no means should he endeavour to find an ‘expression of his
own time’, unlike Western artists who would often attach so much im¬
portance to this —
Asian arts are based on the principle of tradition by word of mouth (16).
Thus, there just is no ‘Introduction into the art of playing the veena ’ on
sale for example. Likewise the veena music has never been recorded until
recent times but it was learnt by heart and then passed on from one gener¬
ation to the other —
trustees of the oral tradition are invariably the master personalities who—
different from professors of fine arts and music teachers in Europe, Aus¬
tralia, or America—will embody this qualitatively improved mode of
existence and are hence called upon to meet a moral challenge (17) —
ijL Asian art goes back to the feudal era. Liberty, equality, and fraternity in
the master-pupil relationship are as good as non-existant even if master
and pupil—a thing which happens occasionally—belong to the same
generation —
These nine elements characterize the Asian arts—on this all respondents
were agreed. They do not experience this, under Western aspects possibly queer,
kind or teaching and learning as essentially different, opposed or contrary to the
Western understanding of arts and they notice in so far—despite occasionally
good knowledge of Western conditions—actually only small distinctions. This,
however, does not imply that the respondents accept the system without criticism
of any sort. Leaving aside for a moment all marginal objections, this criticism is
directed against the masters—called gurus in India.
The fourteen respondents of the central group, among them eight part-
time or full-time gurus, expressed in sometimes harsh words their disapproval
of their frequent lack of spirituality—or ‘lack of transcendental values’—as well
as the naked greed of the masters. This is, by the way, a favourite topic in the
Indian press because the guru nuisance in India—far worse than in the United
States even—is giving rise to the queerest practices: embezzlement, swindling,
and now and then more serious crimes too. The Government in New Delhi has
done something with a view to checking this national menace at least in the
field of music; something in this context would be the establishment of a network
of music schools (19) run by the Government. However, the order which would
be desirable will yet take some time to come because on the one hand the guru
business is deeply rooted in Indian everyday life and on the other hand it just
cannot be dispensed with in the field of Asian arts.
Why could one not do without the gurus ? Because Asian art—this was
not even disputed by the informants—is based upon oral tradition and could
therefore not do without the gurus, being the bearers of the unwritten traditions.
This was not, they uttered, a matter merely of a discipline like any other such as
e.g. business management but of a way which the student could and should not
go alone. Naturally now and again—‘sometimes’—one or the other item ought
to be written down. But the suggestion to produce a cassette course for learning
to play the veena was either rejected without giving a reason joder with the argu¬
ment that a cassette recorder was unsuited to perform the indispensable task of
the initiation.
Attached to this book you will find a cassette containing veena music.
Possibly you have already played off that music and—maybe—gained the impres¬
sion that this is a matter of a somewhat thinly strung sequence of sounds which
for volume could hardly match with Bach or the Rolling Stones. This is true.
But the veena does serve another purpose. As for its function it is more like the
24
pilot tone with directional radio or the test picture by the aid of which the tele¬
vision mechanics adjust the TV reception aerials to the transmitter. In other
words, veena music is in the first place not meant to entertain nor to edify. It
is,
odd as this may sound, foremost serving measuring purposes. And what is it that
is being measured ? It is measured to which extent and in which direction the
change in personality is progressing, which is, as mentioned above, the aim of
Asian art.
For better understanding here is at first a simile: when you are going
to see the doctor he may be able to estimate your body temperature roughly but
he cannot ascertain it exactly by the looks of you. That is why the doctor is
using a measuring instrument, a thermometer, which exactly determines the
otherwise hardly ascertainable temperature by the aid of a mercury column
meaning it measures the distance from the actual to the target value. The design
of the thermometer, i.e. the aesthetic quality of the measuring instrument, is of
no major importance in this context. However, the instrument must be calibrated
according to a fixed standard, in this case: degrees Celsius, in order to fulfill
its
measuring function. It is similar with veena playing. Here it is the pupil who
takes on the role of the patient the master being the doctor. The veena , the
instru¬
ment, serving as measuring equipment. For a standard yardstick, a scale is taken,
a set of acoustic archetypes from India’s classical music tradition by which you
may not be able to measure the body temperature yet the existential condition
of the student.
The sound-wave-formation
Raga Drabidi plays “a game
of dice ” with her lover. “Her
lips are coral-red and she is
dressed in fine silk”.
occur in daily life. The pupil will link up and intertwine these movements borne
by an often elaborate breathing technique in such a way that they appear, though
unnatural in their sequence, natural all the same, matter-of-fact. In playing the
veena they somehow go their own way, the veena-players indeed swaying to and
fro a bit. Yet their body movements hardly indicate anything. However, the
sounds take their place, the sequences of tones and the tonality which make the
immediate existence of the player, his situation, and his distance between the
actual and the target values, audible instead of visible.
27
an archer are not placed at the proper angle. He will notice when the feather of
the arrow does not before shooting off cut the earlobe of his pupil and he will
hear when the jute string after letting fly does not hit against the reed of the
bow. In short, the intimate knowledge of the fixed ritual process ought to enable
the guru to notice the smallest deviation and to form by the sum of these obser¬
vations a picture of the situation of the student as well as to determine the dist¬
ance between actual and target values.
With veena playing this is not essentially different. The guru is checking
to which extent the archetype and the image are corresponding; this he does
of course not with his eyes but by his ears. He hears where and when the student
is bungling, what he is playing not properly and superficially, how he is trying
to cheat himself, if he is trying shady tricks in order to get across difficult
pass¬
ages unobtrusively. Is he sincere ? Which areas of his character are underdeveloped
and childish ? Where should he be encouraged and coached ? When does he go
too far overestimating himself? Does he practice enough? Does he really desire
to make progress ? Or is he simply vane ?
The guru can naturally gather such insight only provided the ritual has
been unshakably fixed, i.e. the distance between actual and target values may
be determined with sufficient precision. This answers now the question put once
before, why Asian art is opposed to innovation and is ahistorical not tolerating
the ‘zeitgeist’ and what is new: nobody is allowed to assail the target, the meas¬
ure, the archetype, the ritual lest its diagnostic quality gets lost and the entire
system begins to shake.
You may now ask perhaps what the guru might be doing with the picture
of the state of affairs so acquired ? Does he draw any noticeable inferences from
it ? He will in general not indulge in any quasi therapeutical activity. Why should
he be restraining the course of destiny ? Why twist the inalterable will of the
Gods ? No, as a rule he will stick to his job. This means he will be sitting with
his
legs crossed on a linen sheet. He is playing to his disciple, his fingertips oily
blackish and notched by the pressure of the steel strings. The pupil will be faith¬
fully repeating. Maybe they will permit themselves the luxury of a cup of luke¬
warm flavoured tea with milk. Outside in the mist before the window—the smell
of vegetables and exhaust fumes—the rickshaw wallahs are beating their bells
against the drawbars. Taxis are blowing their horns. Both teacher and student
for better hearing put their ears to the pumpkinshells of the instrument, flooded
by the underlying roar of Calcutta. What they talk about is vibrations, techniques
of touch, micro-tones, and not questions of existence and riddles of the universe.
"By ten to-morrow again ?’ In taking leave the pupil is touching the horny foot
of his master.
28
29
The three Muslims among the group of respondents felt this question to be rather
unimportant. They believe the guru to be simply a kind of father without any
transcendental qualities. This view, however, should not be regarded as a result
of Islam but might rather be ascribed to coincidence: the Muslims all came from
families of musicians, have crawled among instruments when they were still
infants, had been instructed by their fathers, and hence hardly see not much of
a difference between father and guru.
The Hindus for their part though have a tendency towards speculative
explanations. The guru, they say, takes on a lifelong responsibility for the
personal
welfare of his pupil. This somewhat general statement they would specify upon
request like this: the ideal guru will charge himself with his disciple’s karma. He
will guarantee the transcendental fate of his pupil by his own rebirth. He is
pledging his own existence after death. This special master-disciple relationship
occasionally still to-day finds its expression in an initiation ceremony: the guru
will strip a bracelet crocheted of dyed wool over his disciple’s wrist as a token
of everlasting bondage.
Yet one may do without this transcendental aspect of the guru-disciple
relationship—described by one respondent as ‘old humbug’—when thinking
about it because a power independent of the master is being ascribed to the rite
anyway. The quality of this power may be explained by the the aid of substantive
thinking: he who makes the effort, who exercises the ritual, plays the rudra-
veena and in so doing sticks to the rules will here and now improve his own sub¬
stance and may therefore count upon a progress in redemption and a profitable
rebirth. In this connexion the guru appears merely as an administrator of the
Sou.Ttd-iva,ve-formation Raga
Kamodi represented by a
saint ivith a Shiva sign
painted on his forehead.
30
rite, a guardian of traditions and of the integrity of the tonal archetypes which
are going to be decribed in more detail later, though not as an active creator.
It should not be assumed, however, that the Asian arts, the rites, would
automatically turn their adherents into better people. Certainly the rites possess
converting powers no matter how one tries to explain these forces. But in which
direction does this change w ork ? In all probability the disciple w ill thereby
get into various kinds of critical phases, like the sensation of a vane selection
or, on the other hand, physical illness in consequence of hypochondriac self-
consciousness which might be—who knows in advance—just a transition, but
perhaps also the final point of a development. In addition to these normal risks
grave and lasting injuries may be evoked: the rites, including reena-plaving too,
present themselves more or less openly as the moral position finding of the
student.
33
In brief: practicing Asian arts does not necessarily lead to pious sub¬
mission to the fatherly God. Especially ueena-playing—it is said in India—is
also apt to bring forth demoniac people, black-eyed magicians who at their own
discretion will bewitch and curse soil and cattle lest the peasant fills them their
bowl promptly and abundantly.
allegedly eight million people. The shops and workshops—not so much the Eng¬
lish influenced banks and big business—are of course open on Sundays too.
Should you require new batteries for your recorder at half past two o’clock in
the morning—Calcutta’s mains supply is not very reliable—it will be a matter
of utmost ten minutes to get hold of them. At three a.m. the streets will suddenly
be blocked with tightly packed lorries painted in gay colours—pictures of deities
in the driver’s cabin, rice bags and vegetables on the floor—because three goods-
trains have arrived at Howrah station all at the same time.
In the Mahajati Sadan, Calcutta’s Royal Albert Hall, the drums will still
be droning and the sitars be whining. Peanut and tea vendors have placed their
carts, lit by carbide lamps, before the portal. At about five o’clock the first
pave¬
ment dwellers will slip out of their sheets died brown by vegetable fumes and
exhaust gas to cook a leek soup on their happily blazing cow-dung fires. And
then: a round-up, machine-guns mounted on lorries, policemen with lead filled
bamboo truncheons and with English military stockings. Nobody knows why.
From seven a.m. onwards the sun, hot and white like a flame cutter, will be
drawing her weld across the mud coloured skies. On the banks of the Hoogly
they are lighting the fires for the dead. Trams painted in a war-like grey—the
fenders fitted with iron thorns like barbed-wire to scare off fare-dodgers—are
creeping like huge caterpillars along the housewalls, covered with posters from
top to bottom: “Let Calcutta be the pride of heaven one day”, reads one enorm¬
ous placard on a bank.
34
JYOTISH-SAMRAT
Vice-President .
Sastri. M A.A S
(Registered) THE ALL INDIA ASTROLOGICAL & ASTRONOMICAL SOCIETY (Estd. i907
a.d )
Head Office: 88;2A, (C. T.) Rafi Ahmed Kidwai Road, (South Jn. of Raja Suhodh
Mullick Sqr 4 Dharamtala St ) Jyotish-Samrat Bhavan. Calcutta-13
Interview Hours: 10 AM to 11 AM 4 5 PM to 7 PM. Phone: 24-4065
xliv
35
sewerage system, failures of the mains and water supply, and the immediate
spreading of infectious diseases. This does not only mean influenza, malaria, and
cholera—the smallpox have meanwhile virtually disappeared—but also intellect¬
ual diseases, quasi religious fashions, rumors of all kinds, and political
doctrines.
Occasionally visiting correspondents and poets—from Rudyard Kipling
to Allen Ginsberg and Gunter Grass—usually only notice with a frown offences
against middle-class standards of propriety like the ‘busties’, hut settlements
of Pakistani refugees scattered all over the city, lepers, crippled beggars. Or
that
unreasonably Christian woman Mother Teresa who by nursing pavement dwellers
doomed to death is trying to denaturalize the eternal alternation of departure
and rebirth. The actual city of Calcutta, India’s economic metropolis, the literary
and musical centre as well as the joy of life of Bengal, the chroniclers and the
travellers hardly ever came to know. Even in a leaflet of the Indian Department
of Tourism you will find that classical sentence “Calcutta assaults the senses
like few other cities.”
10. Tantra
Ragamala-drawmg describ¬
ing the mood of the Raga
Malabo sound-wave-forma-
tion.
36
Sound-wave-formation Raga
Bibhasa.
37
The centre of the Kali cult is an area in the South of Calcutta of about
one hundred to one hundred metres, surrounded by small shops selling devotional
articles and by tearooms. The temple, tiled with bathroom tiles, consists of a
patio where Brahmins^of a lower standing decapitate the sacrificial goats by a
crescent moon shaped axe, an open pillared hall for the believers to say their
prayers, and separate from the hall a small dark chamber containing the idol
of the goddess. This is actually a pole-shaped black stone, possibly a meteorite
about
the size of a man, wrapped in cloths and with a three-eyed visage painted on it.
The temple, run in the form of a private and obviously profitable enterprise,
is partly financed through gifts partly by cattle-dealing, i.e. the purchase and
sale of sacrificial goats, and through leasing by leaving to small traders corners
and recesses who will there guard the believers’ shoes—the temple may be entered
barefooted only—or sell flowers. The Brahmins officiating in the temple will
also have to pay a kind of licence fee for being permitted to collect alms on the
temple premises. In addition they may keep the heads of the sacrificed goats, the
carcasses however may be taken home and eaten by the believers.
The Kali cult is serving one single and rather narrowly defined purpose,
namely gaining power by sacrificial blood. Originally, that is until about the
time when Christian-minded Englishmen intervened by the middle of the 19th
century, human beings were sacrificed in the area of influence of the Kali cult;
this was done under the idea that the strength of the victim, concentrated in his
blood, would pass into the sacrificer. This idea—the last man has been sacrificed
in Calcutta’s Kali temple at approximately 1870—is still virulent to-day. Accord¬
ing to an information by the Calcutta Chief of Police his constables yet continue
to find an average of 18 to 20 dead every year, gagged and with five to seven
cuts in their neck artery proving them to be Kali victims. Their blood is used
for ritual purposes and in most cases evidently drunk.
Officially of course nowadays it is goats only which are allowed for sa¬
crificing. On normal days there will be ten to fifteen of them but on special oc¬
casions, e.g. during the Indian-Pakistani war over Bangladesh, anything up to
hundreds of goats to the accompaniment of the roll of drums would be offered
to the goddess. Such a goat costs a lot of money maybe fifty rupees or about
eight dollars. That is why a Kali worshipper can only on very special occasions
afford sacrificing a goat. As a rule, all he does is to buy a handfull of yellow
blos-
Now, at least the Hindus among tantra adherents are altogether Kali
worshippers. Yet in the real tantra literature one will hardly find any hint in
this
direction. This literature, consisting partly of thousands of manuscripts written
on palm leaves, has but to a small extent been translated into European languages.
Therefore, a final judgement would be premature. Provided what is accessible
of it up to now corresponds to its entirety, and this might as well be assumed,
one could however venture to make the following statement: the tantra literature
mostly consists of loose and disconnected bits and pieces of messages which in
themselves do not permit definite answers. This evident lack of concrete con¬
tents—an unstructured mixture of praise, denominations, legends, and charms
expressed in a disguised tongue—should not necessarily be construed as a weak¬
ness of that literature. As one respondent was saying, these books had not been
written for their news value i.e. for what they contain. Their purpose is rather
to condition the reader psychologically, to get him off the track of linear
analytical
thinking and to motion him instead towards a new and better level of thinking
and perceiving.
After all one will find that this type of literature is marked by a certain
repertory of notions which is in so far also clearly repeated in the imagination
of the respondents. This is the idea that visual formations like buildings or pic¬
tures, i.e. light-wave-formations, will ensue acoustic perceptions or even simul¬
taneously indeed are acoustic perceptions, thus being of sound-wave-formation
(27). On the other hand sound-wave-formations, especially those produced by
veena-players, would bring forth light-wave-formations for their part, that is
visual picturelike perceptions. Or, to cut a long story short, a well trained
veena-
player will be capable of invoking apparitions at his own discretion. We must at
this juncture leave it at that and refrain from discussing the question as to where
these pictures originate: outside in the extraterrestrial world ? Or within the
inner world, in the imagination of the audience or in the imagination of the
player ? For the sake of anticipating we may be allowed to say: all of this is
correct.
What about the adherents of tantra now ? What type of people does this
doctrine with its not entirely agreable characteristics produce ? The model tantra
follower—this is at least what appearance will teach us—is rather more a happy
type of person, permanently on the move or moved, for this reason formally or
informally educated and occupied with artistic issues. He is sensitive to the
point of being a hypochondriac and easily frightened and disconcerted. He is
living and experiencing life often in a contrast to the ascetic life-styles (29).
The
adherents of tantra are following the motto: seeing, knowing, discovering, en¬
joying. In this way they contribute something Dionysiac and at the same time
Catholic, this contribution adding a noticeable touch to India and its daily life,
distinguishing and enriching it.
Perhaps you have been asking yourself already why the rudra-veena of
all things should be playing such a prominent role in the structure of imaginations
of the tantra adherents. Well, the tantra people are, as was mentioned before,
circling around a wave-theory (30) with their reflections. This means that a light¬
wave-formation, a visual sensation, produces a sound too. In inverse proportion
to that a sound-structure is thought to produce a picture, a sound-wave-formation
invoking an apparition. The rudra-veena , its form, its symmetrical shape is taken
for an effective magic signal. At the same time, and this must be fascinating
for the tantra adherents, one can produce sound-wave-formations of special
precision and intensity on the rudra-veena which in turn will evoke apparitions,
visions, images, hence particularly significant light-wave-formations.
43
45
The two dancing girls in
transparent dresses represent
the sound-wave-formation
Raga Rajnee.
Footprints of Brahma; a
pair of bronze plates used as
visual aids for meditation
mainly on the problem of
symmetry-asymmetry.
ninth pole of your garden fence. In the stricter sense of the word, however, light¬
wave-formations are only those visual perceptions which induce the observer
to ask who am I ?”—thus having the quality of manipulating him into the
state of meditation. In general this is a matter of geometrical figures, circles,
triangles, rectangles, and their corresponding combinations, hence formations
with a high signal value which you are simply—this is considered to be especially
effective—imagining or drawing with a ballpen on a sheet of paper in order to
achieve by this external activity via an echo effect the transit to the meditative
level of perception.
Since this is, though a musical instrument, at the same time a yantra ,
hence an object of a cult, the entire process, that is the commercial transaction,
attains a second dimension: the purchaser of the instrument becoming at the
same time the donor of a cult object. Of course he acquires the right of possession
meaning that his neighbour may not take the veena away from him. Yet he does
not obtain a full property right and may, thus, not resell the veena at his
discretion
nor scratch, mishandle, or even destroy it because by the purchase it has passed
to the property of the Goddess. In other words, although you have bought your
veena and paid for it the instrument will still be considered as leased to you and
no more. Instead of enjoying earthly riches you can rejoice in the idea to have
done something meritorious and made an effort promoting your some day for¬
tunate rebirth.
12. Instruments
47
This kind of trust idea clearly comes to light when one orders a veena:
because the instrument-maker takes the measure of the width of his customer’s
hands in order that this measure may find its way into the instrument. The
distance between the two pumpkins, i.e. the inside diameter, must correspond
to the width of both hands with the thumbs spread out so that their tips are
touching. In doing so the craftsman is following the example set by Indian sculp¬
tors who would also enter a measure of the donor’s body, perhaps the length of
his forearm, into the proportions of the idol of a deity donated so that the rela-
tionship between the donor and his gift may become, measure by measure, appar¬
ent and remain so (32). But if you order another instrument like a sitar this
principle of proportional correspondence will not become effective. No measure
of a body will enter into the sitar since sitars are mere musical instruments
lacking
that yantra quality as well as that very shape inviting the viewer to perform the
meditative transition.
Instrument-maker'’s shop.
49
of a skilled worker. A surbahar will cost around 1,200 rupees; but a rudra-veena
may use up the entire yearly earnings of a skilled labourer, namely 2,500 to 3,000
rupees (33).
The way these people are handling the wood is also very intrigui
onlooker. The instrument-maker at first lets the about 170
to the
centimetres long
50
A similar purity problem arises when making the ‘bridges’, the string
holders. According to the prevalent opinion again, they should actually be cut
out of ivory and be polished. This does in fact apply to older instruments. But
the veenas manufactured after about 1960 must do without ivory because_as
rumours will have it—ivory could in recent times only be obtained from elephants
which have been killed and no longer from animals which have died from disease
or decrepitude in the jungle or while working in the woods.
52
are rarely for sale, contrary to the tusks. That is why the bones of perished ele¬
phants may be lying about in the woods weathering for years. And only such
weathered bones—hard as stone, leaden, and outwardly dark grey can be
found in some distant corner of the workshop.
The question is: has the construction of veenas changed much? The prob-
ably oldest and still usable instrument—it is now an exhibit of a private
collection
in Bombay—is dated about 1880. Maybe yet older veenas could be found in
European museums but not in India, the climate causing the wood to get warped
and insects gnawing the pumpkin hulls, formerly not impregnated with wood
preservatives, until they become as thin as paper. Musical history research too
does not go back very far. The first exact description of a veena is dated about
1790. Its author, an Englishman stationed in India by the name of Francis Fowke,
is decribing in a letter what a rudra-veena looked like, how it was played, and
how it had to be tuned properly. The pitches and the intervals Fowke ascertained
by the aid of a harpsichord, i.e. a piano. He even added two drawings to his
with seven strings—four main strings plus three drone cords—but with eight
strings: four main and four drone cords. Yet nobody will deny that the eight¬
string veenas sound richer. The additional eighth cord improves the veena under
the aspect of a musical instrument. The richness in sound which is thus gained
is, however, in the opinion of the majority of the respondents at too high a price.
It is held that thereby a cosmological ratio of figures peculiar to the veena is
upset. It is a matter of losing the figure 4 Pi’ which is used when calculating the
circumference of circles or the volume of circles and spheres. The figure c Pi’
called in mathematics a Transcendental irrational figure’ is inherent in the veena
because the Indian scale comprises 22 tones (42). As opposed to the Western
scale it does not consist of twelve half-tones. Once you divide 22, hence the
number of tones within an octave, by Ti\ i.e. by 3.14159, you will invariably
arrive at seven and not at eight. In short, eight string veenas , although they
might sound richer, should be rejected for higher and magically numerical reasons.
A veewo-player need not worry, at least not in this way, about the problems
thus arising the question about what is beautiful, the general taste of the public,
and the economic risks hidden behind all that. His music is not primarily judged
by the standards of aesthetics. And he will refrain from composing any music
56
himself. This is why he is spared the joy and the sorrow of the genius. Nor will
he be disturbed by the public and its quickly changing predilections. Words like
entertainment and edification are missing in his vocabulary. Because he just
does not perform artistic music and this is the decisive difference.
But what does he do then, you might ask ? Can one make any music at
all which is not artistic music ? Yes, one can. The ueena-players, and this can be
proved with regard to the last 2,000 years, have invariably produced a signal-
type music. And what is this supposed to mean ? The answer is: tones, acoustic
oscillations propagating in space may also be employed for the transmission of
messages and are comparable to a language. This is to say that you agree with
your fellow-men or with the members of your group on certain sequences of
tones. By agreement you will then attach certain contents to these sequences
of tones and thereby create a code for yourself enabling you to make yourself
understood. This code might be a regular language like old Greek or modern
French, or it might be a specially devised repertory of signs such as e.g. the
deaf-
and-dumb alphabet, the Braille script, the Morse alphabet, or, as it were, musical
sequences of tones.
It was by way of such musical code systems, which have only become
obsolete with the invention of radio telephony, that in the past Occidental people,
too, were communicating with eachother. Just think of the horn and bugle signals
of a hunt or of past wars. They too were agreed signal repertories enabling
soldiers
or hunters to communicate over long distances and to pass on messages. The
veena -music is serving the same purpose. As opposed to Bach or the music of the
Beatles it is not purposeless but a purposeful system of information and a kind
of language. The only thing is that this type of language is not meant for com-
munication between one man and the other but instead and more about that
later_for communication with the transcendental world
On the vertical or Y-axle the varying highs and lows of the melody thread
can he marked. Here too the untrained ear will meet with certain limits of com¬
prehension at first, because the Indian octave consists of 22 micro-tones and not
of 12 half-tones like the Occidental octave. In theory the Indian octave and its
micro-tones raise a lot of difficult questions (see note 42). In practice, however.
FJ
Mendicancy is an old and
important element of Indian
life and culture. Most of dW
sages , including Gotarno
Buddho , have made their
living through begging. On
this picture (the sound-wave-
the veena -players easily produce these 22 notes, partly by shifting the frets on
the tube in a suitable position and partly by tightening the strings laterally
with the fingers of the left hand (see note 68).
On the one hand such an octave of 22 small intervals has many advantages.
A signal, and it is signal music what we are talking about, serves its purpose the
better the more it is unmistakable. To put it in other words, a veena -player can
produce highly complex sound-wave-formations with his 22 tones and can thus
express himself much more precisely than, say, a guitar-player who will only
have twelve tones at his disposal. Yet it has to be admitted that this micro-tone
system, how to play 22 tones on 12 frets per octave, is one of the unrevealed
problems of Indian musical theory. The number of the micro-tones, defined as
the smallest just noticeable intervals (45), actually is not fixed at all in the
light
of this definition and therefore appears to be chosen deliberately. Maybe the 1 i
problem is at the back of this too. According to this the octave must contain
22 micro-tones because the number of the (seven) strings of the veena as well as
the number of the (seven) basic notes, corresponding to the white keys on the
piano, make 22 provided one multiplies seven by 3.14159265 or the transcendental
irrational figure ‘Pi’. The respondents, highly interested in this subject, were,
alas, not in agreement whether the micro-tones could be transformed into the
conventional half-tones or full-tones by addition or by division, or whether,
this being a third alternative, they could only be perceived relatively, i.e. as
slightly raised or slightly lowered notes in the frame of an octave nevertheless
containing 12 half-notes.
60
62
pupil will not have learnt for his own sake nor simply for the sake of the desired
improvement of his own existence. No, he has achieved two things at a time:
firstly he has changed his mind in such a manner as to enable him to fulfil the
tasks of a medium. At the same time he has learnt a language or a musical code¬
system which permits him to enter into a dialogue with supernatural powers
thus applying his capability of a medium in practice.
Just one more word with regard to these powers: being an Occidental
person the reader will be accustomed to a notion of God which originated on the
Sinai peninsula. In short, you will, if at all, imagine Him to be a paramount
being upon whom you will depend though He is independent of you. He simply
floating over the waters and generally doing quite well without you. The deities
of the Himalayas, and there are but these two religiously really fertile regions on
earth, are however of a somewhat different quality. They cannot exist without
somebody adoring them. They, the supernatural ones, are thus dependent upon
the offerings of their believers and are, therefore, fundamentally inclined to make
that barter mentioned before.
Now you may object that veena music is not suited for a sacrifice since
it is almost infinitely reproducible so that the offerer is not really staking
anything
and is not giving his offering up. If you look at it that way this might be
correct.
But you must take the following element into consideration: veena -playing
used to be in general a performance to order. Thus the neena-players normally
do not play for themselves but as ordered by a client, that is for a fee (46). The
offering, therefore, is not the sound-wave-formation but it consists of the three
chickens, the measure of rice, x the scarf, or the money which you, the offerer,
are
giving the veena -player for performing a sound-wave-formation for you and for
acting as a go-between or an intermediary for transcendental powers.
to be seated on a linen cloth. But above all this: he must play very carefully
and correctly. J
The second question, namely the one on the orientation of the power
is in principle quite easy to answer: the sound-wave-formations are attached
to certain deit.es and demons. By his music the tiema-player is transforming
t e power column into the corresponding characteristic oscillation pattern. In
doing so he ,s producing an unmistakable call-sign, an unequivocable ‘Here am I
and there are you’ or ‘I am you, you are I’, a sound-wave-formation the fre¬
quency spectrum of which is corresponding to one deity only and which can
thus be received and understood exclusively by this very one.
67
In this way the invocation resembles very much a most earthly telephone
call: instead of dialling your live, six, or seven or so figures to get your
subscriber
‘be eceno-playe, is choosing five, six, or seven notes from the twenty-,„„ note
Indian scale in order to ge, in toueh with his transcendental partner. As opposed
to the layman, who is ignorant of the seience of sacrificing he will thus be able
to find his way in India’s overpopulated Olympus and he null have at h,s d.sposal
an intricate system of emergency-calls with 34,848 extensions which corresponds,
as said above, to the ultimate number of sound-wave-formations.
To start with there are Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva who are creating,
maintaining, and destroying life. Associated with them are their female incarna¬
tions like the Goddess Lakshmi dispensing riches and Sharasvati, invoked by the
believer for wisdom and cognizance, or Durga-Kali who gives the power. Then
there is the elephant headed Ganesh responsible for successful business, the
Goddess Rati donating and withdrawing fleshly lust, or Sitala responsible for
small-pox epidemics, and they all have their own combination of tones the same
as we have our telephone-numbers. Along with these recognized deities goes a
multitude of demons, mountain sprites, tree spirits, personified stars, and natural
powers like rain and wind which the veena-player may invoke, ask for help, and
mobilize. In short, within the network of this transcendental telephone one
may find help for all vicissitudes of life, at least in theory.
69
for your distant lover, whoever this might be, music, a signal-like sequence of
tones, the performance of an acoustic archetype, may have a soothing effect
even if you possibly explain this effect away as suggestive; the effect is
nevertheless
obvious though it may have been produced simply by the veena-player’s con¬
centration.
Of course one may object that such a suggestive effect was not yet equiva¬
lent to the afore-mentioned lifting of a law of nature, the aim all magicians and
hence all veena-players claim to pursue. This is possibly true. But here the
problem
arises which phenomena you are willing to accept as according to the laws of
nature ? If for example you consider coincidence, defined as a statistical pro¬
bability, to be part of the laws of nature it will, however, be possible to produce
a so-called c wild shot’ that is to bring about a statistically improbable event.
Within a certain framework, particularly in the psychosomatic field, veena-
playing can set in motion the mechanism of a self-induced prophecy: an ardent
desire, articulated and reaffirmed through a musical-magic ceremony, will in¬
variably contain the nucleus of a prognostic. This prediction may become true
with a probability which is actually contrary to the rules, provided the believer,
encouraged and strengthened by the magic practice, changes his behaviour,
though to a hardly noticeable extent, in the direction of the fulfilment of his
wish, be it the love of a girl longed for, the delivery from headache, or pecuniary
gain. In short, one cannot say that the sound-wave-formations have no effect
whatsoever.
Sceptics could object that nobody had yet seen a river flow upstream or
witnessed a man fly by himself, and if there is talk of any effects, then it must
be the consequence of a spiral of silence. Here is an example: if a veena-player
is playing ‘Malhar’, the sound-wave-formation for invoking rain, it might after¬
wards be raining or not. If it does not the veena -player and his client will keep
silent about their flop and will not make it known. If it does indeed rain they
70
will be telling anybody who wishes to listen about their success. In this manner
keeping silent and and telling others will eventually create a psychological atmos¬
phere, a climate, where the successful people will become ever louder and the
failing ones will die away.
Let us assume once again that c Malhar’ is being played without the sound¬
wave-formation producing any rain. The client, maybe a big estate-owner, will
then think that he has possibly employed the wrong veena-player, one who is
incapable of acting as a medium. The ueena-player on his part might argue that
his fees had been insufficient in view of the unexpectedly complicated constella¬
tion. But the system, that is the efficiency of it, will no longer be at issue.
This
is how the sound-wave-formations act. Perhaps they work subjectively. But
whichever way one twists things around they do have an effect.
So far we have been talking mainly about the system of veena- playing.
Surely you will have wondered what the position of the veena -player might be.
How does he see himself? What are the technical problems he has to tackle
when playing? For better understanding let us assume that you yourself are a
4 Beenkar\ that is a veena-player, and you wanted to play ‘Bhairavi’—one of the
simpler tasks—which is a Durga-Kali sound-wave-formation in order that the
goddess may give you new or more strength.
How to start ? First of all you would have to prepare for the essential
ritual which means that you would in the proper order of things have to discharge,
then take a bath, and finally put on clean garments. In doing so you will have
met the substantial requirements for any activity as a medium. Now the question
arises where to play, meaning that you will have to look for a favourable spot
under the aspect of terrestrial magnetism. This will usually be the point of your
room which is most agreable to you. If you have any doubts as to that, then
you ought to choose the place where you normally spread out your sleeping-mat.
This problem of a suitable site, which is fairly easy to solve within your own
appartment, will be causing you some trouble when you want to play outside
in the open air and in a surrounding little familiar to you. You will then have
to get settled as best you can. There are some Indian sacral buildings where the
architects have already taken care of the most suitable spot. Occasionally one
finds courtyards, recesses or other places earmarked for veena-playing (48).
Once you have found your place you will use considerable care on deter¬
mining the four cardinal points because you are normally supposed to be playing
with your body facing North. If you are in possession of a compass this task
will be easily fulfilled. You might be marking the North-South line by a shoe
or some other mark. Should you not have a compass then you will climb on to
the roof of your house during the night and orient yourself by the polar star.
Should it still be daylight then you can determine true South by the aid of the
sun, i.e. you find out when a pole, which you have driven vertically into the
ground, is casting the shortest shadow and is thus indicating the highest position
of the sun. You must not rely on your watch nor on the assumption that the sun
will be in its zenith at twelve o’clock noon. It takes the sun about 16 minutes
to cross even a small country like Switzerland from East to West. The highest
position of the sun, and that is true South, can therefore be up to eight minutes
slow or fast in relation to the 12 o’clock mark. In a vast country like India this
deviation may amount to minus one hour in Assam or plus one hour in Sindh.
When you have ascertained the four cardinal points and you have found
your place then you may turn to your instrument. You will now have to decide
to what pitch you wish to tune your rudra-veena. In this connexion it must be
remembered that in Indian music as opposed to Occidental music no absolute
pitch of notes is known, such as the chamber-A with its 440 oscillations per
minute. Looking at it this way you may tune your instrument so high or so low
as you wish and after all you are playing alone and there will be no need to adjust
yourself to the tuning of an accompanying orchestra. Yet you should make as
little use of this liberty as possible. You will rather tune the veena to match
your own frame of mind and choose a pitch which will correspond to the mood
of your body.
This harmony of your body and the veena can be obtained by a more or
less complicated procedure. The simplest method not requiring any musical
knowledge just means trying to sing the lowest note which you may be able to
produce without difficulty. All you do is to start with a tone agreable to you
and then to sing down the scale until you will not get any lower after two or
three trials. Beginning with this lowest tone, which you will now have to count,
you will go up four notes to reach a possibly not ideal though quite acceptable
basic tone for the veena. It is to the basic note, the tonic, that you will tune
the seventh cord which is strung sideways on the far side of the beam and also
the fourth string which is the second—counting from your chin—of the four
upper cords. The first and the second string running along the near side of the
beam you will also tune to this note if one (second cord) or two (first cord)
octaves
higher.
You will have got a big step further now: you will have found the pitch,
the basic tone uniting you and your veena for the rest of your life and accompany-
ing you unalterably; this is the X-axle the unchanged tone of which will be
forever the backbone of your music. If you now go to the piano and touch this tone
just to try you will find it to be between F and H and as a rule near G (208
Hertz),
A (220 Hertz) or an intermediate value. All this will only work on one condition:
that you are of male sex. Should you be of female sex thus having a higher pitch
then you ought to be prepared to face a sad message: as tradition will have it,
playing the veena is a men’s job (49). Being a female you must not even touch
a rudra-veena lest you might run into the danger of becoming barren, thus being
branded with the ignominy of remaining without children. The exception of the rule:
The somewhat boorish procedure, related above, for the determination Female veena
player.
of the basic tone does approximately lead to the envisaged target though it
cannot satisfy the inquisitive intellect. This is why we shall start again and
this time as follows: according to the tantric doctrine you must imagine your
body, from skull to anus excluding the legs, to be divided into several partitions.
Between each of these partitions there is one power-knot called chakra. These
seven chakras , localized in the anus, the intestinal, the solar plexus, the heart,
larynx, root of the nose, and cerebrum region, hence the figure seven, you will
have to multiply now by 2 Pi. This means you calculate 3.14159265 + 3.14159265
== 6.2831852 X 7 = 44. Taking the Indian octave having 22 micro-tones, yet
the volume of the untrained human voice being two octaves, this figure 44 as
calculated above will correspond to the volume of your voice projected to the
seven power-knots of your body. This amounts to your average or median tone_
for men it is usually not far away from the C—being in the neighbourhood of
your heart chakra hence exactly halfway between your skull and your anus. If
you now, starting from this cardiac sound, go four notes downward you arrive
again, this time by way of the descending scale, approximately at your basic
tone to which you will be tuning your veena.
The procedures for the determination of the cardiac sound described here
are not undisputed among insiders, as might be mentioned for better under¬
standing. The opponents to this argue in particular that the 2-Pi calculation
was an undesirable magic practice. In addition, they say, the whole calculation
was wrong anyway: if you multiply 2 Pi by seven then the result is not 44 but
43.982296. Moreover according to respect and custom the disciple ought to take
over and to pass on his master s basic tone. The advocates of the theory however
maintain that a sensible guru would never press his basic tone upon his pupil
and instead encourage the disciple to seek and to find himself the individual
harmony of his body and his instrument. The tiny calculatory difference may
exist on paper, they say, but it is of no bearing in the framework of organic
life and of the principle of relative relations prevailing there.
You will by now have found the proper place, determined the four cardinal
points, ascertained your basic tone, and tuned all seven strings of the veena 7
77
exactly—for tuning the third and fifth string the reader who is better versed
in music is referred to the annex (51). You wdll no\y do one more thing and that
is to check by touching all cords whether the now tightly strung steel or bronze
wires will produce ‘om’ or ‘ahm’. To put it differently, the point is whether or
not the strings are producing sufficient overtones in addition to their proper
tone. Do they not only say ‘ah’ but is the wave-shaped oscillation of the wire
divided in halves and thirds ? Does a tower of fifths build up on top of the ‘ah’
tone touched, hence an energy column sounding ‘mmm’ before it grows up beyond
the perceptivity of the human ear into the area of quiet ?
As you may see from some illustrations in this book the strings of the
veena as opposed to those of a guitar are not tightened over a vertical bridge,
i.e. a kind of wall where the vibrations of the cords will refract like seawaves
on a breakwater. The wires rather end up in a horn or ivory plate (52) a little
bigger than a match-box. This plate is, however, not even but instead ground
with a curve hardly noticeable to the eye. That is why the vibrations of the
strings do not refract. They rather run out like waves on a beach and then turn
backwards unrefracted, cutting and dividing by rolling back the frequency of
the oncoming waves. This is how in the ideal case not only a basic tone or a
simple oscillation of the wire will be produced but a long resounding frequency
agglomeration which is reduced into ever smaller sinus curves by halves, thirds,
and fourths finally to fade away into zero beyond the perceptivity of the human
ear. This ideal case does in practice not always occur. The overtone producing
curve of the ivory plate will with the time be polished off by the pressure of the
strings. The sound will become dull. A careful veena -player will therefore if
neces¬
sary regrind this plate with file and sandpaper until the oscillations regain a
slight upward slant flowing back again into the vibrating string.
Leaving aside here the business of planet stones and amulets, you may
now turn to actual playing and in doing so you first visualize a mantra or magic
syllable. This could be the mantra L Hring\ articulated deep in your throat and
which is attributed to the Goddess Kali or it might be the Aim Hring because
the mantra Aim will be especially activating a female goddess. You will then
press the wire plectra (53) on the fingertips of the forefinger and the middle
finger of your right hand, touch with your left middle finger lightly an oil soaked
cottonwool ball to make the fingertips glide smoothly on the cords, get hold of
the veena , and strike the basic note at first, i.e. the descending fourth down to
your cardiac sound with which all sound-wave-formations begin.
You will repeat this basic note and stabilize it; and departing from this
note you will mould every note of the Bhairavi sound-w ave-formation down the
decending scale and shape it precisely so that the shapeless and earthy dark
Durga-Kali shall take notice of the invocation. In doing so vou will localize
each tone of the instrument within your body—at first possibly feeling your
way hesitantly—and sense it going down under your heart chakra. As you will
remember you have at your disposal between your heart chakra and your anus
chakra a complete octave serving as a physical measure of perception on which
the tones, if properly struck, will begin to light up in many colours. This demon¬
stration of tones on the downward scale may take a quarter of an hour or more,
but you are not in a hurry. Once you finally have exhausted the octave within
the lower part of your body—you sitting with your legs crossed on the ground—
you will play the veena yet lower down, unlimiting your body and thus prolonging
the sequence of tones into the ground and getting your anus rooted in the earth.
This at first sight odd idea of growing roots will soon become familiar to you
once you visualize that your body only houses two octaves the veena however
covering almost four. The lowest octave thus pierces through your body into
the ground (54) and the highest one towers above your skull. When you have
firmly and safely grown roots you will tonally return to the heart Chakra and
let the melody thread rise through your throat and nose into your cerebrum
and then—this being a magically critical moment—pierce from inside your
skull. You will be playing beyond yourself, still yery slowly and arhythmically,
demonstrating every note like a shield and holding it up. In this condition you
should repress your inner self a bit, relinquish your individuality, and become
a lotus flower in a pond rooted in the dark and growing above the water surface,
above your skull and your conscience, a pink blossom.
So far you will only have demonstrated the tones of the sound-wave-
formation singly or in the intensities and combinations typical of the sound¬
wave-formation. By now you will have lost any feeling for time entirely and
what is to follow is the actual signal. It would be quite pointless to visualize
the innumerable indications and rules with which the guru has furnished you
in order that you may unmistakably reproduce that signal on the veena. You forget
about the whole collection of regulations and you make a picture emerge before
your mind’s eye which is still filled with Goddess Kali’s mantra ‘Hring 9 . Be this
picture a geometrical figure or an architectural construction, in any case it will
be a yantra , it will however not merely constitute an arbitrary product of your
own imagination. Instead it will be a certain if unqualified figure which has
gained concrete shape as a sound-wave-formation in your consciousness and
hence has become a picture due to months and years of experimentally practicing
on the veena. When this picture presents itself to your eye with sufficiently clear
outlines—the clearness of the contours being of utmost importance—you may
set yourself to the task of tracing the sound-wave-formation with rhythmical and
colourful strokes of sound and develop the sketchy shape into a multi-dimensional
formation of vibrations or into a tonal space. The curves of the melody you
will, by repeating, form more and more correctly and exactly. Again and again
you will be defining the sketch. The ledges you will emboss with characteristic
79
ornaments. Eventually it will arise within yourself, the apparition, the sound-
wave-formation, pulsating, in rich detail, and unmistakable: Bhairavi , the tonal
image of the strength dispensing Ma Kali. She is I. I am Kali.
One of these so far safe basic assumptions is the idea that certain sound-
wave-formations could and should only be played at certain times if they are
to lead the veena-player and his client—this being the declared aim—to a con¬
sonance with the cosmos. This much may be said in advance, that given sufficient
training you can fairly exactly tell the time when listening to a veena -player
carefully. This may at first sound somewhat odd. You should therefore try to
imagine at this juncture, that the 24 hours of the day were divided into eight
sections or ‘watches’ of three hours each. The sound-wave-formations are now
assigned—this being the decisive point—to one of the eight watches each and
80
must therefore only be heard wdthin one of these 180 minute periods (55). Pro¬
vided the vibration pattern, the w ave-formation, and the time for its performance
are familiar to you, you can by inference tell the time as well.
You are now requested to improve this simple model a little. The watches
cannot be determined simply with the aid of a w r rist-w T atch because they are
not dimensioned according to the legal time but in line wdth planetary times.
The cycle of these watches therefore does not commence wdth 0 hours, which
would be the simplest method clock time-wise, but with sunrise which in Calcutta
is in summer at about half past five o’clock and in winter at approximately half
past seven or correspondingly earlier or later in other places. Sunrise and sunset
vary in India, Calcutta being situated on the 22nd parallel, much less than in
Northern countries such as Canada, Finland, or Sweden. Yet it is only in excep¬
tional cases that the watches last exactly 180 minutes due to their connexion
with planetary time. The four watches of the day last 210 minutes in summer
and the night watches are reduced to 150 minutes each. In winter, however,
the night watches expand and the day watches shrink. It is only when the earth
during the yearly course of the sun passes the Aries point in the spring and the
Libra point in the autumn that the watches are of equal length, i.e. 180 minutes
on the clock (56).
This time related to the sun alone does not yet suffice. Some sound-wave-
formations are not related to times of the day or of the night but to the seasons
of the year, mainly to the Aries point and to the rainy period which in India,
according to the location in question, will be during the months of July to Octo¬
ber. But these too are the fairly easily recogniziable fixed points within the time
pattern of the veena-player. If he wishes to play the right sound-wave-formation
at the proper time he also has to take the rest of the planets and their orbit into
consideration, especially the moon with its orbital period of 27.3 days, or the
Jupiter taking twelve years, or the Saturn with its almost 30 years for one orbit.
For the reader it will, however, be sufficient to be aware of the following: as a
veena-player you should always be conscious of the positions of the planets because
it is only this way that you can determine the most favourable time for sacrificing
and for choosing and playing the sound-wave-formation vibrating consonantly
The orientation with regard to planetary times naturally requires the best
possible orientation within space. This means to say that the veena-player should
at least know his position by latitude and longitude. Moreover he will sit with
his face pointing North for the sake of better self-definition in time and space.
There will be one fixed point, the pole-star, before his mind’s eye at least and
by it he will be able to define his personal situation. Theoretically also the
other
cardinal points are of some use. But if the veena -player faces East the celestial
bodies will somehow rush towards him with the earth’s rotation. Facing West
83
he would be likewise without optical support and he would topple over back¬
wards. The Southerly direction—India being situated on the Northern hemi¬
sphere—is also not of any real use since the stellar South pole, that is roughly
the Southern Cross, will be below the horizon and can thus not serve as a support
to the eye. Let us raise the question again here what the position is regarding
the statements in relation to reality, are they reflecting it? Well, all
respondents
said that they respect the division of the day into eight watches including the
corresponding attribution of the sound-wave-formations. In practice, so the
performing musicians stated, they were observing this rule as exactly as possible
and that they would play the sound-wave-formations only at the proper planetary
time. So far this principle is recognized and realized. Even the state operated
broadcasting system, All India Radio, remains loyal to the astro-acoustic rule
and is transmitting sound-wave-formations only at about the time of the day
via its medium-wave stations, when they have been actually played in the studio
and recorded on tape. The pole-star rule, however, is only kept in the memories
of some of the respondents. In musical practice it is obviously no longer being
observed and may at best be part of meditative exercises.
Why do the respondents stick to the rules of the times of the day ? As was
frequently said and maybe too often, this was done because their guru had done
so. But is there more behind it? Yes, the idea, if only vaguely recognizable,
that the planets and the fixed star constellations are either symbols of the gods
or even identical with them. Shortly speaking, here we find the already described
connexion of the various sound-wave-formations with individual deities or
demons now reappearing in the form of stars or constellations. Is Kali Bhairavi ?
Is the moon Kali? Is Bhairavi Chandra, the moon? This can only be recon¬
structed piecemeal, if it ever existed.
changing with the watches (57). So far so good. This fact of the tonality changing
in the course of a day can be proved clearly up to this point and it gives rise to
this reasonable, if not quite scientific, assumption: would it not be possible,
would it not be thinkable, is it not even probable or certain that the tones of the
veena do not originate from the instrument, i.e. by the player touching the
strings,
but from the orbiting stars radiating unstruck sounds in accords corresponding
to their constellation ?
One may object now that this is the old story of the music of the spheres.
But this is not so. The idea of the Pythagorean music of the spheres is based
on the concept that the sphere-shaped magnetic fields of the celestial bodies
are producing sounds by mechanical friction. As far as the astral music is con¬
cerned you will have to start from the idea already familiar to you that light-
wave-formations and sound-wave-formations are two interchangeable manifes¬
tations of one and the same thing. The veena -player is capable, thanks to his
powers of a medium, to transform these inaudible light-wave-formations into
audible sound-wave-formations and to make perceptible to the human ear by
his instrument the vibrations of the infinite. Should you believe in astrology
and should you have pondered over what the influence of the planets on your
life might be like you will now obtain an explanation: what you hear on the
cassette attached to this book are the astral forces determining your fate and
transformed into acoustic oscillations.
The system which you have come to know up to now as a distress signal
transmitter, all of a sudden changes into a cosmic radio which not only transmits
but also receives. That means in concrete: when you sit facing North the con¬
stellations of stars and the planets wander from East to West over your head
and over the beam of your veena , you will be detecting the celestial bodies with
the pumpkin-shells serving as your ears. You are collecting the coloured lights
of the wandering stars and change them into sound spectra. It is you who keeps
the stars in motion. And it is you who is responsible for the moonrise at the
correct time. Who could draw the dividing line between cause and effect? With
the sound produced by you, you will force the sun down below the horizon.
And it is you who lures it out again early in the morning. You are the centre
of the world, the engine and the motor who makes the rains fall, the winds blow,
and the celestial bodies orbit.
But what is going to happen if you play wrongly? The veena -player is
not entitled to commit an error—and he will have to put up with that. Errors
and this is the way the people will have it—will ensue severe punishment such
as depressions, small-pox and premature death, because he, the caller, has upset
the cosmic order by his dissonant music. This burden of responsibility, this pres¬
sure for perfection, and the fear of guilt, so they say, will drive the veena
-player
into a restless life without marriage and without children wandering around
VUVUVUU/ vi/ujmu;
$"T
riirhrh/h
Yantra.
84
and frightened by the demons with whom the veena -player is otherwise associating
so closely. The veena -player Asad Ali Khan who was interviewed on that in
Bombay Television in 1975 quite naturally denied all this. No, he said; was it
not for everyone to see—he having wife and children, how unfounded such super¬
stition was ?
You may now shrink back from the idea put forward to you here, namely
to consider truth to be the consensus of the majority. Once you are willing to
consider what is true without any haughtiness as a countable and questionable
reality you will also look at the pictures in this book with different eyes. Among
them you will find pictures of a strange architecture, agglomerations of buildings
which your rickshaw-driver, if asked, will describe as 4 Janter-Manter ’ or as 6
Yantra -
Mantra\ These Janter-Manter places which are on Sundays popular picknick
sites and on weekdays populated mainly by monkeys, pigeons, and long-tailed
light green parrots comprise buildings which could neither be called commercial
nor housing nor sacral estates.
86
Again an encounter with the
divine: The sound-wave-for¬
mation Khambabati worship¬
ping Lord Brahma. She is
“robed in a cloth as white as
the clouds of autumn ”.
In the sense of colonialist and scientific correctness they are, with some
exceptions, astronomical heavy equipment or planetary clocks (58) although
they might never have been used for that purpose. In the sense of empirical
democratic conceptions of truth they are, however, magic transformers made
of clay, plaster, and marble, often containing form elements of the veena , and
often also serving a similar purpose in their architectural way: namely expanding
the consciousness of the onlooker, his self-definition within time and space, his
perception of the essential world beyond time where shape and sound, light¬
wave and sound-wave serve as interchangeable systems of signals with equal
meaning whose double quality, whose echo effect, whose reflected image can
only lead to an unbroken understanding of one’s self and of reality.
Being a reader of this book and an apprentice in magic you will now be
confronted with the question of what the quality of an acoustic system of signals
might be like in order to enable the transformer, in this case the rudra-veena ,
to bring forth image producing sounds. Vis’-a-vis’ this problem you should in the
ver Y beginning drop the assumption that what you are about to play is bound
to furnish a comforting euphony, t0 evoke sentiments or otherwise correspond
to the music of the Mozart time, be it in the form of likeness or of contrast. You
must on the contrary leave this World of concepts altogether and make yourself
familiar with the idea, not to produce music but to articulate an obscure language
with your finger-tips and with the strings of the veena .
What is an obscure language then? In the wider sense of the term you
would count among them any language which you do not understand. In a more
restricted sense obscure language are acoustic systems of signals which are
either based on mutual agreement and which serve the purposes of protection
and business of minorities. One of these agreed obscure languages is Fortran, a
man-computer language, or the Indian drum lingo (59) which you can also hear
88
on the cassette attached to this book. This drum lingo contains any type of
beat on the drum and hence every one of the allegedly many thousands of different
drum tones in the form of an onomatopoetic and usually speakable syllable.
The initial advantage of this language is that Indian drummers can with¬
out effort tell eachother across the inner Indian language barriers what they
want to play or which sequence of beats they have performed the night before.
The drummer whom you hear on the tape is playing the sequence of syllables
‘Dha-Dha-Dhin-Ta-Keta-Dha-Din-Ta-Kita-Teka-Gaedi-Gaene’. If the accompany¬
ing drummer succeeds in audibly reproducing this sequence of syllables in twelve
parts on his drum treated with flour paste (60) then the veena- player will
invariably
understand at which point of the time circle divided into twelve he will be at
that moment. The second advantage of the drum lingo is that the drummer
beats the rhythm in a grammatical and speechlike manner, not in a monotone
tact, to enable the veena- player to find his orientation and to commence at the
right moment with the new time circle.
The mantras often used in syllables like Hum, Hring, Phat , Namo, or
Sivaha , are by the standards of linguistics so-called phonems, hence wordlike
utterances similar to expressions such as ‘hallo’, ‘hurrah’, ‘umph’ though they
do not express certain feelings like these English exclamations. In general mantras
are void of sense or value and represent mere tools. But they possess the power
to evoke imaginations or to trigger off a compulsion to think in certain images
and, according to the composition of the chains, to produce certain apparitions
(63). If you know how to handle the mantras properly, the most famous chain of
Pandit Rajib Locham Dey , j
Calcutta , playing the Pakha-
ivaz drum.
syllables being -Om-mam-padme-hum’, the mant,a seer will be the master of his
fantasies and trill no longer helplessly drift in the tehirlpool of vtv.d
anx.etres,
the power of imagination, based on the idea now well known to you, that there
is if only in a budding form, a light-wave-formation which corresponds to any
ei’ven sound-wave-formation. This technique is not limited to the so-called sacral
field as may be said for better understanding. Dealing with mantras is rather a
common habit that goes along with life and which might be of use when leaving
the house in the morning, when doing business, upon cohabitation, or as an aid
while taking an exam: who could reasonably draw a dividing line between the
worldly and the supernatural sphere anyway? Nor should the mantras be con¬
ceived as islands of reflexion. They can be integrated into the everyday thinking
or mixed into everyday language the way it is done m the Ganesha (64) invoca¬
tion prefacing this book which is framed by drum or drummers syllables; or in
the following Sharasvati mantra:
Om, aim , hring, tiling, som.
Enlighten my voice.
91
If you go one step further and obliterate the dividing line, drawn arbitrarily
anyway, between the image and the reflexion, between imagination and reality,
then the world will be manipulatory without limit if you only know the formula,
the mantra, especially if you thereby wish to activate the godly beings and if
you can exploit their supernatural powers.
You should attach great care to preparing the instrument, the veena. It
would not get you any further to reproduce here a whole list of measures to take.
The power of the yantra or your instrument to express mantras exactly according
to the pattern does, however, depend on certain conditions. For instance, you
should select the strings (66) with utmost care according to their material-
bronze, brass, or steel-and especially with regard to their diameter (67). If the
strings are too thin, hence relatively weakly strung for a given basic tone, the
overtones will be missing and the towers of fifths will not be building up. If the
cords are too thick though, hence relatively highly strung, their stress will be a
load for the instrument and a problem for the finger-tips of your left hand by
which you are tightening the strings laterally for producing the quarter tones.
The problem arising most frequently in practice, retuning the strings, whose
tension is rising and falling from 30 to 60 kilograms tensile force by this kind
of pulling away laterally, has until this day of nearly 2,000 years of ueena-
playing
not been finally solved. One has to manage somehow either with a retightening
cursor, by tightening screws, or by retuning slackened strings high above your
head at the wooden pegs without interrupting the flow of music-speech.
You should also have in mind that speech is adjusted to a scale of tones
but it is not recited or sung purely in so far but in between the stages of the
scale. If you wish to play in a grammatical way you will have to practice the
‘meer’ (68) again and again. This means the capability to touch vibrating micro¬
tones with the string tightened laterally, to play steplessly and to bring up a
fourth silently and untouched so exactly that, upon the following touch, it will
sound purely. Or it means the skill to play the same tone with four or five
different
tensions of the cords in five different shades of sound, hence to bring it up from
five different frets.
According to a still vivid legend the real reena-player ought to drive a hook
into the ceiling of his room and tie his hair to it with a piece of string in order
that he may be awakened by his pains in case he should collapse from sheer
exhaustion during his daily practicing. Perhaps one need not go that lar. But
without diligence and experimenting endlessly you would not make any progress.
Diligence alone, however, will only solve part of the basic problems of veena-
V
playing * have you a messa g e t0 tell at all ? Can you at least for some minutes
imagine a supernatural being taking shape, such as the elephant headed Ganesh,
the god of success ? Problems of this nature, so the respondents also say, the
student will be able to evade at first through copying his master. They can eventu¬
ally be solved only through a meditative growth in cognizance, hence through
revelation in an absorbed state.
How does one meditate ? How do the godly beings reveal themselves ?
Being a veena -player how does one obtain image sounds and sound pictures ?
The experts on the matter have tried to tackle this problem in a very practical
way Since about the 16th century a peculiar form of pictorial presentation
called Raga-mala (69) painting has developed. The Raga-mala painters have
painted or drawn the sound-wave-formations in a personified form in order to
create for the meditating musician a fixed point or support and to facilitate
thereby his meditative cognizance. Some of these pictures you will find in the
book They may, at the same time, have served the purpose of passing the sound¬
wave-formations on from generation to generation unaltered and to strengthen
the principle of oral tradition without script and by pictorial tradition.
Does one get any further meditatively with these Raga-mala pictures ?
The Raga-mala painters, influenced by the Persian miniature painters, on the
one side frequently depicted the sound-wave-formations differently for reasons
hard to tell. They furnished the onlooker with various starting points for medita¬
tion which would therefore have to lead also to different perceptions. The sound-
wave-formation c Todi? on page 4 you will for instance find along with a veena ,
without one, with deer or antelopes, black or red ones at your choice, but also
unaccompanied by animals. The respondents felt on the other hand that the
Raga-mala pictures were of use for trivial meditation at best in view of their
low degree of abstraction and that is in respect of the rather naturalistic type
of presentation of the sound-wave-formations, mostly depicted in the form of
noble women. For a means of getting access one should, if at all, use real yantras
which are abstract geometrical figures and which can be visualized before one’s
mind’s eye or be drawn on paper.
There is the impression that the respondents also, or even more so, tended
to be of the opinion that the abstract meditation void of images was better suited
than the one with images to obtain a more profound cognizance of sound-wave-
formations. Inasmuch as they were able to express themselves at all the respondents
were tending in the direction of reversing the process, i.e. to get hold of a veena
awaken a sound-wave-formation and with it, if only vaguely, the corresponding
picture: This sound-wave-formation they will then clarify visually and acoustically
to achieve more precision. They will set themselves to the task of making this
picture more and more colourful, better contoured, and plastic by a trial-error
process. Or they succeed—the one not excluding the other—to reshape acous¬
tically an image appearing in immediate totality. Led by the lighting up or
fading of the shape they will find its tonal counterpart and finally reach the
consonance, the congruence and the unity of light and sound.
What are these pictures like which the veena -player sees before his mind’s
eye? In this respect the respondents do not really give any exact answers. It is
a question of colourful formations often in geometrical and abstract shapes, and
to this extent the respondents would agree by and large. These visions in no
case resemble human beings or images of the gods as one may see them in Indian
temples, as they can be found hanging on the walls of ironmongers’ shops or
sticking on the dashboards of taxis. And also this can be taken for sure. These
apparitions are obviously not rigid either but mainly pulsating images.
96
Now you proceed another step forward and get used to the following
idea: the imperfection of human life, our daily self-torture, the seemingly normal
feeling of a split-up emptiness stems from this indistinct tuning of thinking,
feeling, and will. Since you replace your innate self by a higher valued force,
you may reduce your inner tension and you will no longer wear yourself out by
that conflict with yourself. You will make yourself capable of psychosomatic
This experience of unison, though it may last but for a few minutes, will
now and this is the peculiarity of the unio mystica—extinguish your speech
consciousness or you power of speech. In other words: the respondents either
start stammering, resort to speaking in not always intelligible parables, give
evasive answers, or they frankly admit that they could not possibly say anything
in this respect. Starting from the assumption that veena-playing is a tonal dialect
belonging to the revealed obscure languages and not the agreed ones, one cannot
just put the form of its revelation aside as something of no or little importance
and try to gam a picture for oneself by arranging all the bits and pieces of
informa¬
tion. In this way-hke in the case of‘tonlro’—one does not really get anv further
come to know when they are in the state of meditation and receives the following
certainly incomplete replies:
m The fading away of the feeling for time can be a slow or a sudden process
In this way one now arrives at a non-perspective view and this means
^ in concrete: things which are situated at different distances from the
viewer, foreground and background begin to move together and to melt
into one another. The optical perspectives disappear and a state of medita¬
tion is reached when the environment presents itself to the eye as flat like
on a photograph. This loss of the third dimension can obviously be delib¬
erately produced and that is why it occasionally serves as an initial point
of meditative departure.
The fourth and probably most important characteristic of meditation
^ is the shaking off of the structures categorized as important or unimportant.
This implies a form of perceiving, like hearing and seeing, which no longer
works in a selective way and makes the ear and the eye sense no more
only that which seems to be of importance on the background of one’s
life story and of one’s personality structure. It is the empty space between
things which becomes visible, detailsnever observed before which grow
, , to a level of equal value through the abolition of the structural grid.
These are disengaged sounds and tones which have never attained the
stage of perception in one’s everyday consciousness.
Such practice, which may make crumble an otherwise quite solid ego,
is only meant as a preparation and as a means of loosening one’s everyday con¬
sciousness before the access. In other words, the ueena-player makes an effort
to achieve the condition enabling him to play. Now you must again, and contrary
to your habitual way of thinking, swop cause and effect and get used to the
idea that a sound-wave-formation played in the proper manner will bring the
listener, and that is foremost the player, quite inevitably up to the stage of
meditative perceiving and invite him to cross the border. This is achieved mainly
through a special way of handling time and by an arhythmical construction
which is at the basis of all sound-wave-formations and which is in most instances
carefully observed by practicing veena-players. In simpler words one may say:
the sound-wave-formation always begins arhythmically, i.e. the sequences of
tones during this first phase are floating in a timeless sphere. This form of tonal
presentation will sooner or later make the listener emerge from his linear,
historical
time tied up with his own life. It is only then that the veena-player will give the
tonal sequences a rhythmical touch. He now introduces a new and different
circular time, i.e. he makes the melody thread end up in a large circle which
may be divided into twelve sections.
But this bending the time into a cycle is not so easy to achieve. The player
must keep counting in his mind, and this is a bad procedure since it disturbs
concentration. To regain easily the correct starting point of his time-cycle
he may possibly help himself by reciting a verse with twelve accentuations, e.g
‘My Lord I recognise you in the mirror of my soul perceiving that you have
one thousand names / my Lord . . .’. Or he visualizes a twelve-syllable mantra-
chain in order to endure the long rhythm and to end up once more correctly
at the ‘one’. Once this time cycle is firmly established, standing before the eyes
of the listener like a wheel with twelve spokes, the player further bends the
time and into a spiral, which may take hours, whose inner line will eventually
arrive at a focussed time without expanse, hence the mystical timelessness.
To make it quite clear, veena-players do not always operate with a time
cycle divided into twelve sections, hence with a geometrical figure looking like
your wrist-watch. The time circle may be divided into seven, nine-and-a-half,
...u— i ;■ niiiJU
ten, twelve, fourteen or sixteen beats. In short: one and the same sound-wave-
formation can be played in various rhythms though the timing once chosen
must be observed from beginning to end. As a rule, however, the veena-players
divide the time by twelve because there are certain magic qualities which go
with the figure twelve. It corresponds with the number of the signs of the zodiac.
The twelve and the twelve only may be divided by the sequence of the figures
one, two, three, and four. The total of the digits, 1 plus 2, makes three. This is
considered especially static, calm, round, and cosmically parabolical as opposed
to the dynamic and indivisible seven.
If the veena- player divides the time circle into seven sections for instance
then this will not change the principle of bending time. Being a listener you
must only get used to a different type of participating and to join in counting.
According to the Indian custom you use your left hand for counting (71). In
doing so you move with yout thumb-tip over the three joints of your fore-finger
and ending up at the tip of your little finger you will have arrived at the number
twelve, namely four fingers multiplied by three finger-joints. This system of
counting, taken over from mantrics and useful for correctly reciting mantras , you
will alter in such a way as to count only up to the first joint of your ring-
finger,
that is counting up to seven and restarting with number one at the bottom of
your fore-finger.
Once again, what is meditation ? How is one to know that one is in a state
of meditation ? Can meditation be sufficiently described by geometrical time
models like lines, circles, and spirals ? Some respondents are more in favour of
a different statement not mentioned so far. They say that the state of meditation
commences when the kundalini snake wakes up and rises within the body via
the chakras. What is meant by that ? The kundalini snake, a purely magic reality,
you must imagine to be like a real snake, sleeping coiled up three-and-a-half
times within your body and in the ring of your pelvis at that. Though real this
snake is not a natural one but an energetic and transcendental snake which wakes
up whenever a sound-wave-formation is created, hence when a veena is correctly
played. It then rises and, starting from your anus chakra , it slowly slides
upwards
into your brains. All this is not only imaginary but can be felt. In other words,
the kundalini snake—does she only go up to the heart chakra or higher ?—is
supposed not merely to indicate the state of meditation but also its extent.
1C
■i
To bo fair-comploxionod is
considorod beautiful. So the
“fai r-complexioned ” sound¬
wave-formation Goudi , the
lady on the left side of the
picture „ has placed before her
(inner ?) eyes Rati and Man-
matha „ the gods of carnal
desire , anointing them with
white sandalicood paste.
103
other things the simple octave of seven steps or the seven white keys on the
piano. Music ethnologists teach that apparently all people in the world including
the Indians are born with this sort of consciousness arranged in line with '^ ie
figure seven. How can one get released from this seven-room prison . ow can
one’s consciousness be extended? What is in between the steps of the scale ol
tones and the keys of the piano ? How to find one’s way to an undivided, uniform,
unimpaired consciousness ? . ■ * t u a
things behind the things and making audible what has never been
1 9 . The End
In the course of reading this book you have probably wondered many
times how the music here described and its reflective images match with present
day life. India is today one of the countries which enjoy an astonishingly free
press, a relatively stable currency, an almost balanced trade-balance, and an
industry growing steadily from year to year. Certainly not a paradise everywhere,
the country is one of the world’s best democracies. Can one still be a mantra seer
now, a magician, a rudra-veena- player in India ? The tantra- cult, the spiritual
basis with its light-sound doctrine is evidently still blooming lavishly and un¬
changed. As opposed to Hinduism it does not conflict with the political and
economic exigencies of a modern state provided tantra manifests itself in suffi¬
ciently abstract forms. Accordingly an art with such a high degree of abstraction
like veena-playing has, theoretically speaking, a good chance of survival.
Practically though, veena- playing has been virtually extinct since the
fifties. One can often hear people, including the respondents, say that veena-
playing had been too firmly and exclusively tied up with the princely courts of
which there had been up to fivehundred on the territory of what is now India.
After the expropriation of the Maharajas and the independence of India in 1947
the veena-players had not found the way from aristocracy to democracy, hence
from the palaces to the concert-halls. The instruments which have remained
unaltered (73) for centuries are too faint in sound, the music is hardly
pleasurable,
and its performers are conservative and superstitious. With all due respects to
government by the people the downward movement of veena-playing is once
more confirming the thesis according to which true culture could only flourish
under a feudal regime.
Here and there they do console themselves with the idea that a music
transmitted by transistors and diodes is lacking the transcendental effect. In
other words, possible records and tapes could not cause any cosmic disaster.
But no salvation either. And this is the second problem: the veena-players usually
refuse to play with contact microphones or electronic pick-ups such as those
screwed or glued by guitarists to their instruments in order that their sound
may be made perceptible down to the farthest row of a concert-hall. They fre¬
quently argue that amplification alone, not mentioning the distortion of the
tone through loudspeakers and reverberation, destroys the special mantric quality
of the sound produced by the veena.
Leaving aside the question whether or not sacral music with the charac¬
teristics of an obscure language should be played in public, there remains in
the third place the problem of limited time. The usual records and tapes only
contain 25 or 45 minutes of uninterrupted music and also Indian concert-goers
are nowadays hardly willing to listen to the building up of a faint sound-wave-
formation which actually takes hours. One might argue that it is not really
essential to play in public and that one could have a go at the veena in the frame¬
work of domestic music. There are indeed some attempts in this direction. In
general this is where it ends, too, since veena-playing demands tremendous effort,
a frightfully long time of studying, and above all teacheis who have by now
almost completely died out.
Finally, the i;eena-players have fared badly in competition with the sitar-
players. The sitar—perhaps you have heard sitar music—is an Indianized and
originally Arab long-necked lute which can be played easily and virtuosically
and with great euphony. The sitarists like Pandit Ravi Shankar will also refer
to the musical tradition of sound-wave-formations, though they have adapted
themselves c without any reservation’ so that they mostly play in accordance
with mass taste, i.e. loudly, sweetly, for short times and often so fast that they
can no longer shape the 22 micro-tones of the old-Indian scale, falling back in
Samrat-Yantra in Jaipur.
Height : 27,36 metres.
consequence on the simple seven-intervals scale which, as you now know, narrows
consciousness.
This reproach has also not remained without any effect. In order, to draw
level with the veena-players, at least optically, the sitarists often screw a
second
and acoustically superfluous pumpkin on the top of their instruments. This is
done at least for public concerts and in any case for tours abroad in order to
decorate themselves with the strange cosmic qualities of the veena-players and
their ‘music of the path’. Because the real and true Indian music—and this is
still valid from Bombay to Calcutta—is the shrill and quiet veena -music in search
for the dialog with the demon.
* V #
106
20. Instructions on the Cassette
When listening to the cassette attached to this book you should not open
the volume control of your recorder or of your stereo-set too much. Despite
their size the veenas produce relatively faint sounds filling only small rooms
of up to about an area of 20 square metres. Because of the limited volume of the
instruments it happens that during the recording ambient noise finds its way
on to the tapes. Should you therefore hear a rikshaw-man ring in the background
or children shouting or a car hooting then this will be no delusion.
All recordings have been made under real conditions and not inside any
studio. This means that the veena- player is sitting on the floor in a little room.
He is playing alone or to the accompaniment of a tampura- player and a drummer
As a rule he is surrounded by three to eight listeners because with veena-playing
one needs a kind of attendance or encouragement which is expressed by an oc¬
casional swaying of the head or by sighs of approval—less frequently by acclama-
tions—on the part of the audience.
Side A
1. At first you will hear Raga Panchamkosh played by Ustad Zia Mohiuddin
Dagar. Panchamkosh is among one of the unusual sound-wave-formations which
are rarely listed in the appropriate handbooks. It is a variation of the sound-
wave-
formation Raga Malkosh. Malkosh is a tonal reflection of the warrior God Shiva
■with a background of a nocturnal victory celebration: as a rule Malkosh is played
soon after midnight. Assuming for better understanding that the basic tone of
the veena is C then the scale mil be here C-E flat-F-A flat-B. It therefore
consists
of five tones. To this originally five-tone Malkosh formation Ustad Zia Mohiuddin
had added a sixth tone, a G (= Pa or Pancham ) and has thus changed Malkosh
into Panchamkosh. The addition of the comforting G (Pa) signifies last but not
least the postponement of the victory celebrations or thanksgiving from the
night to the day because where the G (Pa) appears in a prominent position there
will be the sun. The recording was done late in the afternoon at Chembur, a
suburb of Bombay. Ustad Zia Mohiuddin Dagar, accompanied by a tampura,
plays the non-rhythmical opening (alap) and the following rhythmical part (jod).
2 After the very rich Panchamkosh follows for the last seven minutes
of the front side of the tape the originally five-note sound-wave-formation Raga
Malkosh, played by Pandit Asit Kumar Banerjee accompanied by a drum (pak-
hauaz). The pakhawaz- player is Pandit Rajib Locham Dey, professor of pakhawaz
and tabla music at Calcutta university. The recording was done at nighttime at
Calcutta’s Great Eastern Hotel.
Side B
3 When you have turned the cassette around you hear Ustad Asad Ali
Khan of Delhi, the representative of traditional reena-playing performing the
sound-wave-formation Raga Marva. Marva as opposed to panchamkosh and
malkosh is a rather shrill signal which as for time belongs to the afternoon and
which expresses (or silences) expectant fear, namely fear of the night and the
darkness rushing in fast in the tropics. The scale contains six notes, C-C sharp-
E-F sharp-A-H. And these notes may not be played in an arbitrary order, some¬
thing that you find also with other sound-wave-formations. A binding rule says
that the basic note C for example must be reached from higher up, e.g. in the
order of B-C sharp-C, and never in the order of B-C. Along with this go a number
of nominal rules for playing marva , which are scrupulously observed by Asad
Ali The disharmony mainly occurs because Asad Ali is playing the C sharp
very high-pitched following the rule according to which this C sharp ought to
sound like ‘the cry of an elephant’. With a view to the running period of a
cassette
the Ustad plays some minutes without rhythm ( alap ) then rhythmically (jod)
and finally ‘fast’ or ‘advancingly’ ( jhala ). All this is done more in the sense
of a
technical demonstration rather than with the intention of building up a sound-
wave-formation properly.
21. Notes
are now found in Munich and New York City and the
largest choice of records is offered in Amster am -
dian intellectuals, and also some of the respondents,
expressed their concern about this ambrv a c nt ro e
the foreigners in Indian music. The foreigners, so it
heard, have corrupted Indian musicians anc n lan
music. They have first exploited the economic ressources
of the country and try now a “cultural colonisation
by stealing India’s art and philosophy.
161
144
163
164
152
151
140
126
140
48
44
49
48
37
45
34
32
41
15
15
18
18
tube: bore
98
92
99
98
97
99
100
88
92
5,4
4,7
5,4
5,4
5,5
5,5
5,7
4,6
5,4
number of frets
24
19
24
23
24
22
20
22
21
width of frets
8,2
7,1
7,6
7,6
7,7
6,4
7,0
6,7
6,7
wood
Teak
Toon
Teak
Teak
Teak
Bamboo
Toon
height of gourds
32
33
36
28
33
37
31
34
37
gourds: circumference
128
122
129
127
137
127
129
120
136
11,5
11,0
10,0
9,0
13,0
9,0
8,0
8,0
11,0
73
67
73
71
74
70
73
69
73
material of bridge
stag horn
ivory
eleph. bone
eleph. bone
stag horn
horn
ivory
ivory
ivory
tonic
a
h
a flat
a flat
a flat
decoration
grapes
painted
grapes
grapes
roses
none
ivory
leaves
leaves
year of construction
1976
1930
1975
1973
1962
1910
1880
J18
Just a ring made of silver or some sort of nickel alloy
to prevent the tube from splitting.
Do = C = Sa
Re = D = Ri
Mi = E = Ga
Fa = F = Ma
50 = G = Pa
La = A = Dha
51 = H = Ni
Do = C = Sa
[ 4 microtones
3 microtones
2 microtones
4 microtones
4 microtones
3 microtones
2 microtones
22 microtones
upwards
downwards
possible
number
15
36
90
5
15
90
225
484
common (modern)
a"
a'
d'
common (classical)
a"
a'
d'
A
a
a"
a'
d'
historical
a"
a'
d'
e'
cis'
sound-wave-formation
season
daytime
1. Bhairava Raga
autumn
before sunrise
2. Bhairavi Ragini
autumn
late night
3. Nat Ragini
summer
late afternoon
4. Malashri Ragini
winter
late afternoon
5. Patamanjari Ragini
spring
early morning
6. Lalita Ragini
all seasons
before sunrise
7. Malkosh Raga
winter
midnight
8. Gauri Ragini
winter
early afternoon
9. Khambhavati Ragini
night
morning
winter/autumn sunset
spring, rainy s.
morning
morning
noon
spring
early morning
early morning
spring
early morning
summer
after sunset
autumn
afternoon
spring
morning
late evening
autumn
afternoon
autumn
evening
25. Megha Raga
rainy season
night
rainy season
after sunrise
winter
before sunrise
winter
sunrise
winter
before sunrise
autumn
late afternoon
summer
afternoon
summer
noon
rainy season
noon
I I I I I I I I
Gis A Aia H
l 1 1 I
124
before sunrise
1. sunrise
after sunrise
2. early norning
late norning
3. noon
early afternoon
4. late afternoon
before sunset
5. sunset
after sunset
6. early evening
late evening
7. nidnight
after nidnight
8. before davn
Noon
CO
CO
Midnight
,-^( 1686-1743 ),
126
c =_s*_
4 m 2 f 2 w
or its conversion:
4 m 2 f 2 c w
t = --
g
1. string (d’) =
293.7 Hertz
0.55 mm
steel
42.9 kg tension
2. string (a) =
220.0 Hertz
0.60 mm
bronze
48.8 kg tension
3. string (e) =
164.8 Hertz
0.90 mm
bronze
61.6 kg tension
4. string (B) =
123.5 Hertz
1.10 mm
bronze
51.7 kg tension
277.2 Hertz
0.46 mm
steel
39.9 kg tension
2. string (a flat) =
207.7 Hertz
0.85 mm
bronze
77.5 kg tension
3. string (e flat) =
155.6 Hertz
1.00 mm
bronze
67.8 kg tension
4. string (B flat) =
116.5 Hertz
1.25 mm
bronze
58.4 kg tension
a b c
22. Bibliography
Basham , A.L.: “The Wonder that was India”, 3. edition,
Calcutta 1975
und Propor-
Mesch”, Mu-
The Contributors
ISBN 88=900002=0=1
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