Indian Classical Music and Dance

By Christine Beamer, Daily Arts Writer

The musicians sit cross-legged in a circle, keeping the beat on their legs as a singer recites foreign words to the tune of a drone and two small drums. If you close your eyes, it no longer feels like you are in Ann Arbor but instead in the heart of India thousands of years ago. In reality it is just another rehearsal of the University’s Indian Classical Music and Dance group.

According to Ashish Deshpande, an Engineering graduate student and leader of the group, ICMD branched out from the Indian Student Association in 2003. A few musicians had played popular Indian music for several years for the ISA, but as Deshpande said, “We found there was an interest in classical Indian music and dance as well.”

The music and dances were originally religious compositions designed to be performed at temples and tell the stories of religious figures or events. Now, as group member Arun Rajageopalan said, it is “a way to experience your roots again.” The atmosphere in the 25 to 30-person organization is informal; there is no sense of performance but rather a warm camaraderie that emanates from the group.

The music

Performers of classical Indian music are formally trained, just as classical Western musicians are. That, however, is where the similarities end, for the music and instruments are vastly different from a New York Philharmonic concert. Indian music has “a lot more improvisation than Western music,” said group member Prashanth Gururaja, an Engineering junior. “It’s nothing like anything else.”

According to the ICMD website, any piece of classical Indian music is structured around a melody, called a raga, and a rhythm, called a taal. The ragas, which may be up to 3,000 years old, are usually only about a minute long, and the music truly begins when the artist begins to improvise on the raga, still keeping its structure but adding their own interpretations. “You have a small set of rules,” Deshpande explained, “and great artists can perform the same raga for 45 minutes.”

When Indian students are trained in classical music, their teachers have them memorize the minute-long ragas, which are not learned from sheet music. In fact, Deshpande said, “the teachers all teach them a little differently.” Musicians then get together and play from this common learned “list” of ragas.

To make it more complicated, there are two distinct types of classical Indian music, North Indian (Hindustani) and South Indian (Carnatic). The two types are sung in different languages, and, in addition, the instruments, the structure and the mood of the styles are all different. According to Deshpande, most Hindustani groups use one vocalist, and four or five instrumentalists to play the tabla, sitar, tambura, harmonium and occasionally a bamboo flute. The tabla is a percussion instrument similar to the bongos, a sitar is similar to a lute, a tambura is an instrument that plays a drone and the harmonium looks like a box with keys and a bellow similar to an accordion. In contrast, Carnatic groups use a vocalist, a violinist, a mridangum (a double-sided drum) and a ghatum (a clay pot) for percussion.

The real difference though, is in the sound. “It’s sort of a feel you get,” Deshpande said. According to other members of the group, Hindustani music is more tune-oriented, while Carnatic music is more oriented around words. “Carnatic music is very rigid in the composition,” said Business School sophomore Suneeta Tatapudy, “and North Indian music is a lot more free-flowing.”

The dancing

The group also puts on dance shows with Hindustani and Carnatic dances. The different dance styles, like the different musical styles, create similar moods. And like the music, dances have a basic structure that has been passed down for thousands of years. According to Deshpande, though dancers can choreograph within that structure, “it is not their complete free will” that determines the dance structure. The emphasis in the dancing is on the facial expressions, which tell about the traditional Hindi stories that the dances depict. All the dancers wear bright colored costumes that follow traditional Indian dress. “Each style of dance has a particular costume of its own,” said Deshpande.