Raag and taal

There is a question I get asked a lot and have never quite answered well: what makes Hindustani classical music different from any other music? When friends sit with me through a recording for the first time, the question always arrives somewhere around the ten-minute mark, usually phrased politely. I have been trying to answer it for years.

So let me try here, slowly.

Hindustani classical music rests on two ideas. The first is raag. The second is taal. Almost everything else - the instruments, the gharanas, the seasons of the day a piece was written for - sits on top of these two pillars.

Raag is not a scale

It is tempting, the first time you encounter it, to call a raag a scale. The notes line up that way on paper. But a scale is a list of ingredients. A raag is a recipe with a temperament. It tells you which notes are allowed, which are emphasised, which lean against the next, which must be approached only from below, which must always be approached from above, and which are quietly forbidden. It is closer to a character than a key.

Raag Yaman walks. It is long evening light, slow and gracious, the mood of an unhurried day. Raag Bhairav is the opposite shoulder of the day - the first hour after sunrise, ancient, almost severe, its notes flat where Yaman’s are bright. Bageshri is romance and longing without sentimentality. Bhimpalsi is a quiet ache. Darbari Kanada is grand and grave, a court at dusk.

These are not poetic descriptions. They are the working brief. When you sit down with a raag, you are committing to live inside that personality for the next ten minutes or two hours. You can take it many places, but you cannot make Yaman sound like Bhairav without leaving the raag.

The phrase I keep returning to, which is older than I am and not mine, is that a raag is that which colours the mind. A single raag, in a single sitting, can colour it a thousand shades.

Taal is time made felt

Taal is the rhythmic cycle the music lives inside. If raag is the what of a piece, taal is the when.

The cycle has a length - sixteen beats, twelve, ten, seven - and an internal architecture: where the strong beats are, where the soft ones are, which beats you hold and which you move through quickly. Teentaal is the most common, sixteen beats split four-four-four-four, the third group flipped soft. Ektaal is twelve, more spacious, weighted differently. Jhaptaal is ten, an asymmetric lilt. Dhamar is fourteen, the cycle that anchors most of dhrupad. Chautal is twelve in dhrupad’s own gait. Each taal has its own walk.

What is easy to miss, listening at first, is that the cycle is not a metronome. It is more like a room. The musician keeps wandering away from the centre and coming back to it. Every few minutes the melody and the percussion meet again on sam, the first beat of the cycle, and there is a small private satisfaction every time they land there together. If you have ever clapped without knowing why during a concert, you were probably clapping on sam.

How they work together

A raag without a taal is alaap - the slow, unmetered exploration of the raag’s personality. It can go anywhere, take any time. It is closer to meditation than to performance. This is most of what I play on the surbahar, and a great deal of what dhrupad is: moving through the raag, listening, letting one note suggest the next.

A raag inside a taal is a composition - a bandish in khayal, a gat on instruments. Now the freedom is bounded. The melody has to fit the cycle, return to sam, dance with the tabla or pakhawaj. The discipline of this is what produces some of the most thrilling moments in a performance, where the artist slips through the cycle in an unexpected way and lands on sam exactly when they should not have been able to.

There is a reason both forms are necessary. The alaap teaches you the raag’s interior. The composition teaches you to hold it, to make it walk in time. One is contemplative. The other is conversational. A full performance moves between them.

The discipline of a form

I came to this music late. I assumed, like most outsiders, that the strictness of the rules was the obstacle - that artistry meant breaking them. The longer I have sat with the form, the more I think the opposite. The rules are what make the artistry visible.

If everything were permitted, nothing would mean very much. Because Yaman cannot be Bhairav, and Teentaal cannot pretend to be Ektaal, every choice the musician makes inside those constraints carries weight. A held breath at the right moment is a held breath against the rules. A tiny departure means something because there is something to depart from.

The tradition calls this naad yoga - the discipline of sound. I find that name accurate. Sitting with a raag at five in the morning before work, or returning to the same composition after months away, is not unlike the meditative work of any other practice that asks you to keep showing up. The structure does not get in the way of the experience. The structure is the experience.

So the next time you sit with a Hindustani classical recording, try this. Don’t listen for a tune. Listen for a personality. Notice when the same phrase comes back, slightly different. Notice when the percussion and the melody land together, and how much work it took to get there. The piece is not asking you to follow a story. It is asking you to keep company with a living thing.

That, in the end, is what raag and taal are. The grammar of a music that lets the artist say almost anything, on the condition that they say it inside a form. I keep showing up because the form keeps giving me room.

Further listening

If this primer left you wanting to hear what any of it actually sounds like, a few places to start.

• Raga and Tala: Exploring the rich musical traditions of India - Orchestral Tools, 6 minutes. A friendly visual walk through the same territory plus a few of its neighbours: the Hindustani / Karnatic split, kol (the mnemonic syllables percussionists use to recite a rhythm before they play it), and the principal instruments. Good for getting the survey.

• Breaking Down Classical Indian Music: Raag and Taal - PBS Great Performances, 6 minutes. Composer Reena Esmail explains raag and taal to a Western-classical host; violinist Kala Ramnath and tabla player Abhijit Banerjee demonstrate them in the same room. If the first link gives you the survey, this one gives you the feel.