Context of musical events

There are several contexts for the performance of Hindustani classical music here in the United States: the large audience or festival, the connoisseurs, the mehfil, the restaurants, the recording studio, and in the radio studio. Each musical environment potentially shapes the music itself. Of all the musicians I interviewed only Aashish Khan denied that the musical environment shapes his music:

I do what I do. I don't make any shortcuts. I don't compromise with music. When I play, I try my best. People who do understand, it's very easy [to play for them], but people who don't understand, you try extra effort to make them understand.

This may be interpreted to mean that he realizes the raga similarly for all audiences, but it can also be interpreted differently. Gorn elaborates:

Pure. Pure. Pure. It's the appropriate thing to say, but the interpretation of that can vary. One of the beauties of India [and Indian communication] is its flexibility. One thing doesn't necessarily not mean another thing...It's an oral culture where change is built into continuity.

Although Aashish Khan cuts short the alap at the beginning of a concert for one type of audience and not so for another, he does not consider the former to be a shortcut or compromise in the music. However, while the heart of the music is not changing, certain measurable aspects of it do change when a musician is confronted with patrons and audiences with different musical expectations. I wish to articulate this relationship.

The large audience is very diverse. In a large audience one might be playing to Americans who have never heard classical Hindustani music before, American and Indian-Americans with a limited knowledge thereof, connoisseurs, relatives, friends, and even before one's guru. The musicians I interviewed shared a common conception of the large audience's expectations: the guru will expect you to play like him or her. The connoisseurs will be listening for a brilliant, technically interesting realization of the raga, as well as for the aesthetics of rasa. Relatives and friends will probably respect or support anything one does. Americans with little or no knowledge of Indian music will be listening with interest, but without many musical expectations. Because they don't understand the subtle technical and aesthetic points of the music, they need something else to latch on to. Thus, they may be satisfied if the music is fast and exciting, or otherwise panders to their generally ignorant musical tastes. As such non-Indian-Americans make up the bulk of the large audience, the musicians will most commonly try to play fast, yet remain technically and aesthetically interesting. Leake articulates this relationship:

The less knowledgeable the audience, [the more] one tends to go for the cheap thrill, the cheap effect--fancy flourishes, speed, the more show-off kind of stuff...our role as the musician is partly to do what we want to do, but partly we are not operating in a vacuum. We are trying to say that we can entertain or educate or create a positive environment for any type...whether it is a knowledgeable person or whether the person is hearing it for the first time, I feel the music should be able to pass that test. It should be able to do that. But at the same time, there is in the music something for everybody.

The easier rasas to understand might also be chosen. As Chatterjee recalls:

I generally choose a raga that is overtly romantic, or overtly sad, or overtly heroic, the appeal of which is instant. But I enjoy it. I enjoy to share that with the audience. To pick something like Marwa or something is a little more--something I wouldn't do.

Chatterjee also makes the "compositions more accessible to the audience." Thus, a musician playing for the large audience is in awkward situation, caught between the pressures of the few audience-members with high expectations, and the bulk of the audience for which speed and excitement are the primary concern. This is a problem most musicians here in American can only do one or the other, due to their level of mastery. As Margolin argues:

That's true with students. What it comes back to is that the people who are at the levels that most of the people here in America are at--they have to earn a living. But most of them are at a level that, traditionally--none of the are at a level at which they would even be allowed to perform.

Because of this tradeoff which must often be made because of the level of the performer, I posit that the rasas of shant and karuna are becoming increasingly rare in public performance. It is certainly possible to have both speed and shant. According to Menusan, "There can be peace in the eye of a hurricane. At that moment it depends on the artist." Chatterjee asserts that very few musicians can achieve this, Rais Khan being a notable example, and that this problem is due in part to the percussive element of the plucked string instruments which make up most of the Hindustani music played in America. Thus, those rasas are becoming increasingly rare. When asked about the restaurant environment, sometimes referred to as the "Samosa circuit" (Gorn), musicians will often respond with bitterness. It is an environment that, while helping one to pay the bills, is the most frustrating of all the environments for a Hindustani musician to play in. Whetstone asserts that, "Restaurants are hell on Earth for Indian musicians...you are sitting there with your sitar, gritting your teeth." It is frustrating because of the expectations of the restaurant owners and the noisiness and inattentiveness of the audience. Menusan surmises that:

The restaurant wants background music and something interesting to draw business. They would prefer if we played film music, because that's what they know. As a matter of fact, when I first came here to the restaurants, they didn't know what a sitar was. [The Indian owners had never seen one.]

Most of the time people aren't listening in the restaurant, though Chatterjee and Menusan have both mentioned exceptions to this rule. So, for the most part, the soloist and accompanist will simply pretend they are alone and play to and for each other. They sometimes use the restaurant as a place of practice. As Spiegel points out:

Because you know nobody's listening you can try all kinds of stuff, and if you make a mistake, who cares? The gig is bad though, because you're not making much money, there's a lot of noise going on, there's a lot of food smells, talking, and drinking. There's often so much noise that the soloist and accompanist will not be able to hear themselves or each other properly.

This affects the music. According to Whetstone:

The raga choice in the restaurant: I realize that I'm playing essentially for myself, so I just go ahead and play whatever I feel like...You have to play very loud in the restaurant if you want to hear yourself...Very slow tempi don't work because you don't hear yourself. We get into a lot of rhythmic play because if I can't hear [the accompanist] at least I can see his hands move...In terms of raga structure, well, that goes out the window. You can't pull off some refined thing in the restaurant...the alap [often shortened because of it] is pretty subtle...and if there's an accompanist there, the restaurant is paying him to play, not to listen to my alap.

Thus, although the lack of connection with the audience in the restaurant environment provides a measure of musical freedom for the musician (Gorn sometimes even throws a little jazz-fusion into his restaurant playing), the distractions of the restaurant limits what can be done and, as evinced by Whetstone, can change the shape of the music dramatically.

Though I have outlined the typical restaurant environment, I wish to point out the exception to that rule. Sometimes people in the restaurant will stop and listen. Chatterjee, Whetstone, Menusan, Parsons, and Gorn have all experienced, at one time or another, this situation:

Some of the most satisfying times in restaurants are when you don't try to play so loud that someone can hear you, but when you get deep into something and you get softer and softer and the room gets quieter and quieter. That's a wonderful feeling because you've experienced a chance for music to do its work on someone, rather than being aggressively pushed on someone...So there you've, in a sense, transformed the space. What was a Friday night party, with people drinking and people starting to talk louder and louder, has been pacified and internalized. (Gorn)

The connoisseurs, such as the Indian musical societies, are a tough crowd to play for as an American, with an American's training and inclinations towards the music. Whetstone elaborates:

I feel rejected by connoisseurs in most all situations. They are somewhat critical of me because I stretch the raga form. Indian musicians themselves, they listen to what you are doing and appreciate it, but connoisseurs are a very critical group and sit in judgement. When it comes to me, they have a fair amount to chew on because I don't play the ragas exactly properly, according to them. For instance, I will emphasize a certain note a little more than it is supposed to be, or I'll even throw in other notes...I will play some raga and they will say, "Actually, this is not quite Desh, this is---- Desh"; and I've never heard of ---- Desh!

Also according to Whetstone, the audience's demand for American Hindustani musicians is shrinking: "I used to play for the Indian musical societies in the United States, but now most of them have grown to a level where they can get people like Budhaditya Mukerjee, so they'll never get somebody like me."

The mehfil is a satisfying place to play, almost a perfect situation. This audience consists of fellow musicians and friends. Almost everyone in this environment will have a deep knowledge in the music, and thus they will both understand and be willing to listen to music which is intellectually and aesthetically interesting. Here, the music's finer aesthetic points, rather than speed, are satisfying. The mehfil is Burghardt's favorite environment, and he articulates its good points:

I have decided to essentially forget about everything else but the chamber presentation at the largest...because I believe that the audience-performer relationship is the single most important thing in the success of a presentation of this music...that's confirmed by Sanskritic aesthetics. I pulled it from [that] and I pulled it from empirical experience...The whole theory of rasa, which reaches its height in the writings of the Eleventh Century, spells out clearly that you've got to have this audience-performer relationship, whether it's in dramaturgy, poetry, music--it doesn't matter.

Burghardt believes that the rasa comes across best in the mehfil because of the lack of distance between the audience and the performer, the attentiveness of the audience, their interest in the music (cf. the typical restaurant scenario) and the lack of a need for amplification, which is in most performance contexts, appalling at best.

The recording or radio studio is interesting because the audience-performer relationship, which is important to most musicians, is absent. Chatterjee illustrates the effect this has upon a musician, describing the limits of this environment:

The way I look at it is that I can't imagine somebody sitting in front of a radio and listening to the raga, and if somebody is, it's not more than one or two people per radio. So I tend to approach radio as a more introspective thing. The choice of raga depends on that. I really go very strictly with the rules...in terms of time of day and things like that. If the time is very short, then I'll play a raga with a lighter nature with a drut gat. But the only times I've played they have generally given me half and hour to play. There's not much time for alap. You can be quite creative on the radio, but there's always this sense that you don't want to go too far out. You just don't know who's listening. But within the conventional rules you can get pretty creative.

The recording environment and its result on the music are similar to that of the radio studio, with a few exceptions. The time of day doesn't matter so much, because you don't know when people will be listening to the recording. Also, you have to work within the limits of the recording medium, which tends to be even more stringent than in the radio studio. Chatterjee speaks to the effects of these time limits:

[The producers] want something like, "Oh, you know, why don't you play something really short over here and we have forty minutes for this over here," or they will say something like, "We have the whole CD. Why don't you play only alap for seventy-five minutes. We'll put it out as a two-CD thing. The second CD will be gat." The thing is that the artist, at that time, may not feel like playing alap for seventy-five minutes; he may feel like playing a for only forty minutes.

This situation does not lead to inspired performances. Burghardt speaks to the effects of the recording environment on the music itself:

It's rare that you're going to get recordings that really catch the essence of a person's style. Extremely rare. They're just too short, and there's something about the recording environment which just doesn't work. What are the reasons? Probably because people think they have to do it "perfectly" is one. They are intimidated by the recording idea--of permanently recording mistakes.

Musical environments shape the form and content of a musical event. Aashish Khan denies this relationship, perhaps as a response of respect to his own tradition. He wishes to highlight his integrity as an artist and his loyalty to the family tradition. By so doing, he ignores the changing dynamic of interaction between the performer and audience in differing musical environments, as affirmed by other respondents. Leake, for example, talks of "the cheap thrill," Chatterjee tends to perform ragas with overt rasas, Menusan and Whetstone bemoan the inattentiveness of restaurant audiences, Burghardt praises the intimate mehfil environment, while most interviewees acknowledge the time pressures of the radio and recording environments. All of these factors suggest complex shifts of interaction between the performer and the audience; the consequence thereof are musical products reflective of those contexts.

Of course, these environments are open to change themselves. At a concert that Budhaditya Mukherjee gave at Carleton College on May 24, 1984, the announcer, noticing the respectful, yet "unreadable" audience's effect on the performers made the following request:

These two young artists, as is very obvious, happen to be in one of their most breathtaking moods this evening and this is in response to the select knowledge level and appreciation of the audience that we have here today. May I appeal something more, as an Indian? They would love if all of us here would concert the Indian way--that is, giving expression to our appreciation whenever we feel that appreciation.

The announcer subsequently articulated several different Indian ways of expressing appreciation at a concert, successfully "Indianizing", to some degree, the response of the crowd for the second half of the concert. This provided the performers with the audience feedback to which they were accustomed, and also augmented the audience's understanding of its own potential interactive role in the musical environment. Because of this change in the audience-performer relationship, Mukherjee's subsequent performance of raga Bhairavi surpassed his intention of a sole "short composition," rather developing into a full, several movement presentation. Thus, not only do the environments affect the performers, but the performers can likewise affect the environments.

With patience, as well as some willful work, even (as noted above) the restaurant environment can become a satisfying environment at times. It will take patience to impart understanding of the traditions of Hindustani music to the American audiences. However, it is also possible that the music culture will undergo still more change resulting from the American audiences' expectations. One example of the pressures confronted by a musician is observed by Whetstone:

I have noticed one funny thing, specific to Western audiences: the tabla player is just sitting there during the alap while you're playing. A lot of times [the audience] is thinking, "Why isn't he letting that poor man play?"...People come up to me and I say, "How was it?...And they say "Yeah it was good, but people felt sort of sorry for Marcus...you played an hour alap!"

If Whetstone were to shorten the alap further to satisfy the audience it would not only be the shape of the music itself that was changing, but also the traditional soloist-accompanist relationship, where it would not matter whether the tabla player has to sit still for a lengthy alap or not. In this manner, the audience resists the performer's attempts to "Indianize" the audiences' and patrons' understanding of and response to the music, and the music culture that surrounds it.

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