The difference between pop art and serious art lies not in the emphasis on rhythm, loudness and bizarrerie that the former flaunts and the latter tries to conceal; the essential difference seems to lie in the emphasis on the obvious which pop art seeks to make its characteristic technique and the emphasis on the implied which serious art tries to raise into a ruling principle. This explains why pop art throws overboard much of the classical rubric which it considers to be needle’s rigmarole. The principle of improvisation is to pop art what the principle of iteration is to serious music.
But the principle of improvisation is not exclusively the characteristic of pop art. It plays as important a part in serious music as the principle of iteration. While improvisation is pursued with a careless abandon in pop art it has to cohere in a larger purpose or pattern in serious music. Improvisation in pop art is achieved by permuting the rhythmic patterns within a given structure. This is both easy and effective; easy because, when stripped of the larger purpose of emotional communication, rhythmic permutation becomes an elemental appeal to the senses; and effective because the appeal to the senses gets through with ineluctable impact and thus creates a sense of active participation. But serious music frowns upon this elemental rush of sensations by throwing around it a cordon of sophistication, propriety and, most important of all, purpose.
At the same time, however, serious music does not dam up the rush of sensations completely. It lets as much of it to pass through the cordon as would not constitute a serious threat to the basic purpose of its communication. If pop music achieves its impact exclusively through rhythm, serious music adapts rhythm as an embellishment to what it aims at communicating. But the fact is that both pop and serious music exploit the elements of rhythm, loudness and bizarrerie for varying purposes —the former to proclaim the obvious and the latter to embellish the implied. These common elements of pop and serious music point to the possibility of a two-way commerce of ideas and interests. But, in actual practice, there is no such two-way commerce. It happens that while pop music may be willing to learn from serious music, the latter does not think there is anything for it to learn from pop art.
The reports from England of the wide popularity which Ravi Shankar’s music has achieved among votaries of pop music underscore the possibility that pop and serious music can learn from each other. James Cowley, writing his weekly column in ‘The Statesman’ has said: “More than one critic who attended the concert he (Ravi Shankar) gave in the Festival Hall expressed surprise to find in the audience, besides the flock of expected aficionados of Indian music, an unusually large sprinkling of jazz musicians and jazz fans, together with a lot of young people who looked as if they liked pop. Basil Douglas, the impresario who promoted the concert, tells me that folk clubs all over the country are inviting Ravi to play for them; a composer of Western music has written a piece for Yehudi Menuhin and Ravi to perform at the Bath Festival. The sitar has not yet succeeded in ousting the ubiquitous guitar, but it is used regularly by at least three of Britain’s most prominent beat groups.”
It would be argued by the upholders of classicism that what, in Ravi Shankar’s music; appeals to the pop lovers is only incidental to it, namely the “tans” and “sargams,” with their strong rhythmic accents, and shifting, kaleidoscopic patterns of arrangement. Of the subtler beauties of “alap,” they would aver, there is not much that pop music can take over. We might, albeit reluctantly, agree that it must be so, though Cowley quotes Basil Douglas to describe how two-thirds of Ravi Shankar’s audience of more than 3000 were Europeans, half of them young people, who “listened seriously and attentively, to the sitar’s grave tones in that wonderful 16th century ‘Chandra Kauns’ raga.” But the apologetics of the classicists proceed from an arbitrary or anachronistic distinction between the essential and the incidental in serious music. Even while conceding that pop music stresses the obvious and serious music emphasises the implied, it would not be out of place to suggest that the one function is as important as the other in any integrally conceived work of art.
So far as Karnatak music is concerned, one might say that there have been alternating periods when the implied and the obvious have been envisaged as ideals worthy of pursuit. Such a statement, it is admitted readily, is vulnerable to criticism of the literal type, because for the purpose of understanding the broad trends of style and substance, one has to equate, however reservedly, the obvious with a preoccupation with rhythm, and the implied with the predilection for lyricism. A more acceptable but less palpable pairing off may be between the obvious and improvised on the one hand, and the implied and iterated on the other. It is said that Maha Vaidyanatha Iyer’s concert repertory did not extend beyond a dozen “kritis.” His favourites which he repeated in his concerts, were ‘Vatapi Ganapatim’ in Hamsadwani, ‘Sri Subrahmanyaya Namaste’ in Kambodhi, ‘Tyagarajaya Namaste’ in Begada, ‘Najivadara’ in Bilahari, ‘Chitayama’ in Bhairavi, ‘Kanchadalayadakshi’ in Kamalamanohari and ‘Anandasagara’ in Garudadwani. It was held that the more one sang the same ragas and refined them by constant handling, the more beautiful the rendering of each ragas became. It is significant that nearly half a century after Maha Vaidyanatha Iyer, Madurai Mani has held the same view about music—namely refinement through reiteration. But after Maha Vaidyanatha Iyer, when Konerirajapuram Vaidyanatha Iyer came into limelight, the metier shifted from iteration to improvisation. It is said that it was he who gave to Karnatak music concert the form that it follows today. Konerirajapuram’s contribution to Karnatak music was the element of improvisation both in raga and laya. This is not surprising when one learns that he had studied music initially from Nagaswaram Kuzhandaivel and later from Pandanallur Meenakshisundaram Pillai and Manpoondia Pillai. One might consider this a revolutionary auspices for the birth of the concert form in Karnatak music. Konerirajapuram seems to have inaugurated the era of “bhrigas” in “alapana” and elaborate rhythmic arrangements in “swara” singing. After him, Ariyakkudi stepped into the limelight. Ariyakkudi has been no tour-de-force in Karnatak music. But he knew the box-office formula for a judicious combination of the principles of the obvious and the implied, of improvisation and iteration, that would sell. From the way he has been selling during the last fifty years, one wonders whether any formula could have been more patent worthy. Is it any surprise then that almost every singer who came in the wake of Ariyakkudi tried to conform to the Ariyakkudi formula? It was left to Madurai Mani Iycr to break away from the Ariyakkudi stranglehold to an assertion of lyricism over learning.
Madurai Mani Iyer’s epoch would seem to be drawing to a close today—not because Madurai Mani is a spent force, nor because his music has lost its meaning to us, but because of the inevitable swing of the pendulum towards improvisation. The younger musicians like Balamurali Krishna and Madurai Somu are exemplars of the new era.
One last word about the obvious and the implied. In the swing of the pendulum between iteration and improvisation, it is seen that when iteration leads to too tenuous a refinement, the natural reaction against it is to stress the obvious in the form of improvisation in raga and Jaya. The obvious here should be understood to mean that which readily appeals to the senses, that which is elemental enough to carry through by its own force.
All such improvisation may not be pop music, but pop music does reflect a great deal of such improvisation. It is this quality in Ravi Shankar’s music—a quality no less authentically classical than the quality of iteration—which has captured the imagination of the pop-loving young listeners of Britain. Before improvisation is carried to its limit in the gaucherie of wild bizarrerie, there is sure to be a reaction to it in the form of a return to lyricism, implicitness and iteration.
AEOLUS, 19 June 1966
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