Ravi Shankar

The Panton Interviews

Ravi Shankar: The Missionary of Eastern Music Milan, Italy 1994

Ravi Shankar The world’s foremost sitar virtuoso returns to Europe. In an exclusive interview, Peter Panton is given a brief insight into the two thousand year old history of India’s classical Raga music.

Think of Indian music and you immediately think of Ravi Shankar. For he, more than any other artist, has been responsible for importing the brilliancy and beauty of a music which had previously been ignored. This does not mean he has always been understood. At the Concert for Bangladesh the audience mistook the on-stage tuning of his sitar for the first song and burst into applause. Shankar dryly commented, “If you appreciate the tuning so much, I hope you’ll enjoy the playing more.” This “missionary of eastern culture” has collected, along with honorary doctorates, many distinguished disciples. The much publicised master/pupil relationship with George Harrison helped familiarise westerners to Indian melodies and rhythms. More recently he has been guru to the classically trained minimalist musician Philip Glass.

The fact that Shankar bases his compositions around the traditional form, whose roots can be traced back to the year two thousand BC, hasn’t inhibited his own inventiveness. He has proven his creative flexibility by the number of ways he has applied his music.

During the 1950s, at the beginning of his career, he composed the scores for Satyajit Ray’s Apu trilogy which included the famous Pather Panchali.

Shankar admits to loving cinema and was enthusiastic when Hollywood asked him to score the award-winning Ghandi soundtrack.

He played at Woodstock in 1969, and has written two concerti for sitar and orchestra, music for ballet, theme music for the 1982 Asian Games and even the soundtrack for Alice in Wonderland. In all these circumstances he used the traditional Indian form called the raga.

Indeed, a full-length film of his life and work made in 1972 was called Raga.

The word, which literally means “that which colours the mind”, is associated with spirituality. Here his glamorous fifty-year career comes second because what matters most to Ravi Shankar is his relationship with the sitar and the living music it can, after years of dedication, be coaxed into producing… but only with careful handling…

Peter Panton: I believe that the last time you came to Milan you had a very unfortunate experience with your sitar.

Ravi Shankar: Yes, it was an awful experience. You see it was my first sitar and it was like my Stradivarius, my child, so to speak. I guess it wanted to retire because it just… fell apart. I’ve tried to have it repaired since but it doesn’t sound the same for some reason. Now, I’m working on out-living my second sitar.

Q: Sitars, they originally came from Persia, didn’t they?

A: No, that’s a popular misconception. I mean, what happened is that we originally had instruments in India which were called three-stringed vinas or three-chantry vinas but a great genius called Ahmed Husrau changed all that.

He was Persian but settled down in India. While he was there, in the twelfth century, he was a minister during the Khalji dynasty and I guess in his spare time he modified the existing instrument and called it a sethar. This is a Farsi word, which is Iranian, which means three-stringed. So because Ahmed Husrau gave it a Persian name people make this mistake. They have a sitar in Persia but it is a smaller version. It has a very thin long neck, and, well, in any case the mandolin, banjo, lute are all similar in terms of shape but have their own distinctive, recognisable sound. Anyway, the sitar is fashioned after the ancient Indian instrument known as the vina. The vina is the first of all instruments but unfortunately we wouldn’t be able to construct one today since no specific plans exist. It is mentioned in the scriptures, in ancient musical treatises, so we can say that it’s at least four thousand years old.

Q: Is it still one of the most popular instruments in India?

A: Yes, especially in Northern India. We have two musical systems in India: the Hindustani of the north and the Carnatic system of the south. I follow the Hindustani system. It is also somewhat popular with western musicians.

George Harrison was very serious about it but, you know, he couldn’t give enough time to it. He really is very enthusiastic about our music but he understood that he was too busy to give up the time needed, like ten, fifteen, twenty years. There are a few Americans who have reached a high level but they need another few years.

Q: Has Indian music influenced the classical music of other eastern cultures?

A: Well, let me start by saying that I think that our music and western classical music are the only two which can be termed as classical. Anywhere else, like China or Japan, the music that you hear is known as “traditional” but not the classical music, which is a living music, not a living tradition.

Certainly India has influenced other cultures, even that of Greece, but Indian music always went further. Ragas are really much more developed than mere states or moods. Similarly in the skeletal pattern of a scale maybe you can find even today, you know, the same sort of notes being used in the scales, but ragas are much more intricate things because they are based on scales. We have 72 parent scales and each raga is based on one of the 72 scales. A raga can be pentatonic, hexatonic or septatonic, or a combination of all these in ascending or descending movements. So with the usage of microtones, with a lot of embellishments, we put life into the raga called pranha. This is only possible if you learn from a guru. First of all, our music is not written down, it’s an oral tradition, passed on from a guru to his disciple. Therefore a raga only comes alive if you have the proper training for many years.

Q: Now you are about to embark on another grand European tour and I’m certain you’ll soon be back in Milan again!

A: Yes, I’ll be starting off in Brussels and I should be in Italy sometime in late autumn. I just hope that this time I won’t have to buy another sitar.

Footnote

Ravi Shankar, born Robindro Shaunkor Chowdhury on 7th April 1920, sadly passed away on 11th December 2012 and he did manage to outlive his second Sitar!

Ravi Shankar - Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ravi_Shankar

Ravi Shankar - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4gWCiLexilY&list=FLzD8tINh8EMdAMDvp LAJrYQ