Nicolas Magriel with Lalita du Perron

The Songs of Khayāl (2 vols & CD)

Delhi, Manohar, 2013.

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The accomplishment of this large-format, two-volume study is impossible to exaggerate. The first volume is an enormously informative study of the form and history of khayāl as the pre-eminent form of Hindustani music; the second volume offers transcriptions, in a specially developed form of sargam notation, of no less than 492 bandiś or musical-cum-textual song compositions. In a study of well over a thousand pages, together with musical examples on a CD, Nicolas Magriel and Lalita du Perron have preserved an astonishingly rich legacy of recorded music from the twentieth century. As to the scope of the work, Magriel writes (p. 3):

I have endeavoured to present a balanced selection of songs by the great artists of the first three quarters of the twentieth century, beginning with the first disc of khayāl, recorded by Gauhar Jan in 1902, and covering the period up to the late 1970s when the proliferation of cassettes and compact disc culture put a new face on the Indian recording industry, hastening the advance of eclecticism and the blurring of stylistic distinctions.

The song selection represents recordings by 74 singers, primarily from a range of some six gharānās. A whole chapter is devoted to the matter of ‘Notating Khayāl’, and with the same scholarly attention to detail that characterizes every aspect of this book, the notation systems of some nineteen earlier books are scrutinised as part of the process of achieving a new system for the present transcriptions. This meticulous chapter stands as a fascinating study of scholarly practices, and takes no prisoners in describing some of the more fanciful earlier processes exemplified here: ‘Maula Bakhsh’s system is so symbol-heavy that one feels enhanced sympathy for the poor musicians whom this man intimidated and denigrated for their lack of fluency in notation’ (p. 58). The system promoted by Abdul Karim Khan in his Marathi-medium Saṅgīt Svar Prakāś had two idiosyncracies: firstly, superscript and subscript crotchets to show sharp and flat variants respectively; and then two further sets of symbols designating the higher and lower registers. ‘So [p. 59]

a major scale ascending from low Ṇi to high Ṙe and returning to Sa would look like:’

This oddity is just one of many historical attempts to solve the puzzle of transcribing a genre of music that is traditionally transmitted through sound alone. (I recall once seeing a 19th-century Hindi text in which yet another variant on sargam was weaved by using a Devanagari transcription of the sol-fa scale.) Magriel’s own solution is best seen by an example: the facsimile

page depicted here illustrates one of the shorter songs, and shows how most aspects of the transcription are readily understandable at first glance. The example also shows how the Hindi lyrics are given in full at the head of the page, with a neat and concise translation, and are then represented again in romanised transliteration under the sargam notation that follows.

Magriel explains the book’s primary agenda in the following words (p.2) There are thousands of khayāl songs notated in books produced by Indian scholars, pedagogues and musicians during the twentieth century, so it might be asked what utility there might be in yet another collection. From the beginning this project was conceived of as a study of bandiś in performance—as opposed to bandiś as an abstract idea, as found in the relatively skeletal blueprints of songs in the existing literature. We would present the reality of each song as found in a specific instance of performance. This would necessitate meticulous attention to the details of ornamentation and timing and a commitment to representing the text as sung.

The authors bring a unique combination expertise to this project. Nicolas Magriel’s 2001 London University thesis ‘Sāraṅgī Style in North Indian Art Music’ was, among many other things, a sādhanā of preparation for the musical analysis of khayāl in this book; Lalita du Perron’s 2007 book Hindi Poetry in a Musical Genre: Ṭhumrī Lyrics (Routledge) was itself based on a London University thesis of 2000. Thus both the musical and the textual aspects of khayāl receive the meticulous attention to detail adumbrated by Magriel above. The structure and range of the book may best be indicated by a listing of its chapters:

1 Background2 Notating Khayāl3 The Subject Matter of Khayāl4 The Language of Khayāl5 The Tāls, Tempos and Song Structures of Khayāl6 Melodic Nuances and Devices of Khayāl7 The Life of a Song.

These chapters offer more insight than can possibly be suggested by a short review. To my mind one of the most useful findings of the musical analysis is the degree to which musical fashions have changed even within the relatively

short span of this recorded history. A process of particular interest is the slowing down of khayāl, which ‘can be seen as inspired by artists wanting to incorporate more ālāp, more systematic attention to rāg development within their metered khayāl performances’ (p. 253). We are told that ‘Vilambit khayāl

has … slowed down to the extent that existing recordings of baṛā khayāl from the first quarter of the twentieth century would not be recognised as vilambit by contemporary listeners. But the increase in drut tempos is a phenomenon mainly related to the pyrotechnics of jhālā performance in instrumental music. The fastest starting tempo of a bandiś in our collection is to be found in the very first known example of recorded khayāl, Gauhar

Jan’s Sūr Malhār, recorded in 1902, which begins at a breathtaking 412 mātrās [beats] per minute and accelerates to a formidable 553 mpm in its modest duration of two minutes and twenty-two seconds’. (ibid.)

The two-volume study is equipped with detailed glossaries, bibliography, and the like, and is illustrated by archival photographs of the ustads and others, whether in the full flow of performance or poised for album covers. All in all, The Songs of Khayāl is a fascinating and unrivalled study of the most important genre of Hindustani music.

Rupert Snell — HINDIDOX