Contemporary Musicians and the Ragascape
In this third part of the Ragascape study, we examine
the repertoire strength of different Raga-s, as evident from the concert
repertoire of contemporary musicians. This direction of enquiry is suggested by
the findings of the first study on Audience Engagement Indicator of widely
performed Raga-s. (See Parts 1 through 6) In the earlier study, the
recordings of contemporary musicians reported a much higher Audience Engagement
Indicator than the recordings of earlier generations of musicians. This justifies
a generation-specific enquiry related to the repertoire-strength of Raga-s.
The relationship between the Ragascape as a cultural umbrella
of melodic ideas and the repertoire of contemporary musicians will tend to be
reflected in two ways. (1) It will be reflected in the totality of Raga-s
performed by prominent contemporary musicians and (2) It will be reflected in
the frequency with which each of the Raga-s is performed. It is impossible to
access information on the frequency with which each Raga has been performed in
public by prominent contemporary musicians. However, it is possible to get some
indication of the totality of the Raga-repertoire being performed by
contemporary musicians. I choose to draw, once again, on the YouTube archive to
paint an indicative picture of this phenomenon.
Defining the Contemporary Musician
For the purposes of this study, I define the
contemporary musician as a vocalist or instrumentalist who is born between 1950
and 1980, and is still active as a professional musician. The logic for this
definition is three-fold. (1) The birth in/after 1950 defines the first
generation of post-independence musicians. (2) Social scientists accept a
period of 30 years as appropriately defining a cultural generation. (3) At the
time of doing this study, a musician born before 1980 is at least 40 years old
which is considered the maturation threshold of musicians in the Hindustani
tradition.
Based on this criterion, I drew up a list of 20 prominent
vocalists and 20 prominent instrumentalists. Every single Raga performed by
them anywhere, on any occasion, and uploaded on YouTube was logged. Only solo
performances were considered, because the choice of repertoire in duets or
ensembles need not reflect the musician’s own preferences. All major genres of
Hindustani music were covered by the survey – Khayal, Thumree, Dhrupad.
The output table answered the question: How many
musicians have performed a particular Raga even once, irrespective of context
and location? As mentioned earlier, no estimate is possible of how
frequently each musician has performed a particular Raga, and therefore this
factor remains unquantified. The list of contemporary musicians covered is
given in Table 1, along with their years of birth, and instruments
(where relevant).
An interesting figure emerging from this study is the
difference between the number of Raga-s performed by vocalists and
instrumentalists. Vocalists appear to present an average repertoire of 44
Raga-s, while, instrumentalists appear to perform an average of only 35 Raga-s.
No significance can be attached to this difference, because it may well be an
infirmity of the data-source without having any basis in the reality. In any
event, the “finding” is irrelevant to the objectives of this study.
Tracking the YouTube upload repertoire of the selected
40 musicians gave us a total of 244 Raga-s. Of these, 110 have shown up as
having been performed by both vocalists and instrumentalists, 43 performed only
by instrumentalists, and 91 performed only by vocalists. Because the total Repertoire-strength
of different Raga-s is our focus, I choose to analyze only those 110 Raga-s
which have been performed by both, vocalists and instrumentalists.
An analysis of 110 Raga-s performed by
instrumentalists as well as vocalists reveals an average of 12.4 musicians (out
of 40) having performed any Raga, with a Standard Deviation of 7.9. This simple
measure permits us to focus our attention primarily on those Raga-s which have
been performed by more than 12 (30%) musicians.
This group of Raga-s enjoying an “above average”
preference amongst musicians can be further divided into two groups. Group 1 is
of those Raga-s which are performed by more than 20 out of 40 musicians (above
mean+ standard deviation), and Group 2 performed by 12 to 19 (Mean to Mean + Standard
deviation) musicians.
Group 1 consists 0f 20 Raga-s, and Group 2 consists of
33 Raga-s. The Repertoire-strength of these 53 Raga-s is given in Table 2
at the end of this paper. These Raga-s may be said to constitute the Ragascape focus,
by virtue of being performed by the largest number of prominent contemporary
musicians. A contextual/ thematic classification of the two groups is as
follows.
Having ranked Raga-s on the basis of their presence in
the repertoire of contemporary musicians, it is useful to examine the
correspondence between this ranking and the Audience Engagement Indicators
derived from YouTube viewership in the first part of this three-part study.
Contemporary Repertoire and Audience Engagement
Indicators
This present study has identified 110 Raga-s for
focused consideration, and ranked them on the basis of the number of contemporary
musicians performing them. The earlier study started from the other end –
considered 97 commonly performed Raga-s, and ranked them on the basis of an
Audience Engagement Indicator. A
matching of the two lists shows 89 Raga-s appearing in both the lists. A
statistical correlation was run on the 89 common Raga-s to examine the
correspondence between the two rankings. The procedure yielded a
Correlation Coefficient of 0.65, and the X-Y scatter plot is presented below:
Concluding observations
In these three studies, examining the concept of a
Ragascape from different angles, we have established that there does exist a
set of Raga-s that can be considered the core of the present-day musical
culture, and that its existence is manifested in several aspects of musical
activity. Admittedly, the data-source utilized by us to arrive at these
inferences does not satisfy the demands of scientific rigor. However, the
ecosystem we seek to study is, by its very nature, inhospitable to conclusive
research. This series of studies has attempted to use YouTube, the only
candidate data-source, as prudently as
possible to evolve a plausible snapshot of the cultural phenomenon sought to be
profiled.
These three studies provide us with the insights that,
if merged, may lead to a Raga-repertoire profile of Hindustani music that may
answer to the definition of a Ragascape. The results may, or may not,
approximate Bhatkhande’s definition of “Prasiddha” Raga-s, as conceived by him
over a century ago. It could, however, answer a similar query, with a more
transparent support of evidence than was possible in his time.
(c) Deepak S. Raja. October 2020
