Learning Indian Classical Music: Chapter 2

Dear friends, hope you have read the first chapter of this article, if not you can read it here Learning Indian Classical Music: Chapter 1.

In the first chapter, we covered the following topics:

• What is meant by singing musical notes?
• What are the categories of musical notes?
• What is Saptak and what are its categories?

In today’s chapter we are going to cover the below topics:

• What is meant by singing in ‘soor’ ?
• Harmonium vs Tanpura — Why is Harmonium not recommended to learn Indian Classical music?

So, let us start and explore these concepts.

• What is meant by singing in ‘soor’ ?

As I explained in the first chapter, “singing the musical notes means pronouncing the names of the musical notes at the defined sound frequency of that note.” and any song is made up using the 12 notes ( 7 Sudh Swar + 5 Vikrit Swar). Hence when you are singing or practicing a song, you are actually following the musical notes of the song while singing. It means while singing a song, you are pronouncing the lyrics but at the sound frequency of the corresponding musical notes. When you are singing the song as per the composed musical notes with the correct sound frequency of the note then you are singing in ‘soor’. If you are deviating from the correct frequencies of the musical notes , then it is called ‘be-sura’

• Harmonium vs Tanpura — Why is Harmonium not recommended to learn Indian Classical music?

In Indian homes where someone in the family learns music, you will find one or both of these instruments. Both these great instruments help in guiding you throughout the learning process or singing process to correctly maintain the frequency of the musical notes. In Indian classical music, generally, the harmonium is not recommended and tanpura is preferred. Let us understand the reason

The harmonium has keys for all the musical notes, when the keys are played, it produces their corresponding sound frequencies. When someone sings while playing harmonium, it acts as a support for the singer where it helps the singer to maintain the correct frequency of the notes.

The difference of harmonium with Tanpura is that tanpura plays the frequency of only 4 notes — Madhya Saptak PA, Madhya Saptak SA, Madhya Saptak SA, Mandra SA. So, tanpura continuously gives a kind of refrence to note ranges. One who is practicing using tanpura, continuously keeps on hearing the note frequency refrences of these 4 notes and has to sing the other notes based on these refrence notes.

The advantage of practicing using tanpura is that since it does not provide the sound frequency of all the notes and practitioner has to practice all the notes by taking reference of only the 4 notes — hence, all the frequency of the notes eventually gets into the practitioner’s brain. Practioner, after a point of time can directly sing the correct frequency even without the support of any instrument. This process becomes slightly difficult for practitioners using harmonium because they generally get completely dependent on the harmonium for maintaining correctness of the ‘soor’ and hence the frequencies do not get embedded in the mind.

Hope you got a fair idea about the points discussed today.

In the next chapter, we will understand Scale in detail.