Re: Why ICM excluded harmony from its musical system ?

Here is a layperson's simple, non-technical hypothesis which can be
called the "One Throat, Two Hands" hypothesis.

A fundamental place in Western music belongs to the keyboard. The water
organ (hydraulis) was invented as early as the 3rd century BC and the
bellows organ in the 2nd century AD. The church (and later the concert)
organ has been central to Western music since the 8th century BC.
Musicians wrote a lot of music for the organ - records of keyboard
music survive from the early 14th century.

The hydraulis (a machine rather than a natural instrument) was invented
by Ctesibios while he was trying to solve the problem of having one
person play more than one wind instrument at the same time. The
essential point is that the keyboard allows the use of both hands to
play music - the easiest way to play polyphonic music. (Note that it
was also possible for more than one person to play on the organ
keyboards.)

Now there was no equivalent of keyboard instruments in ICM till the
time in the 19th century (BC!) when the harmonium found its way to
India. It is quite possible, as Prof. Jep Boer notes, that "alap
improvisation, the very core of the Hindustani classical music, was
first and foremost an instrumental phenomenon." However, these were all
string instruments - much less conducive to playing polyphonic music.

The interesting question relates to the reason for this tremendous
divergence in instrumentation. One line would be to argue that
necessity is the mother of invention. There was a lot of congregational
singing in the Western tradition. In monasteries, abbeys, cathedrals,
and churches worship included liturgical singing in groups. This need
called for an instrument that could support this type of singing. Hence
the central place of the church organ and institutions like the
"Kings Organ Maker."

There was no such tradition of congregational singing in Hindu
religion. Rather there was the tradition of holy men going off into
solitary journeys and seeking God or the Ultimate through individual
worship. Part of this worship was music - first chanting and then the
addition of text. Hence the primacy of voice in what grew into ICM.
With one throat you can't have polyphonic music.

The two trajectories can thus be followed to the present. The great
names that are remembered in ICM are the vocalists, starting in recent
history from Tansen down to Rashid Khan today. Nobody thinks much about
composers (although they were there like Sadarang, etc.) and there are
no such things as conductors. On the other hand, in Western classical
music the names that are iconic are those of the composers (Mozart,
Bach, etc.), great conductors are remembered, but there is much less
recognition of vocalists (except more recently in the case of opera).

When one reserves a ticket for a WCM concert one knows what one is
going to listen to a whole season in advance. When one turns up for an
ICM concert, one doesn't know what one would hear till the time the
artist begins.

All this is pure speculation by someone who knows next to nothing about
WCM or ICM but a little bit about the materialist strand of historical
development.

It's been fun trying to think this through. Thanks Paulo.

.

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