Hindu Origins of Javanese Music

Like Indian painting of the classic age, Indian music is perhaps best described as linear, in the sense that it is severely melodic. However intricate the convolutions, the progress was that of a trail of single notes, vivid and victorious, before which Harmony itself stood silenced. Europe recognises Melody but prefers it in a complex harmonic setting. With Harmony, music gains an element of colour and let us admit readily that European music possesses something that modern Indian, and generally Oriental music, lacks and that something, is the analogue of colour, viz., Harmony.

Melody is undoubtedly the soul of music, but one is apt to misunderstand the term, when one applies it to Indian music, in the narrow sense which it carries in European parlance. Indian melody is winged with Gamaka, and makes use of the unique scheme of Stayavaga in which the notes and their enjambments merge to form new units of expression–no embellishments, but integral parts of the melody, by virtue of which music resided as much in the notes, as between them, a process of continuous blending and graded shading as it were, a whole world of intervallic melody, of which Europe knew nothing. Nor is Europe aware of the abstract but pictorial Ragas familiar to us as Lalita, Vasanta, Kalyani, etc., in elaborate profusion and which are the burden of our music.

Harmony signifies the coincidence of different notes; the unit of European music is the chord, and its progression that of a cluster of notes marching in triple or quadruple file, a kind of blend in which every note surrenders its individual hue to produce a new composite effect, emphasised and reinforcad as it often is, by the diverse timbre of the various instruments of the orchestra. It is indisputable that European music is a more composite art in that it expresses itself in the interaction of the three elements–rhythm, melody, and harmony; and with harmony particularly it has assumed the existence of a kind of space in three dimensions, none of which could subsist without implying the others, in contrast with the merely melodic, two-dimensioned Oriental art. But the critic is on debatable ground when he affirms that without harmony, a musical art of permanent value and intelligibility has not been known to attain independent existence or that non-harmonic music is always ancillary to poetry and dance, because he is not aware that the movements of Ragalapti make it as elaborate a work of art as the symphony achieved with an economy of means unthinkable in Europe; nor has he gauged the Gamakik richness of Indian melody or the intricacies of Indian rhythm, still largely a sealed book not only to Europe, but also to ourselves, exponents and all! Harmony by itself is no guarantee of great art, for if it were, popular European music will not be the abomination it is. Great music like any great art depends upon human personality especially that of the chosen ones such as Beethoven or Tyagaraja, and let us not, therefore, exaggerate the role of this or that element of music, because every element has its unplumbed depths, and all methods are legitimate because beautiful, and no method final; but welcome every school and style, the slow majesty of the Dhruvapad along with the learned Pallavi, no less than the epic harmonies of Europe or the intriguing polyrhythm of the Gamelan or the ethereal tintinnabulation of the Gendar Wayang. Many are the paths that lead to the Palace Beautiful!

According to historians it took Europe more than 700 years to understand harmony. Whatever the origin of European music, whether it grew out of the post-classical tradition or the folk-arts of the Celtic and Teutonic races, it was a musical necessity that led to such a discovery, for "vague melodic music and vocal music sung by voices of different pitch seems imperatively to call for the help of harmony;" the melody was primitive and poor in content and had developed neither in the direction of Stayavaga nor Raga; harmony alone could redeem its poverty and raise it to the level of an art. The immediate source of harmony was the fact that men's voices were of different calibre from deep bass to high tenor and that it was inconvenient that they should all sing their plain chant at the same pitch. So men had to discover that relation of pitch at which the song could be sung simultaneously. This led them to mix up notes as when the tenor sang the principal melody and the other voices took up assigned parts in accompaniment and so to blend divergent melodies. This was the contrapuntal tradition, and as it took root, the tendency was to bring instrumental music into greater prominence, till eventually the art based itself on a succession of chords. Here was the curious phenomenon, that European music which during its infancy broke away from the ecclesiastical modes, after the lapse of many centuries and the wisdom of a later day, is seen walking in the direction of the very modes she had discarded earlier and halting at the half-way house of modulation–the modern musician's mainstay. In a purely melodic art with a multiplicity of modes there was no call for the ‘changing of keys’ of the European kind, and the tendency was rather towards a single well-defined pitch in the shape of a rich drone, sometimes a second if the level of the song demanded it. In an harmonic system, an explicit drone would clash with the chords and therefore impossible. When Mr. Suryaputra, during the Javanese Art Congress, objected to modulation in European music, he revealed that like the Indian, his music-consciousness was melodic and modal; likewise should we remember his harmonic prepossessions when Mr. Fox Strangways calls the drone a distraction or the tritone ugly. Musical Europe has never understood musical Asia for this reason, that Europe thinks exclusively in terms of harmony so that a merely melodic utterance becomes unintelligible unless harmonised; Asia has likewise to divest European melody of its harmonic setting, if she would understand it at all. A truly Himalayan barrier of form!

Harmony was no doubt an important European discovery, but the scope of harmony was much wider than European music, so that several systems of harmonised music could co-exist, each different from the other. One such system was the Javanese. It was an unique phenomenon and its very uniqueness upset the equanimity of Sir Hubert Parry who assigned it a place just above the art of the bushmen. Raffles rated it high because it was the nearest Oriental approach to European music. A modern savant Mr. Brandts Buys states; "I do not claim that Western music is more developed than the Javanese system, both being highly developed and highly cultivated forms of art, both having an evolution of more than a thousand years behind them; they have, however, developed along parallel lines, not identical lines. The point where Javanese music stands now is not behind us, but rather at the side." And referring to the musical art of Bali, he says: "We Westerners getthe impression of a certain immobility about the Javanese Gamelan; but the Bali orchestra demonstrates how immensely moving the same gong-sounds could be; it boils and bubbles; it is not calm, but tremendously expressive, wild, demoniac." Tagore called it a tonal mosaic and said that in the gongs of the Gamelan the Indian Jalataranga had gained breadth, dignity, and variety. In spite of its dissimilarity it was very pleasing to our ears, nor did there seem to be any bar to its appreciation by the Europeans either." Here after all was common ground for East and West, where the West could follow an art that was polyphonous in expression–nay seek inspiration therefrom as in the case of Debussy–and the East recognise her immemorial Ragas and Talas in a strange but beautiful setting. Javanese music was not the less harmonical because the scales were not of the same pattern as the European or the polyphony was regulated differently. As the pianoforte in Europe evolved from the harp and lute which it replaced, so the bronze-keyed Sarons and Genders of Java ousted the stririged instruments in some period of her history. Up to that period Javanese literature and sculpture abounds with guitars, lutes, harps; suddenly these disappear and are replaced by the keyed instruments. The same musical tradition continued without a break, though in place of lutes with notes of variable pitch, there was a new class of Idiophones with notes of fixed pitch. I will just stress this point that the Javanese Idiophones are evolved from the stringed instruments in the same way as the piano, with this difference that the latter is mechanically more perfect.

I propose in this paper to trace Javanese music to a forgotten school of instrumentation recorded for us in early musical literature in Sanskrit–an art completely emancipated from languge as well as dance and that sought an harmonic mode of utterance particularly and did not depend upon words for its intelligibility-literally a ‘song without words’ of pre-historic antiquity.

The term Samgita comprised the triple arts of Song, Dance, and Instrumentation which expressed themselves in interaction with one another or in separation, but which were inspired by the common principle of rhythm. The three were independent arts, never ancillary to one another, though in the theatre as in the temple, they merged in a common service. The modern notion that exalts any of these at the expense of the others is a mistaken interpretation of the ancient Hindu view of the individual status of each of the arts.

Hindu theory recognised two great schools of Samgita, the Desi and Marga. All those local systems which like the Prekrits varied from province to province and followed popular caprice and which by their very diversity could not be brought under one comprehensive code were of the genus Desi. Marga Samgita was the analogue of the Sanskrit language and signified the highest art creations of the race–a culmination of several cycles of art endeavour divinely inspired–a height of creative expression unattainable by mere humans. This group of arts demanded from the artist not virtuosity, but faithfulness to encompass which was devised an elaborate grammar of regulations which controlled every detail of practice and left nothing to chance or whim of performer or auditor. Whoever rendered a Marga piece, whether a native of Dravida or Kashmir, and wherever it was rendered, its musical character remained the same. Its preservation engaged the early theorists and monopolises the bulk of our technical classics. Marga song in particular found a passionate votary in king Mahendravarman whose inscription at Kudumiyamalai is an attempt to record for posterity some of these classical melodies as remembered by Rudracharya and it is inferable that they were in danger of being forgotten so early. It was Rajaraja III who in the course of a visit to Tiruvorriiyur (a centre of Sanskrit learning of the age) during the Avani festival, witnessed Marga dance being rehearsed by a girl, learnt to love it so well that he had the cadences of the dance permanently defined and identified on the inner walls of the towers at Chidambaram and elsewhere. A similar office was perhaps done for the classical orchestra by an unknown king of the Sailendra dynasty after whom was named one of the two tone-settings of the Javanese Gamelan, very much like modern South Indian music which is called Carnatic in memory of the Karnataka kings of Vijayanagar, who patronised her during six centuries.

The Marga and Desi system had many ingredients in common though their use of it was different. All modern Indian music is Desi, whether Hindustani or Carnatic, though there are relics of the Marga system in either school awaiting discovery.

The Marga instrumentation, comprised many systems, one of which was Nirgita Vadya, known also as Bahirgita, whether because, as Abhinavagupta explains, it originated with the Asuras, like Maya-Silpa or because its place was outside the stage, we do not know; but if legend may be believed, the bulk of it had disappeared very early except for a few compositions. This art which accompanied neither song nor dance, for once went out of its way in the preliminaries of the ancient theatre, along with Marga song, to provide a musical ground to the supreme Tandava. The unit of this music was not the note, but what was callled Dhatu, a sequence of which constituted the principal melody and was played on the chief harp, to the accompaniment of an elaborate kind furnished by the subordinate Vinas,-the lutes, guitars etc. This system of accompaniment was perhaps taken advantage of later, in following the orthodox Gitis by the Tata Kutapa (string band) consisting of Chitra, Vipanchika, Nakula, Kinnari (petit and grand) Pinaki, Kurmi Satatantrica, Ravanahastaka, Shadkarana, etc. We read in this connection of an ensemble of flutes and piccolos and also a vocal choir (Gayana Vrinda) made up of four chief singers, eight subordinates, twelve women accompanyists, four flutists and four drummers, not to mention the Avanaddha kutapa (dram orchestra) in which more than twenty members of the drum family were represented. Chronologically let us remember that Marga arts not only implied millenia of evolution, but had a history dating to the Vedic age and that Nirgita Vadya in particular has been a lost art in India during the past ten centuries or more, unlike Marga song which straggled on almost till the times of Vijayanagar.

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