Indian dancing

INDIAN DANCING

performance, it may, despite being on the audible plane, be treated also as a part of the visual plane of the aharyya abhinaya of nrtya.

The dancer and the orchestra have to work in unison, between them creating a mood. The Abbinaya Darpanam lays down the tule that during a dance performance two cymbal players must seat themselves on the right and two mridanga, or drum playets, must temain on either side of the stage, while a singer must be present with a tambura, ot drone.

Indian music consists of an infinite variety of sounds, skilfully atranged. While in Western music the harmony is between melodies, in Indian music it is between rhythms. In comparison with the music of India, that of the West has an uneven flow graduating from a gentle andantino to a quick allegretto and then pethaps broadening into an al/largando ot tising to a crescendo. Indian music, on the other hand, though based on melody, has innumerable variations, so subtle and with so many twists to each note, that the inexperienced eat misses the lightning changes.

The octave in Western music rushes on with the force of a torrent; but there are twenty-two notes in Indian music and they glide smoothly, with silvery tones, creating subtle moods and visions. Owing to the profusion of tones, half, quarter tones, and eighths of tones, and the minute differences in the sound of each of them, each sound ever mingling with another with the most delicate of modulations and cadences, the untrained ear is baffled by what sounds to it like a drawn-out wail!

When Indian musicians play together each tunes to the same melody or improvises a background for it. In the East, orchestral music of the Western variety is unknown. Innovators, however, ate endeavouring to use counterpoint so that by playing several melodies against conttasting ones, monotony may be relieved.

The Indian musician has two bases on which to improvise — the tala and the raga:

The a/a governs the duration of a sound and is beaten out on a variety of drums, each drum regulated to the dancet’s pace. It is the dancer who fixes the ¢a/a; the drummer observes the speed set and meets the dancer at the climax of each beat, in the process impro-

52