Three Ragas - Ravi Shankar (1956)
Despite featuring music from all over the globe, I refuse to tag anything “world music” because the term has colonialism and racial essentialism baked in. We wouldn’t dump Iannis Xenakis, JS Bach, Miles Davis, Metallica, James Taylor, and Ella Fitzgerald into the same genre tag, so why do that with literally every other kind of music besides the western tradition?
It’s especially galling when we talk about music that is both highly developed and probably older than standard western tonality, like the classical music of North and South India. I can’t pretend to educate you much on this. My middle kid could; she’s been quite taken with the Carnatic South Indian tradition the last few years.
The basic idea is that Indian music (Shankar played North Indian or Hindustani music) is built in ragas. Ragas are a rough framework for what to play; not quite a scale, but more like a set of rules. Within that framework, the musician can improvise as long as it fits the rules. When I was reading about it I was actually reminded of Henry Threadgill’s system of “free serialism”, but there I go again framing non-western things in western terms.
It is gorgeous music, and Shankar is an acknowledged master of the form. I wish I could talk more intelligently about the particulars, but I’m still learning myself.
