Sitar Player

Clad in high-collared vests and baggy cotton trousers, the three barefoot Indian musicians sat down cross-legged on an Oriental carpet on the stage of Judson Memorial Hall at Manhattan's Washington Square. Glancing at the drummer to the right of him, Ravi Shankar cradled his sitar in his arms, and with slender, agile fingers began to coax from its steel strings a piercingly plaintive, twangy melody. Beside him the tabla (drum) thrummed and rataplanned a shifting, syncopated beat, and behind him a four-stringed, unfretted lute named the tamboura thinly droned its hypnotic accompaniment. Thus Sitarist Shankar, India's most widely famed contemporary musician, last week gave U.S. listeners a taste of his country's traditional music.

U.S. audiences were receptive but occasionally puzzled. The sitar itself is a confusing-looking instrument, shaped like an oversized guitar (up to 12 ft. long) and equipped with six playing strings, 13 "sympathetic" resonating strings, and two gourds which serve as sound box and resonator. Indian music is based on melodic forms known as ragas. Neither scales nor modes, ragas are separate, individual series of notes--there are thousands of different ragas--most of them passed orally from one musician to another. In combination with the drummer's rhythm, a raga gives the starting theme of a composition. The sitar player can improvise as long as he does not use notes other than those included in the basic raga. Each raga expresses an individual mood, e.g., tranquillity, loneliness, love, heroism, and is designed to be performed at a clearly specified hour of the day.

The result is an infinitely complex music which bears some slight resemblance to modern jazz and Schoenberg's twelve-tone system. The wonder to Westerners is that the ancient music of India is also the nation's most popular music. It has caught on so rapidly during the last decade that Shankar and other top artists (who get up to $2,000 a performance) have no difficulty drawing crowds of 40,000 to open-air music festivals.

Benares-born Ravi Shankar, a younger brother of famed Dancer Uday Shankar (TIME, Nov. 22, 1948), started mastering his difficult art when he was 18. He has written movie scores and ballets (including one based on Nehru's Discovery of India), is working to modernize Indian musical techniques, i.e., standardize instruments and notation. But he despairs of ever accomplishing true mastery of the sitar. "It is like driving through a mist," he says. "The more you drive, the more you realize the road is still there."

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