3. Explorations and Analyses (I)

This part of the book contains two discussions: the first (section 3.2) asks ‘How do you sing an ālāp?’, and the second (section 3.3) asks ‘How do you sing a choṭā khayāl?’ Section 3.2 is an article-length discussion that investigates the procedures of ālāp, the unmetred opening stage of an Indian classical performance, and one of its fundamental principles of extemporisation. I approach the question, how do you sing an ālāp? through three explorations, each involving close musical analysis of extracts from Rāg samay cakra—thus also providing commentary on the album. In the first and longest, I consider ālāp formation: how is a performer to shape an ālāp, both across its entire span and from phrase to phrase? In the second, I undertake an empirical analysis of duration and proportion in an ālāp: how long should an ālāp last, both in absolute terms and relative to its place in a rāg performance as a whole? And in the third exploration, I broach the under-examined issue of what it is that khayāl singers sing instead of words in an ālāp: how do they select and combine its non-lexical syllables? Through these inquiries, I seek to pull out general truths from the specifics of Vijay Rajput’s performances, and speculate on some of the bigger questions raised by the improvised musical procedures of ālāp. The answers are often formulated as rubrics that codify knowledge acquired by musicians and listeners over a long period. Ultimately, I ask, what kind of theoretical knowledge is constituted by such rubrics, and how does this relate to the intrinsically musical knowledge that is passed down through successive generations of performers? In shorter khayāl performances, the unmetred, preludial ālāp may be followed by a choṭā khayāl. Here the vocalist is joined by the tabla player, in the presentation of, and improvised elaboration around, a metred bandiś (song). Because this composition is only a few phrases long, considerable extemporisation around it is needed to make a fully-fledged performance—hence the salience of the question, ‘how do you sing a choṭā khayāl?’, addressed in section 3.3. In the first instance, I explore this question with examples from the Rāg samay cakra album, on which all the khayāls are choṭā khayāls. I take VR’s performance of Rāg Bhairav as an initial case study, and then widen the canvas with further empirical analyses of extracts from the entire album, examining the full range of elaborative techniques employed. These include first-line accumulation, bol ālāp or vistār, tāns, behlāvā, and lay bāṇṭ. In a second approach to the question—a more formalised theoretical account—I draw the threads of these analyses together into an extensive series of rubrics for performance; ultimately, I speculate whether what underpins the flow of a choṭā khayāl might be something like a grammar. If such theorising pushes beyond the everyday discourse of musicians, I nonetheless continue to make the pragmatics of practice my touchstone.