ATS1346 Study Guide - Quiz Guide: Natya Shastra, Pentatonic Scale, Alap
25 May 2018
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Ragas, Recipes and Rasas
• Raga in Hindustani classical music
o Inventory of melodic elements, performative process and aesthetic
outcome
• Relationship between music, food and cooking
• Significance of rasa in the performance of raga
• Senses further enhanced by mood and touch of chef
• Idealised ways of accounting for these experiences and discerning the
embodied qualities that they give rise to in their participants varies according
to place, culture and context
Rasa
• Creative act
• Rasa theory is the product of Sanskritic intellectual culture
o Nurtured an insightful capacity into the classification and
systemisation of vast areas of human experiences and natural
phenomena
• Specific and general significations
• A technical term within an aesthetic tradition used in regional languages to
describe sensual experiences
o Primarily signifies emotional flavour
• Rasa signifies intangibles such as flavour, sentiment, essence, zest, nectar,
humour, delicacy
• E.g. Natyasastra – related to drama
• Connection between music and food is encountered in anecdotes
Premodern times:
• Oral transmission: collective knowledge of community or family was inherited
by individuals more like acquisition of a mother tongue than as formally
learned closed systems of exercises and rules
• Diverse, parallel, creative and multilayered
• Diverse fabric invokes a sense of musical past and its traditions and import
core sensibilities about social, creative and aesthetic values of tradition
Raga
• An inventory of melodic elements, a performative process and an aesthetic
outcome
• Core sensibility: awareness and appreciation
• Important foundational, technical, structural concerns:
o Sound production, grammar and syntax
o How they are shaped melodically
o How the intonation of notes are articulated
o How ragas share common melodic characteristics are differentiated
from each other
• Textured and emotionally flavoured experience
• Rasika (performer or listener)
• Equally accommodate its technical performative and aesthetic dimensions
• Two primary concerns: ingredients and method
o Ingredients:
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