On finding a palette, pt. 3
Raga Malkauns
One of my fondest memories of college was listening to Hariprasad Chaurasia’s 2 versions of raga Malkauns on the album “Flying Beyond” while driving my ‘84 Plymouth Voyager minivan through the leafy northern Virginia suburbs on my way to class. (You can listen to it here while reading...)
I bought this cassette at a local Indian bookstore, Nataraj Books, back when casettes were still sold in stores. When I saw the album cover of a hazy sunrise in Benares or some other place in India I just bought it without hesitation not really knowing what was on it. Each side of the cassette has a 20 minute version of the raga and the auto reverse feature on my cassette deck allowed me to play it over and over again when driving.
Raga Malkauns is a late night raga and considered to be one of the oldest of classical Indian music. It is noted for its deeply meditative quality and tends to be played in the lower octaves and with a slower tempo. According to musicologist Alan Danielou its expression is one of “prayer, deep, peaceful, and sublime. Humble abandon in the peace of the night.”1
While I’ve listened to this album for over 20 years I never really looked into what makes this sound so mysterious and otherworldly besides the virtuosic flute playing. Danielou’s book provides a little insight by providing the basic structure of the raga. Unlike most other ragas, Malkauns is pentatonic meaning it only uses 5 notes which makes it similar to the pentatonic scale in Blues music.2 What is surprising to me is that of these 5 notes, the 5th (pa) is one of the notes that are “missing”. The “perfect 5th” as it is called is so central to Western music that both major and minor scales, in fact all 7 musical modes, leave the 5th untouched. The 5th is really the cornerstone of western music along with the tonic note. In fact much of classical music theory, from classical to jazz, develops around resolving a melody or chord progression back to the fifth. The simple act of dropping this one note out perhaps gives the raga some of its exotic, unearthly quality.
This made me think about how removing a note or two can sometime do more to music than adding additional notes. One need only look at how blues, rock, bluegrass and jazz all evolved from the use of the shortened pentatonic scale instead of the full 7 notes of the classical scale (although certain chromatic notes, ie. the blue note, were also added to give some flair.) In the case of raga Malkauns, the key note or sonant is the fourth (ma) although there are not many other rules as compared to other ragas which have strict rules on ways to ascend and descend when playing a melody. This freedom perhaps lends to its open, expansive quality.
Another feature of Malkauns is its connection to the Hindu god Shiva. According to one story, his wife Parvati created the raga to calm him down after a sacrifice gone bad. Shiva is related to the number 5 as one of his principle mantras contains 5 syllables (na ma shi va ya). There’s a whole theology around sound syllables and their relationship to the ancient view that the world is made up 5 elements (pancha bhutas) of ether, air, fire, water and earth. This backdrop can elicit a cosmic feel in the raga as if these 5 elements are gracefully swirling and dancing together in a formless sound field. Of course that’s just one interpretation …. Daneilou gives a more emotive feeling to the raga by describing each note as affecting a certain emotion: passionate request, peace, loving, desire/love, satisfaction/peace.3
There are hundreds of ragas in Indian classical music (both Hindustani and Carnatic) and each is associated with a time of day and specific expressions of emotion, color, form, etc. In many ways each are like a little palette with specific rules that act as a blueprint to create a certain type of picture or feeling in the listener’s mind. Adding or removing a color can change the whole composition.
Alan Daneilou, The Ragas of North Indian Music (1980), Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers, New Delhi, p. 324.
For reference, here are the “notes” for Malkouns compared with the major and minor pentatonic scales as used in Blues and Rock music in the key of C.
Raga Malkouns Ascending (Aroha)
C Eb F Ab Bb C
C major Pentatonic
C D E G A C
C minor pentatonic
C Eb F G Bb C
Ibid.