What is a raga?

Question

Wikipedia describes a raga thus:

A raga is sometimes explained as melodic rule set that a musician works with, but according to Dorottya Fabian and others, this is now generally accepted among music scholars to be an explanation that is too simplistic. According to them, a raga of the ancient Indian tradition is best described as "a non-constructible set in music", just like non-constructible set in language for human communication, in a manner described by Frederik Kortlandt and George van Driem.

What does this mean? How does this mathematical concept map to a raga?

If the above quote is nonsense as one answerer asserts, then what is another precise definition of a raga?

Answer 1

I think the "non-constructible set" concept is actually more confusing than descriptions of what a raga is.

As far as I can tell, a raga is a whole group of musical concepts put together to form a framework from which an entire work of music can be created. It is more than just a key signature or scale, although all ragas seem to have at least one scale in them.

Some components that ragas may have (but not necessarily have to have) include:

• Arohana - A set of notes (scale) used to play ascending melodies.
• Avarohana - A scale used to play descending melodies.
• Vadi - The most important note in a raga (the tonic, in Western terminology).
• Samavadi - The second most important note (the dominant).
• Komal Swar (swar means "note") - Any of what western theory would call "flattened" notes included in the raga.
• Teevra Swar - Any "sharpened" notes included in the raga.
• Varjit Swar - Any notes that should not be used when playing or composing with the raga.
• Pakad - A musical phrase that captures the essence of a raga that may be used as a tag phrase or motif in a piece.
• Samay - A time of day when the raga would be played.
• Seasonality (an English word) - The season of the year when the raga would be played.
• Taal - A rhythm associated with the raga.

So one way to think of a raga is a collection of notes along with a set of rules or guidelines on how to use those notes in a piece, along with a musical motif that uses those notes and obeys those rules that is associated with that raga.

I suppose a western concept that might be as close to a raga as western theory can get might be a fugue with a predetermined key and motif. Even though everyone who writes such a fugue would be writing in the same key and would incorporate the motif somewhere, there are still an infinite number of different fugues that could be written with those guidelines.

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Sources and further reading:

http://learnraagabasics.blogspot.com/2011/01/introduction.html

http://www.ragopedia.com/raga/

Answer 2

The description of a rāga as a “non-constructible set in music” is essentially useless, because if you follow the source that is referred to on Wikipedia, and its citations for the phrase “non-constructible set”, you arrive at things like these (1, 2, 3, 4) from which, after unpacking a fair bit, it turns out to just mean roughly “something hard to define”.

However, the source that Wikipedia quotes for the “non-constructible set” actually has a great description of what its author intended. The source is the article by Wim van der Meer titled “Audience Response and Expressive Pitch Inflections in a Live Recording of Legendary Singer Kesar Bai Kerkar”, in a book Expressiveness in Music Performance. This is what it says:

Raga is sometimes described as a set of melodic rules to which the musician must adhere, but it is now generally accepted that this is too narrow a viewpoint. Perhaps a raga is best described as a non-constructible set along the same lines as language is seen as a non-constructible set by Kortlandt (1983, 2003) and Van Driem (2004, 2007).

(These citations are the 4 articles I linked above.) But it goes to say something more helpful:

In fact, in India, raga is often seen as an entity in the sense of a living being, a creature, an organism. And what the artist does is to bring it to life in front of the audience. Undoubtedly, expressivity in Indian music has much to do with this very conception of raga. When a musician manages to touch the core of a raga, and to portray its salient characteristics, this surely elicits a strong response from the audience, possibly with specific interjections such as “yeh [raag] hai” (this is the raga). is is not an analytical or intellectual process; the listener does not sit comparing the notes being performed with a formal definition of the characteristics of a particular raga. Instead, the experience is immediate and intuitive in the Bergsonian sense (Bergson 1889), in that the audience “knows” the raga without any intervention of reason. Many members of the audience may know the raga without being able to identify it by name; they are familiar with its melodic patterns or gestalt, in much the same manner that we may know or recognize a person but not their name. The comparison to people is drawn also for the immediate nature of the cognition of ragas, in the sense that when we come across a person in the street we recognize them without resorting to a table of physiognomies.

That's fair enough, at least as a sociological description of how listeners experience rāgas (even if it's not useful to other musicians as a technical definition), and explains what the author meant by “non-constructible set”.

The rest of the Wikipedia section (permanent link) has more useful things to say about rāgas too.

[…] Jones translated it as "mode" of European music tradition, but Willard corrected him […] a Raga is both mode and tune. […] Stern refined this explanation to "the raga is more fixed than mode, less fixed than the melody, […] richer both than a given mode or a given melody; it is mode with added multiple specialities"

[…] the concept has no direct Western translation […] Raga is a fusion of technical and ideational ideas found in music, and may be roughly described as a musical entity that includes note intonation, relative duration and order, in a manner similar to how words flexibly form phrases to create an atmosphere of expression. […]

[…] A raga has a given set of notes, on a scale, ordered in melodies with musical motifs. […] a rasa (mood, atmosphere, essence, inner feeling) that is unique to each raga. […] For most artists, their basic perfected repertoire has some forty to fifty ragas. […]

[…] The goal of a raga and its artist is to create rasa (essence, feeling, atmosphere) with music […]

[…] defined Raga as a "tonal framework for composition and improvisation." […]

etc.