Lāszlō Hortobāgyi (Hortator):

Sitār Ang (1982-2013)

The Sitār Ang cover image is based on the cover of the first Sitār lecture book of eL-Hortobāgyi, published by Sangeet Karyalaya in 1943.
The small book was written by Krishna Rao Shankar Pandit (1893-1989)

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krishnarao_Shankar_Pandit#Biography

www.guo.hu/___WORDPRESS/Laszlo-Hortobagyi_Gayan-Uttejak-Orchestra/_By_The_Way/Sangeet/1953_My%20first%20Sitar-booklet.pdf

and which, of course, could only be used with the knowledge of a few specific 'secrets' of sitār technique that could only be learned through practical instruction. Despite northern India's population of hundreds of millions and its centuries-old classical music culture, Hindusthān's ONLY classical music publisher was the Sangeet Karyalaya of Hathras, founded by Prabhulal Garg (Kaka Hathrasi) in 1935 and publishing the long-established Sangeet magazine.Lakshmīnārāyan Garg, Kaka’s son and the chief editor of the magazine, (passed away at age 88.) and the leader of Sangeet Karyalaya, known as Garg and Co. in its early life, has done more than just publish Sangeet.

Next door was the KCCCO instrument manufacture. (Temple Road). My first sitār was made there and in the sixties I managed to order all the issues and books of the Sangeet periodicals that were published up to that time (and later too).

The following extract illustrates the spirit of Sangeet:
In 1937, ‘Sangeet Bhushan’ Lakshmiprasād Mishra wrote of his chance encounter in Varanasi (Benares) with Vishnu Digambar Paluskār, the grand old man of Hindusthāni music tradition.

On why rāga-s no longer work miracles as legends claims, V.D. Paluskār harrumphs about making money out of music:
" in an epoch when music is no longer a purely spiritual pursuit, what hope is there of it wresting a miracle? " - he retorts.

More on:

scroll.in/magazine/1008254/after-an-unbroken-run-of-87-years-indias-oldest-classical-music-magazine-is-facing-a-bleak-future

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Here reable an extremely symplified outline of the history of the traditional practice of the sitār instrument. Two historical trends (bāj) , the Gāyaki and the Tantrakari, can be highlighted to depict the musical background of the Sitār Ang on these two CDs.

In contrast to Western classical music practice, where the participating musical heroes neutralise and robotise as much of their individual personalities as possible in order to achieve harmony, in Indian society, which appears homogeneous, musical styles can be described in terms of the musical schools and trends founded by great personalities, and yet this is how they have become a unified musical vernacular on a
continental scale, transcending caste boundaries.

It is therefore necessary, for example, to present the certain instrumental musical movements through their outstanding representatives. The Indian continental network of guru-shishyā-shagīrd elite (inbreeding) relations of representatives without caste preferences is similar to the network of European ruling families covering the whole of Europe in the 19th century. Gāyaki Ang and the Merukhand system
The Progenitor: Ustād Amīr Ali Khān (1912-1974) was born at Akole (Mahārashtra), and brought up in Indore, where his father, Shahmīr Khān served the princely court as a sārangi player. Young Amīr Ali began his training in vocalism and the sārangi at an early
age.

For young Amīr Ali's training, his father once sought the documentation of the merukhand discipline from a colleague at the Indore court, Ustād Nasīruddin Dāgar. The Ustād refused on the grounds that such knowledge was not available to “the son of a mere sārangi player”. The remark stung Shahmīr Khān, and he developed his own method for training Amīr Ali in the merukhand system.

The merukhand discipline (meru = mountain, khand = fragment) is a logically sequenced compendium of all the 5040 (7 x 6 x 5 x 4 x 3 x 2 x 1) melodic patterns that can be generated from seven notes. The patterns are sequenced according to a particular logic, and required to be practiced endlessly until they get “programmed” into the ideation process of the musician. The mastery of these patterns also, obviously, developed the musician’s technical ability to execute the most complicated melodic passages. When performing a rāga, the musician chooses the patterns compatible with rāga grammar for exploring the melodic personality of the rāga.(Dīpak Rāja) Performances in the Indore gharānā are noted by the style of Abdul Wahid Khān, and
the tāna-s reminiscent of Rājab Ali Khān. The merukhand structure is similar to that practiced by Aman Ali Khān of the Bhendibazār. The khyāl gāyaki in the Indore gharānā retains the slow development and restraint from frills as in the dhrupad Amir Khān's music was an introverted, dignified 'darbār' style.

The Indore Gharānā's ramifications

01= Indore Bīnkāri Bāj
Bande Ali Khān Indore Bīnkār (1830 - 1896) was the son of Ghulām Zakīr Khān of the Saharānpur, contemporary of Sādiq Ali Khān of Jaipur(1893 -1964) . His sister was married to Behram Khān Dāgar.
His disciple was Abdul Wahid Khān of Kirānā.

02= Mewāti Gharānā
Ghagge Nazir Khān and Wahid Khān are regarded as fountainheads of the Mewāti gharānā.They were descendants of the Qawwal Bacchon gharānā. Raīs Khān (1939 - 2017) belonged to the Mewāti gharānā (classical music lineage) which is connected to Indore gharānā and the "bīnkār bāj gāyaki ang" combined with rūdra vīnā approaches carried out by Raīs Khān's father Mohammed Khān, a rūdra vīnā player and a sitār-is. Belonging to the Mewāti gharānā which goes back to the Mughal period, it produced famous singers Hassu Khān (died 1859) and
Haddu Khān (died 1875) from the school of Bāde Ināyat Hussain Khān (1837- 1923)" (He was the first person who introduce bol-bant technic in Khyāl Gāyaki.

03 = Etawah Gāyaki Ang
Sarojān Singh of this gharānā was an invited singer of Mughal Darbār in Delhi. His son Turab Khān (previously known as Baddu Singh) and grand-son Sahabdād Khān (previously known as Saheb Singh) were also shagīrd of Nirmāl Shah Bīnkār of Seniā, Sahabdād Khān was brother in law of great vocalist Ustād Haddu Khān of Gwālior gharānā and also learnt vocal music from him. He applied his music on vocal music and sārangi. Afterwards he started to play sitār and he was the inventor of the instrument surbahār. He lived in Etawah, near Agra (hence the name of his gharānā as Etawah) where he was a musician in Naugaon Darbār. He had two sons, the elder Imdād Khān (1858-
1920) and the younger Karimdād Khān. Imdād Khān lineage: Enayat Khān (1894-1938), Vilāyat Khān (1927-2004) and their family: Wahid Khān (?), and disciples : Shāhid Parvez (1954-), Budhaditya Mukherjī
(1955),etc. Seniā - Maihar Gharānā The musicians belonging to the gharānā follow the strictest performance of the basic ālāp-jhōr-jhāllā parts of a traditional dhrūpad rāga. These movements are always performed without rhythm accompaniment. During the performance of the jhōr, tempo changes are used to separate the movements and a short rhythmic figure marks the end of the section, so the rhythmic figures within the jhōr have structural significance. This phrase-closing motif also appears in all non-Seniā jhōr performances. Sometimes, the basic jhor movements are usually followed by a khyāl style vilambit gat with tāna improvisations, and the performance concludes with a
jhāllā structure performed in a tāla period.

From the mid-1930s in Maihar (U. P), the emergence of a special style of music - Bīnkāri Bāj - represented by Ustād Allāuddin Khān and within India at that time, which, although it has its source in the Mughal court music of the 14oo-s, Seniā gharānā, represents a so kind abstract small instrumental style within the inherently vocal Indian musical ocean, not at all characteristic of the music of the great Hindusthāni past. The style is thus characterised by a code system of (matrix) sets derived from
centuries of standardisation of rhythmic-mathematical constructions - more easily monkeyed with by white men -, by the poverty of melodic variations and their modal polyrhythms, and by the cool - sometimes bleak in the performances of successors - distance from the human-ecstatic factor of singability. In contrast with the merukhandi concept, where the elaborate (aroha-avāroha) pyramidal matrix constructions of separate rāga scales and the improvisational tāna- sargam-bol-bant sets of associations that have become blood concentrate on the most
characteristic character (rasa) that follows from the sound sequence of the respective rāga-s, untill then the Seniā-Maihar system superimposes the hundreds of the accumulated and rehearsed rhythmic patterns upon the rāga sound sequences.

Abdul Wahid Khān practiced Todī and Darbāri day in and day out. When asked why he limited himself to only two rāga-s, his response was that he would have dropped the second one also if morning time could last forever. One lifetime, according to
him, was not enough to do justice to any rāga. He was forced to change from Todī to something else only because of the setting sun and the gathering darkness.The Seniā gharānā dates back to the golden age of Akbār Emperor Mughal court music, when the first instrumental compositions would try to reproduce multitude of vocal pieces of that time, on their instruments (rūdra-bīn, surshringār, sarod, rebāb,etc.).
This is how classical music, originally sung like an instrument, appears as an unsingable abstract instrumental style in the sea of medieval Hindusthāni vocal music. The best known representative of Seniā gharānā is Pt. Ravi Shankar (1920-2012), this is how the 'white man's last encounter with North Indian music came about, when from the second half of the 1950s onwards, this minority, albeit genius trend of
Indian music, was identified from John Cage to Yehudi Menuhin to the Beatles as the whole Indian music culture in the West.

Nowadays:
Amazing homogeneity, all incoming pigment-rich trends are quickly reduced to the jazzoid-Gershwinian soundscape of the major-minor system, including most of the repetitive (minimal) school. The self-serving onanism of jazz, which leads nowhere, has been confused with the centuries-old improvisational practice of the high cultured
Eastern music, even though the two are heaven and earth. This horrific and distorted practice continues today, with ever more horrifying amounts of kitsch. This astonishing contemporary music-historical bankruptcy can be clearly seen in the hyped to death Whiplash (2014), where the humanism of the fist of the American brutal "aesthetic" dictatorship is radiated on to the adust cerebellum of mortals, where
the quantity of sounds masturbated per second legitimizes the musical talent.

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Since being a part of a tradition is possible only by being born into it, this also means that it is never possible to leave it. A disintegrating social fabric loses its cultural cohesiveness and therefore the jealously guarded intellectual vaults, technical secrets and legacies of family genealogies born into previously closed schools live on as family heraldic shield. However, their importance in the transmission of musical heritage is diminishing and homogenising into the genre standards of the so-called music industry market.
It is very pity to see how, in this final Sonderangebot, the great Ustād-s and Pandit-s who could afford to cling to their unique but fading family traditions become the knights of the saliva and the servants of the manipulated tastes of the global music industry.

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With this in mind, it did not even occur to me to ape these traditions as an external person, but I tried to combine the colloquial practices of that baroque music, which had died out in Europe, with the practices of the local musical colloquial that still existed in the so-called Eastern hemisphere of the world. All of this requires the knowledge to combine the European system, once a minority in the world's musical culture and globalising the world standard of welltempered scales, with the unique traditions of Asian musical thought, which is in the process of
disappearing.
The last living (but dying) colloquial-vernacular musical language now can only be found in the Arabian-Indian World on this planet.
Though the extinction of the traditional Indian schools (gharānā) had already commenced in parallel with the disappearance of the mahārāja courts (after 1947) and the general misunderstanding of the classical Indian music by ”white man’s” consumption could also lead to the development of a consumable Indian music that was comparable with the global “conform-idiomatism” of the awful pop-New Age industry and finally died out about on the symbolical day of Ustād Vilāyat Khān's
death (March 13, 2004).
The Indian and the World Music today it has become a Tāntric rectum cleaning and the silly 4/4 groove loop music of entertainment industry characterized by kitschyworld and wellness-ambient facility that will operate as one of the Wellness- Neuronetics subdivisions of Wychi-Exonybm Corporation.

(Lāszlō Hortobāgyi-Hortator, 2013)

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