Orchestration in Indian Music

There is another composition of mine which has three part harmony and I will sing the melody first. First Salilda sings the melody line of the song “Surjer aalo ese ghase poDe”. Then, Antara and Sabita sing the other two harmony parts with Salilda. The song is like an experiment. You may or may not like it. But, if we are afraid of making mistakes then we will never move forward. All the students here who are present in this session please don’t think that I am the last word. The last word in the sea ! But you have to be adventurous and you must know the theory. Otherwise you will fall into traps. First learn the fundamentals and then you can take risks and make mistakes. May be after 10 mistakes there will be one success. You would then know and understand what mistakes you made. To all my Indian classical colleagues here I have a plea and request and that is that please try to broaden the horizon. Our classical heritage will always be there. However, if you can’t show any new ways or broaden the horizon then the whole thing will remain static. In our country we have famous classical artists such as Abdul Karim Khan, Bade Ghulam Ali, Amir Khan etc. Nobody can come close to these stalwarts. Who can come even closer to them ? But this will remain our treasure and will become our inheritance. If you all can add to this treasure by adding new dimension then who knows one day some famous artist can make your creation popular and open up new doors. You can also try to do orchestration based on raags. Try new experiments, break rules. I showed you how I broke rule in “Jana gana mana”. I showed you that I used “komal dhaibat”(flattened 6th) which is not even in the song’s notation. But, it is following the rules of chord progression. Salilda plays the first line of “Jana gana mana” with chords and uses a passing augmented chord (uses flattened 6th) which sounds wonderful. Unless we are adventurous we will never be able to find new ways. I composed another song first time recorded by Sabita. It is in two part harmony. Sabita and Antara sing “surero ei jhar jharnaa” with orchestra. Now, I would like to present a composition by Bach “Prelude and fugue in C”. Antara will play. This is composition for harp and we have the notation. Bach never wrote any counter parts for this piece. I have, as an experiment, created a counterpart in violin for this composition. we will demonstrate a part of it. Here the principle is the same. If you are unable to identify the chord for each note you will not be able to write the counterpart. Bach in this piece is going through some quite complex chord progression. I had to identify each chord and then decide which note in the chords should I use to create my counterpart. For example in a 7th chord there are 4 notes, a diminished chord has 4 notes. So, which note should I use to create the counterpart ? Salilda asks Antara to play the melody and asks Debu (Debojyoti Misra) to play the counter melody.
Live demonstration by Antara on a digital piano and Debu in violin.

End of session.

The World of Salil Chowdhury