classical indian music on theremin?

Merula wrote:

Vibrato, as well as being an expressive device is also used on violin to cover bad intonation.

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This is only true of unskilled violinists.

Good fiddlers are quite capable of playing the violin on pitch without vibrato - something they were expected to do as a matter of course up until the early 19th century when vibrato became fashionable.

This is not true of thereminists.

Vibrato is an indispensable part of the technique of playing the instrument and you cannot play with consistent accuracy without it (perhaps I should say I've never heard anyone do it and I do not believe it is possible).

L. Shankar is a wonderful Indian violin player but I have always preferred the sarangi (an oriental cousin of the violin). For me, the sarangi has a more plaintive, hollow and mournful sound than the western violin, and of course it has sympathetic strings as well.

The dilruba, which I believe is a relative newcomer to the Indian family of musical instruments, is sarangi-like but more delicate and wistful. I have a fine dilruba that sits on the wall in my living room and I am ashamed to say I have never played it.

Both the sarangi and the dilruba allow a greater mobility and fluency than the violin because there is no fingerboard. Only the fingernails actually touch the strings, so there is relatively little friction and drag. The advantage of the violin is that the fingerboard permits fast connected notes to be played accurately and without 'meend'.

When I lived in India, I was often proudly told by musicians that the violin was in fact and Indian invention, and that the word "violin" was a corruption of a Sanskrit word which means "played upon the arm". As you have noticed, Indian players do not play with the instrument under the chin.

I don't believe that there is any truth at all to the claims of an Indian origin for the violin, or the Sanskrit origin of the word, but many Indians swear it is true.

Any attempt to dissuade them is usually regarded as western arrogance.

Coalport wrote: [i]When I lived in India, I was often proudly told by musicians that the violin was in fact and Indian invention, and that the word "violin" was a corruption of a Sanskrit word which means "played upon the arm". As you have noticed, Indian players do not play with the instrument under the chin.

I don't believe that there is any truth at all to the claims of an Indian origin for the violin, or the Sanskrit origin of the word, but many Indians swear it is true.[/i]

It is possible that you were the subject of a little cross-cultural teasing. The claim that anything and everything is Indian (*) is a popular joke amongst my in-laws (who originate from the sub-continent) and was a regular topic of skits in the UK comedy sketch show Goodness Gracious Me. (A few examples on YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=%22goodness+gracious+me%22+%22is+indian%22&search_type=&aq=o).)

Naturally I always hasten to point out that Indians invented nothing (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero#Rules_of_Brahmagupta)!



(*) Except curry. That's British.

At the risk of sounding pedantic... oh, who am I kidding? I [i]always[/i] sound pedantic. So anyway:

Rather than draw a Manichean distinction between absolutely-without-vibrato and absolutely-with, I would insist that it's more fruitful to ask: [i]How much[/i] vibrato? (or even more precisely: how narrow or deep, and how rapid or slow?)

No one, but [i]no one[/i], sings absolutely-without-vibrato. And some thereminists use less than others. Perhaps because of my leanings toward Baroque repertoire, I strive for very little vibrato (except as an expressive ornament). No, I haven't achieved it yet, but that's the goal. Also, listen to Pamelia Kurstin: a distinctive feature of her style is that she starts notes with very little vibrato (indeed, it's part of her mystique among players that she can find the notes so quickly, with such uncanny accuracy), and then (if a note is sustained) may move to a very quick and very deep vibrato.

There used to be a recording posted by a NYC radio station, with Pamelia on theremin and (now her ex-husband) Greg Kurstin on piano, playing Billy Strayhorn's [i]Lush Life[/i]. And for much of the track, you could swear you're just hearing a good jazz violinist; there are just a couple of spots where the theremin asserts its identity, and those are through its electronic timbre, rather than any intonational issues.

P.S. Coincidentally, I was chatting online with a former student who is Indian, and when I asked him about theremin for classical Indian music, he said it would fit very well. For what it's worth, he's not himself trained in classical techniques (he's a highly skilled blues player), and he's not a thereminist.

[recreating lost double post...]
I didn't enjoy Peter's in-depth studies there, but the time I spent studying Indian Dance and Song (Bharatanatyam and some Kathak) was also a great help in all my musical endeavors. Later that ear/pitch, rhythm, and body and hand training all helped a lot in my early theremin studies.

The electronic Shruti and Tambura boxes (harmonically rich dones), now more easily available, are great practice and improvisation aids also.

But I've wondered why the theremin didn't make it into Bollywood and popular Indian music while so many other electronic instruments did. It seems it hasn't turned up much in Bhangra in England yet either. Maybe we just need more World Thereminization, and instruments there?

While players work to master the classic forms, we can still benefit quit a bit from some study of the rich arts of India.

omhoge wrote:

the time I spent studying Indian Dance and Song ....was also a great help in all my musical endeavors. Later that ear/pitch, rhythm, and body and hand training all helped a lot in my early theremin studies.

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There's nothing better for ear training than the study of Indian music. That is why I suggest, in my "How To Play The Theremin" DVD, that anyone who is serious about learning the theremin and feels any affinity at all with 'raga', should consider taking up a simple Indian instrument or studying Indian classical singing. (I studied voice with Lakshmi Shankar, the sister-in-law of my instrumental teacher Ravi Shankar).

It is an adventure which will greatly enrich the musical life of anyone who wants to invest the time and energy needed. You don't have to become a virtuoso. You just need to familiarize yourself with the quarter tone system.

The problem with the whole question of ear training is that the more you need it the less liable you are to realize that you need it.

Over the years I have heard many people talk very opimistically about the use of the theremin in Indian music but the talk has always been theoretical. No one has been able to show that it can be done.

In a radio interview done in Holland in 1938 by Lucie Bigelow Rosen specifically for broadcast to the Dutch East Indies, Lucie begins by saying, "I know that there IS a theremin in India.....".

Unfortunately, she doesn't give us any more info than that. Don't forget, in those days there were only a few hundred theremins in the entire world and almost all of them were RCA's - large, heavy, fragile and expensive to ship.

Evidently, the theremin did not catch on in India and nothing more has been said about it in the more than 70 years since Lucie's interview.

It is my belief that Indian musicians would quickly have realized that the limitations of the theremin would make it impractical for Indian music.

"Vibrato, as well as being an expressive device is also used on violin to cover bad intonation.

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This is only true of unskilled violinists."

Perhaps I should rephrase: Vibrato is constantly misused as a means to hide bad intonation rather than as an expressive device. As for vibrato being an 'indispensable part of the technique' I'd say that it's an indispensable part of certain styles just like vibrato is an indispensable part of classical violin style but it's absolutely possible to play without it. This thread seems to be mainly saying that certain things are too hard to do on the theremin - playing fast accurately and playing without vibrato. As for them being impossible I don't think so.

It is certainly [i]possible[/i] to play quarter tones. Clara Rockmore does so - for example in the note she plays between 53 and 54 seconds into Song Of Grusia on the album The Art Of The Theremin.

The pitch determination was made using Vocal Lab (http://www.rustykat.com/), (with the assistance of SoundFlower (http://www.cycling74.com/products/soundflower) to feed the audio output from Quicktime Player directly into Audio Lab.)

The note in question is played with a vibrato almost exactly one semitone in width. With "pitch smoothing" switched off in Vocal Lab the highest pitch in the range of the vibrato is almost exactly F4 (349.2Hz) and the lowest pitch almost exactly E4 (329.6Hz). With "pitch smoothing" enabled (either setting) the note averages out to about five cents above exactly half-way between E4 and F4. (Or, in other words, either approximately 45 cents flat or 55 cents sharp of concert pitch 12TET.)

[i]Perhaps I should rephrase: Vibrato is constantly misused as a means to hide bad intonation rather than as an expressive device. As for vibrato being an 'indispensable part of the technique' I'd say that it's an indispensable part of certain styles just like vibrato is an indispensable part of classical violin style but it's absolutely possible to play without it.[/i]

One might add the element of tuning: There's an argument that vibrato became a more central aspect of classical technique when equal-tempered tuning was widely adopted in the nineteenth century. That is, vibrato helps to cover the beating that would occur between "straight" tones that don't relate to each other within a simple-integer ratio.

And of course, there are plenty of modern styles of fiddling that call for less vibrato than the classical (or, really, Romantic) tradition does.

Gordon C wrote:

It is certainly possible to play quarter tones. Clara Rockmore does so - for example in the note she plays between 53 and 54 seconds into Song Of Grusia on the album The Art Of The Theremin.

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What Clara does in the bar you refer to is use what string players call "portamento" (a slide or "gliss" between two notes). In this case it is between a 'C' and the 'F' one fifth below it.

This should be distinguished from playing quarter tones.

That being said, no one has suggested that you can't play quarter tones on a theremin. In fact, people play them all the time, although not always deliberately.

Here is an interesting example of the accurate and skilled use of quarter tones. The following YT video is of a Turkish kanun player.

The kanun is an instrument of the zither family. It is of ancient Persian origin and is very popular throughout the Middle East. Each string is provided with a series of several tiny levers which can be used to raise or lower the pitch of the string in quarter tone increments.

To western ears this often makes the music sound out of tune, but the quarter tones are quite deliberate and much appreciated by connoisseurs of this kind of music.

Watch the left hand of this kanun player, particularly in the second minute of the piece, as he raises and lowers the levers and listen carefully to the pitch of the notes as they shift into quarter tones. "Portamento", as we hear it used by Clara Rockmore in SONG OF GRUSIA, is not possible on a kanun but the true and accurate use of quarter tones is.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QSFegnie0B8

Coalport wrote: [i]What Clara does in the bar you refer to is use what string players call "portamento" (a slide or "gliss" between two notes). In this case it is between a 'C' and the 'F' one fifth below it.[/i]

Oops. I didn't mean that bit. I meant this note:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--X_Z6Wm_jQ&fmt=18