This Is A Book Of And About The Classical Music Of North India, Among The Oldest Continual Musical Traditions Of The World. This Volume Introduces The Great Richness And Variety Of The Different Styles Of Music As Taught By One Of The Century`S Greatest Musicians, Ali Akbar Khan.

Winner of the James Tait Black Prize for Biography An autobiographical exploration of the role and meaning of music in our world by one of India's greatest living authors, himself a vocalist and performer. Amit Chaudhuri, novelist, critic, and essayist, is also a musician, trained in the Indian classical vocal tradition but equally fluent as a guitarist and singer in the American folk music style, who has recorded his experimental compositions extensively and performed around the world. A turning point in his life took place when, as a lonely teenager living in a high-rise in Bombay, far from his family’s native Calcutta, he began, contrary to all his prior inclinations, to study Indian classical music. Finding the Raga chronicles that transformation and how it has continued to affect and transform not only how Chaudhuri listens to and makes music but how he listens to and thinks about the world at large. Offering a highly personal introduction to Indian music, the book is also a meditation on the differences between Indian and Western music and art-making as well as the ways they converge in a modernism that Chaudhuri reframes not as a twentieth-century Western art movement but as a fundamental mode of aesthetic response, at once immemorial and extraterritorial. Finding the Raga combines memoir, practical and cultural criticism, and philosophical reflection with the same individuality and flair that Chaudhuri demonstrates throughout a uniquely wide-ranging, challenging, and enthralling body of work.

Illustrations: B/w Illustrations Description: This book is a step-by-step practical guide to North Indian music. With the help of this book, the reader can understand the basic aspects of North Indian music and learn to appreciate it better. It describes the ten basic ra.gs of North Indian classical music. It also gives instructions on how to sing and how to play the musical instruments. This book describes the tonal patterns and the tonal embellishments. By following the practical exercises given in this book, you can train your voice, sing notes correctly, develop your own ability to improvise, and make your own tonal patterns. This book is your guide to creating and singing you own ra.g.

On the scales and permutations and combinations in different Hindustani ragas; also includes musical letter notations on the ragas.