MUSIC CHRONICLE
familiar ground which leaves nothing to be desired, for it is on this level
that Hindu music has reached its highest maturity. Conceived not in
two's and three's, but in groups measuring up to thirty beats, it moves
with consummate ease from simple regular pulses to the most extreme
intricacies of polyrhythmic music. Unnotated, it achieves an infectiousness
too frequently absent in Western music, where emphasis has become
increasingly diverted from what the ear hears to what the eye sees.
Yet even harmonically there is considerable interest, for the many
gongs and percussion instruments have definite pitches which impose
striking polytonal and atonal effects upon the scale line. And in the
field of imitative sound, Shirali rivals our most skillful orchestrators in
an amazing factory sequence, where sounds of machinery are produced
most convincingly and excitingly with instruments and voices, aided
only by amplification. So complete is the illusion that one listens twice
before detecting the large plucked instruments, the tinkling water cups,
or even men's voices. Shankar tells me that they do not consider this
music, but only sound effect; yet its well conceived rhythmic organiza–
tion would seem to put it on a somewhat higher plane.
So far as the dancing goes, one is struck by the immediacy of its
emotional appeal and its complete cognibility in the realm of feeling,
quite apart from its meaning as symbolic gesture. I have the feeling that
in its advanced development of form and expression, dancing is to the
Orient what music is to the Occident, and would even compare Shankar's
art with the music of our so-called "classic" period; in its building on a
number of basic forms, its immediacy of perception, the ease with which
it moves through any number of moods, and finally in the profound
joy of creation which it expresses.
It
is perhaps this wonderful joy that
attracts me to Shankar's dancing (and to classical music) as much as
anything, for it is an element painfully lacking in contemporary Western
art.
It
is
useless to inveigh against, or prescribe for, the artist, who is sub–
ject to higher laws of social and artistic evolution as well as to laws of
individual creativity. But it is quite conceivable that the re-appearance
of
this joy in artistic creation, without counterpart in any other emotion,
will
be a sign that art has at last freed itself from the dilemma into
which it was plunged at the turn of the century.
Harold Brown
195
