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| Cheryl Dunn |
Classically-trained musician Shubha Mudgal took the "blasphemous "step of straying into pop, and now she's got teenagers stopping her in the streets for autographs… She takes in a concert with Holly and fills her in on everything from the subtleties of musicians' etiquette to gurus.
Click below to read what she had to say about:
Holly: How would you characterize your music?
SB: My music primarily is, of course, nonrepresentational, improvisation, classical music which has these important elements called rag and tal which are by now internationally well known, but I also feel that I'm very much a person of today's contemporary, sort of Indian woman, and so I'm also very, very willing to adapt to other musical urges and needs, and collaborate with people from all over the world to commit the blasphemy that I told you about.
Holly: Yeah, actually, let's hear more about that blasphemy.
SB: Well normally, classical musicians have this kind of image of me, art is for art's sake and populist is bad. And classical music in India is really listened… the music lovers are basically a very small group of elitists, and therefore it becomes difficult to have, you can rarely hear a concert of classical music with like 20,000 people in the stadium, no smoke machines, no stacks of fire, etc. Then I was invited by a musician friend, but one who works with popular music in India, to sing a popular album, where he needed a classically trained voice but he would remove the dimension of orchestration, and he would put in that synthesizers, keyboards and drums and guitars, etc. And I said, 'I can't do it,' and he said, 'Will you try just one song?' and it was fun when I tried it. That's how I came to do my first album of popular music, which really was quite a success.
Holly: You became an unlikely pop star…
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SB: People do come up and ask for autographs, especially a lot of young people, but what's even more encouraging is that very often when I perform classical music, you have these young kids coming and sitting and they perhaps have heard classical music for the first time and they are willing to listen to it, somehow because they feel that the music and musician is more accessible, having once sung something like popular music, they feel it's accessible and they are willing to give it a try. So it's, now I never set out with that motive in mind, but it's a happy coincidence that it happens.
Holly: Do you think that classical music is way of preserving tradition?
SB: You know, I personally feel that it has its own space, and I feel that there is no harm in… I never feel upset about the fact that popular music, or film music, more than any other kind of music in India, gets so much attention. I do regret the fact that in India, somehow, we are really a hypocritical about what we feel for our culture. So when you want to boast about a 5,000-year-old culture and great musical tradition, and when you want to have a festival of India, then you showcase these museum arts, so there, I regret the fact that classical music is turning into a museum art, to be pulled out when you want to boast about the glory of an antique old tradition. And the rest of time, it's left to struggle, to sink or, you know, just actually become completely, just fade into oblivion, that's what I regret I think. That it is an important tradition that has to be documented; you must not lose touch with it. At the same time, I don't regret the fact that a stadium full of people can listen to pop music or film music and not to classical music.
Holly: And you talked a little bit; actually I just want to back up to some of things you were talking about earlier, about poetry and how that inspires your music.
SB: Yeah, I've been sort of trying to study medieval mystic poetry for some time, now. Particularly poetry that evolved around either religious worship, or from mystical traditions. Because when I started learning music, I was always told that music and devotion, they go hand in hand, and that there is spirituality and mysticism about Indian music because it is so closely linked to worship ritual. And yet I grew up in a family that was not really overly ritualistic in its worship. I grew up in a family that was not illiberal about accepting traditions and religious customs from several religions. And I always wondered, I mean, is worship ritual synonymous with devotion, or can there be devotion without a worship ritual?
And slowly I started studying the temple literature, and I found that the wonderful thing about medieval temple literature and poetry which was set to music, is the fact that it is so closely linked to life, to the sacred of day and nights, diurnal and nocturnal cycles, to the cycles of season, to festivals that we celebrate, and the poetry contains within itself wonderful indications of Indian culture and life in general. So, it will tell you what you should eat on a hot summer afternoon, or it will tell you what you should eat when it's really cold. And it tells you other things, like what fruits grow in a particular season, and somehow it's seemed not distant at all, but so completely linked with daily living, that it was wonderful to sing about it.
Holly: Tell me about women's role in Indian music. Who were the initial conduits, can you talk a little bit about that?
SB: 'Till about 50 or 60 years ago, it was not possible for a woman who didn't belong to a family of hereditary musicians to take up music as her life's work. In fact, professional woman musicians came from traditional song stresses, or poeticians, and if at all, women from gentile families, so to say, were taught Indian music, it was merely like a finishing school idea, so you learned how to cook and sew and little bit about music too, and you learned a bit about the arts.
But you could not actually pursue a career as a musician, a professional musician, but, with the kind of renaissance that took place after independence and began actually just a little before India got independence, a whole lot of people who did not belong to families of hereditary musicians, these are called Caranas, or houses of music, they started doing music, and today, we are in a situation where people like me, who are first generation musicians, women from families that did not belong to hereditary musicians, are able to learn music, to pursue it as our life's work.
And I know of several contemporaries who are lawyers, women musicians, who are lawyers, microbiologists, doctors, and who have the possibility of pursuing an alternative career. But who have chosen to make music their life's work, and this is wonderful, given the fact that till about 50 or 60 years ago, it wasn't possible.
Holly: The idea of a microbiologist choosing between that career and being a musician interests me, I mean, we met with a police chief yesterday who was a very pragmatic police administrator on one hand, and clearly a very spiritual artistic person on the other, and that combination seems to…
SB: You're talking about Delhi's favorite person, Kiran Bedi, I think.
Holly: Yes, I am.
SB: Wonderful woman, really, the kind of work she has done, and yes you're right, that there's this wonderful paradox that exists in her, I mean, she's really firm and tough and yet, the kind of jail reforms for example, that she has introduced, are just revolutionary, and they show a side of her which is so compassionate and so human that it's, I mean, like the rest of Delhi, I'm a great fan.
Holly: Yeah, do you think this paradox is inherent, something about Indian culture that creates this paradox in people, that you can be a cop and a spiritual leader and a microbiologist, and a musician?
SB: I think it's just a part of human nature, I think we all have these little channels, you know, within us, and which one chooses to surface is really dependent on so many things. No, I don't think it's really particular to India, but yes, I think in India you find wonderful examples of such paradoxes.
Holly: Why?
SB: Perhaps I think, in today's modern India, I think that women have suddenly realized, or not really suddenly, but they have come to realize that they can choose these unconventional parts, these unconventional lifestyles, and that for years they were not allowed to do this, but yes, they can do it. And it's a realization that I think is leading to these wonderful women who are choosing certain areas of work, which I think, I'm full of admiration for all of them.
Holly: Tell me a little more about Indian music.
SB: Well I think it's important that lots of genres, lots of forms of music exist in India, as in other cultures too. One of the traditions that is celebrated the world over and is really acquiring a great stature is the tradition of classical Indian music, which contains within it several forms. So you have forms that are meant only for vocal music, and there are forms that are called forms for instrumental music. All of them are based on systems of rag and tal, which are basically melodic and rhythmic systems. And they're almost all of them extremely improvisatory, a lot of people like to call them abstract, but I think it would be better to say that they're non-representational, so when you hear a piece of music, there isn't really a song context that you're hearing.
The words don't actually spell out a reference to context for you; there are a set of notes with hidden strengths and a lot of wonderful potency about them. But they can give different listeners different sets of meanings, so I would begin to perform a melody and to one listener it may seem wonderfully peaceful or meditative; to another, it may have a poignancy about it, so each listener too has to make his or her own interpretations. But the important things are that they're improvisary genres, and they're performed in ensembles. But not really in a band, for example, so members who are performing together don't actually always, they don't form part of band, and they all come together, and they improvise on this part.
On the one hand, since it's improvisational, you can let your imagination run riot, I mean, just fly in whichever direction it takes you. At the same time there are a strict set of rules to be followed, and so you can't use this note after this note, or you must focus on this particular note.
Apart from classical music, of course, they are very popular systems of music such as film and pop music. And film music is by far, you know, I mean just rides high.
Holly: The most popular.
SB: Absolutely popular, and then Indi-pop is a genre which has become quite well known in the last 10 years or so. And a lot of the influence of Western pop, rap, reggae, rock music, can be heard distinctly, sometimes to the point of plagiarism, in Indi-pop, but yes it's becoming quite big. Although it still isn't really anywhere close to competing with film music. And there is the tradition of folk and travel music too, which is unfortunately not too well.
Holly: Not a healthy genre.
SB: No, no, it's a wonderful, it's in a genre with a lot of potential, but unfortunately its acceptance in India is not too big right now.
Holly: I was reading that there are 330 million deities.
SB: Deities, yes.
Holly: 330 million?
SB: Yea, I mean, there are, there are sort of primary sects, and then lots of different sects, I didn't even know that number existed.
Holly: It could have been made up by the guidebook, but, it's a big number, huge, fair to say.
SB: Enormous.
Holly: Yes, well do you think that has to do with, you know, how you walk to the corner store, I mean do you think the deities play a part in everybody's life on an hourly basis.
SB: Not really, I mean, yes most people in India have a family deity, and they, they're involved in a worship ritual, particularly for festivities and certain occasions, but the deities are abandoned too whenever it's convenient for people to abandon them.
It's very interesting actually if you, if you get into a taxi, for example. Almost invariably, you will see the picture of a deity on the dashboard, and you have these little magnetic stickers that stick on to the dashboard, or you'll have these really fancy little, miniature temples with a little deity sitting inside and these flashing bulbs that are connected to the battery of the car, or you walk into a doctor's reception, and you'll find perhaps a string of either pictures of deities, or sacred words, or syllables printed, so yes I think deities are important in the lives of most Indians, most families have a family deity that they worship, especially on special occasions or festivals. But they are equally willing to abandon them, or make them to adapt to modern circumstance when they want to.
Holly: That's why the number keeps growing.
SB: Yea, yea and there are always a little improvisation, I think, so a twist here and turn there and there's a new one.
Holly: Do you have a favorite deity?
SB: I belong to a sect of Krishna worshipers, and you see this mark on my forehead, a bindi on my forehead, this is a mark which identifies me as being part of this sect, part of the family Krishnas, so to say I took formal initiation into this sect about two years ago. I've been studying the music of that particular tradition, and what I found particularly moving was the fact that an offering cannot be made to Krishna without an offering of music accompanying it. The importance of music is what really drew me to the tradition and I'm very happy now to be a part of this.
Holly: So the, the music came first, and then the tradition.
SB: I was studying the music, and in the process of finding out more about it, I wanted to be very much a part of it. And I was really lucky, because I found this wonderful guru, and I became a disciple two years ago.
Holly: And how does that, how has it changed your music, since that happened?
SB: I can't really point out and say, no my music has become better, it's just that I'm, I feel I'm learning a lot more, I was already trying to find out more things, but it becomes being part of that entire sect, gives me insights into a tradition, which perhaps as an outsider, I would not have gained.
Holly: You were trying to learn more about spiritual traditions.
SB: Spiritual traditions and the importance of music in those traditions. And so I think, as an insider now, I possibly would learn faster and would gain access to materials faster, and also I feel a wonderful sense of being part of a community, a large community. I think that's really been important for me.
Holly: You know Kiran mentioned yesterday about Indians having an anchor, different anchors, depending on who they are, and what was important to them, do you think that's true?
SB: Yes, I think that anchoring in either a religious ritual or in the practice of meditation for example, is very, very important, to Indians and in fact, the importance of the master-disciple relationship, or the importance of having a guru who can show you the path, not through merely a practice, but through life, so to say, is considered very important in India.
Holly: So do you look to your guru for, is it a him or her, a him?
SB: I mentor from a lot of people, including a woman.
Holly: So, what do you look to your guru for?
SB: You know I think when it comes to music I was taught everything that was concerned with music by my gurus, as well as various little things that you, that you would never find in a textbook for example. Or that you could never, perhaps pick up if you weren't part of that tradition. I must say that I question far more than a lot of Indian students, and the emphasis usually is to accept whatever your guru says without any questions. But I've been fortunate in having really wonderful teachers, and I think I've been a pain for them at times, because I have had too many questions, but I think that they are there not merely to provide answers to your questions, but perhaps to show you the possibility of finding your own answers to those questions, and that's what I really appreciated and what I've learned from them.
Holly: So the term guru here would be more a term for teacher.
SB: Yes.
Holly: One who teaches you, rather than having a strict religious connotation?
SB: Yes, he would teach you a practice. For example, he would teach you how to sing in a particular form, for example. If it's a musical group, but he would also in the process teach you related aspects of music. For example, an unspoken etiquette on how you behave with older musicians, what you do in certain situations, how you greet another musician when he or she walks into your concert while you, when you are already singing. Acknowledging a person whose composition you are singing. How to deal with difficult moments, when an accompanying musician is trying to, you know, take over. Or various other situations which really can't be put down in a syllabus or a curriculum strictly speaking. But they are part of an oral tradition, never written down, but taught very, very subtly.
