For those unfamiliar with the music of the sitar, there may have been some confusion about when the Saturday concert actually began. As part of last week’s Navaratri Festival, internationally-renowned sitar master, Irshad Khan shared his craft and introduced many to the music.
Khan took the stage, with tabla artist Ray Spiegel and a drone player as his only accompaniment, and began tuning and tinkering as any artist gearing up for a performance would. As Khan prepared his instrument by bending strings and playing rudimentary phrases, Spiegel and the drone player joined in, adding flourishes that turned the mundane process into a jam of its own, with distinct melodic qualities that would have stirred even the most hardened Western music scholar.
After about five minutes, Khan introduced himself orally and it became apparent that his finagling was not, in fact, part of any song. But the incidental music he and his fellow players had made highlighted the exotic beauty of the sitar, a traditional Indian string instrument with which most Americans are only vaguely familiar. While the instrument may appear like a longer, more elaborately crafted guitar, it sounds utterly unlike anything in the Western musical tool shed, producing a characteristically twangy sound.
Khan is the beneficiary of an extraordinarily intimate and detailed education, even by sitar standards, where the pedagogy is usually dependent on years of apprenticeship. His family is one of the most prominent in the history of the instrument, and throughout the evening, Khan made no effort to conceal their involvement in his development.
“My grandma taught me this one,” he said, over the opening fingerings of the performance’s second raga. It is doubtless a phrase that he has uttered, with an alternating cast of subjects, countless times since first taking the stage as a child prodigy at age seven.
While the concert at Crowell Concert Hall may not have held the glamour of Khan’s first performance at Queen Elizabeth Hall at age 13, it featured some of the most masterful sitar music a Western audience is likely to hear.
All of Khan’s ragas had subtle beginnings. His delicate playing felt for the structure, rather than rushing to define it. Occasionally, Khan would remove his hand from the neck of the sitar to make gesticulations or explain something about the music. This loosely-structured, educational approach has roots in the work of Ravi Shankar, whose album “The Sounds of India” made him something of a sitar ambassador to the West. Khan, however, took it to a new level, playing with vibrant facial expressions and body language, and rarely hesitating to chime in when he felt explanation was needed.
“A problem with a lot of sitar players who play for Western audiences is that [Western audiences] take for granted what they’re hearing,” said Forrest Leslie ’08. “The player will do a lot of technical stuff because it’s impressive.”
As a result, Khan would sometimes allow the music to lose shape and drift away momentarily, before diving back in, each time more intently than before. The opening raga started out amorphous, with few hard transitions or rhythmic jags. Spiegel kept a steady tabla rhythm with few flourishes (Khan later explained the piece’s complex 10-beat meter). It seemed that at times Khan was testing his accompaniment by throwing in unexpected rhythmic twists. Like a Buddy Rich of the sitar, Khan made no effort to mask his immense technical proficiency, yet always let the shape and spirit of the raga direct the flow of his playing.
Like the mesmeric opening piece, the evening’s second raga featured perfectly contrasted dynamics, sturdy architecture, and a seamless narrative arch. Khan described sitar music as spontaneous, with the artist usually trying to imbue his mood into the piece.
While Khan’s emotional input was keenly palpable, it rarely detracted from his accuracy. While darker and more melancholic than the first raga, the second piece involved a bolder set of maneuvers, ranging from quick jaunts up and down the fret-board, to sweeping arabesques that brought the music into perilous territory. More often than not, however, Khan resolved his intricately woven patterns where lesser players would have cautiously retreated from them.
Duly impressive was Khan maintenance of vocal melodies over some of his most elaborate rhythms. The vocals, while arguably peripheral to the performance, were deeply meditative, accentuating the mood of the piece.
In addition to being a recognized sitar legend, Khan is also a pioneer of the subarhar, a deeper, larger cousin to the sitar, which he demonstrated in the evening’s third piece. Naturally, his work on the subarhar was slower and more deliberate, drawing from a different well of emotions and tones. Playing significantly fewer notes, Khan explored the amazing resonant range of the instrument, bending notes upwards of a whole octave and letting the overtones ring out indefinitely.
More than with the sitar, Khan coaxed sounds out of the larger subarhar. He delicately manipulated the strings and forcing their sounds in sundry directions. Some notes acquiesced, some flared out, some kicked and screamed, some flitted away, some persisted, some mewled and moaned, some swam, and some actually created feedback.
Both with the sitar and subarhar, Khan’s playing was all about contradictions. The ragas were sultry and lush, but also airy and open. With the subarhar especially, silence and space played and integral role, but Khan’s sound was uniformly larger-than-life. And while his playing may have seemed to defy human possibility, it conveyed a broad span of human emotions –which for many included the childlike excitement of discovering something utterly new.
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