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Bhaskar Da, Sure I do my best to find that article for you.!!!!!!Originally posted by: Bhaskar.T
Thanks Bobda never heard earlier about this incident 😕. Can you get something that may elaborate this incident.
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Bhaskar Da, Sure I do my best to find that article for you.!!!!!!Originally posted by: Bhaskar.T
Thanks Bobda never heard earlier about this incident 😕. Can you get something that may elaborate this incident.
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Ustad Vilayat Khan passed away on 13th March, 2004. He has left behind his sons, Sujat and Hidayat, to carry on the tradition.
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| From the time he began his life as a musician at a maharajah's court, Vilayat Khan has remained synonymous with the sitar, playing throughout the world, recording and imparting his tradition. Ustad (maestro) Khan now lives in a New Jersey townhouse adjacent to a thick sprawl of untouched woodland. His son, the excellent sitarist Hidayat Khan, recalled growing up with their large family on a farm in Dehra Dun: "Social life was constant, with all the family and 15 pupils who lived with us on a farm. I spent my time practicing and riding horses." Today, Vilayat Khan receives visitors in a spacious sunken living room dominated by a photo taken at one of his concerts and, on the opposite wall, a colorized copy of a 90-year-old photo of his father, turbaned, seated cross-legged, bearing with impeccable posture the surbahar, a bass sitar long associated with their family. While the modernity of the concert-hall photo represents Khan's stature and professionalism, it is the family portrait that provides an entry into a lost India, before its independence, when the Khan family was in residence at the court of the Maharaja of Gauripur. One cannot overlook the importance of the rajahs and their enlightened support of music, as many were great connoisseurs who helped the highest forms of art to flourish. Then with independence, all the courts were dissolved and musicians were cast into competition, with the public as their arbiters. With this transformation, many forms of the raga became endangered. Vilayat Khan is an anomaly who has remained untouched by these changes in politics, as his abilities as a child prodigy made for a career that began at the top and has stayed there, unbroken. Unlike his family's patrons, he survived, and has been an active sitarist for nearly 71 years. Twenty years old at the time of independence, Khan's manner and speech evoke the aristocratic elegance of a lost age. "Gauripur court was finished but the association with the maharajah went on for a long time, after independence," he says. "All was nostalgia for olden times, the relation: Often we would go to meet, talk, to remember those days. But the immediate change was so bad, the difference so much, that everything one has to learn goes to business and for advantage. No patronization for culture. India was independent in such a bad condition, bad terms, that if Pakistan can be made, then India and Pakistan have to live separate. The scar remained after the wound, as many times we see the scar, we remember this independence is because of this. Then politically it started getting very bad. More favor to their own people, less favor to other people. My party and your party, as Israel and Palestine." With the partition, Muslim musicians experienced an eclipse, as Khan recounts from deep personal experience. "Culture started getting neglected," he recalls. "The Muslim people started being neglected so much, favoritism came, but they also started neglecting the maharajahs. They confiscated their land and courts, and started showing them the lesser human being. . . So this is the tragedy, especially as we are not talking about any other fine arts: painting, woodwork, gold work, only about music. Music suffered so much that now in India, there are very few people who are connoisseurs of old traditions." Most listeners today first encounter India's sounds through Bollywood, bhangra and other styles. Ustad Khan once contributed to The Music Room, a film by the late auteur Satyajit Ray, which documents the final breath of music at a court. Khan composed and conducted the music, which has been released on CD (Ocora), while in India it has appeared with Ravi Shankar credited as music director, which Khan pessimistically hopes to redress in their hopelessly entangled courts. He too has kept abreast of new music trends: "I don't know why people are crazy to produce loud music. You break your eardrum and such electronic distortion, that is not music." Indicating the portrait nearby, he muses: "My father, I have never found such a great man. Once I was playing very loud and fast and putting only the physical onto the sitar, not emotion, so he came and said 'Wait.' I waited. 'Why you are struggling with sitar? Why you fighting with sitar? Why you are wrestling? Do you want to break it or play it? Look, the silence is also music sometimes.' I often remember that a particular gap from one phrase to start another phrase is so necessary, that gap is the silence, that silence is the music. That gap, for the thinking, that is music." While it is commonplace to dismiss the disdain of an older generation for new music, Khan is an exception, as he was and is a revolutionary. Losing his father at age 10, Khan's instruction continued with the considerable musicians on both sides of his family. Before World War II, sitar playing emphasized rhythmic patterns and repeated instrumental lines. "A thought came into my mind: how to sound more vocal on instrument, this was the basic research," says Khan. "Grandfather singer Bande Hussain Khan (my mother's side), Zindah Hussein Khan, these two people, uncle Wahid, they started teaching me surbahar, sitar, and vocal, then my uncle, Zinda Hussein Khan, he was coaching: don't do this way, do this way, that way. He was singing as I am playing and suddenly a few things he is teaching me I am not able to produce [here, Khan imitates vocal projection from his chest, throat and nose to show varieties of timber]. I thought about what to do about this, the idea started coming to me, how to produce more resonance. That technique I started giving, then changed the string to change more volume, filing the bridge in a way that gives accent, shiny and sharp and soft notes. Then the capacity of pulling the strings more than one or two notes, it was pulling three to four notes, and I made capacity on bridge where it became 5 1/2 notes, then change instrument nearest to voice, thickness and thinness or wood, length. I worked with sitar makers Kanai Lal and Hiren Roy on the thickness and thinness of tabli (upper wood); we chose thun wood. " Khan succeeded in creating a new type of sitar and with it, an expanded technique in the vocal style, and a language that has transformed and furthered five generations of musicians, extending into the work of his own sons. It was unlike anything heard in India's classical music and its impact brought Khan a recognition and prestige as a purist and virtuoso that has accompanied him for over six decades. Despite the passing of time, his quest for perfection is as acute as when he began transforming musical tradition. A profoundly religious and spiritual man, Ustad Khan reflects on the universality underlying his existence: " I am a great believer in God; rather, you may say, a superior power; some friend who is in me and behind my conscious, subconscious, and unconscious mind. He 's a very powerful friend, very good advisor, philosopher and guide who always teaches me and always appears as a teacher. He doesn't say yes or no, doesn't come in front of me, even when I have researched so much at practice time, at home. Sometimes when I'm performing, in my improvisation, I do such a miracle thing that immediately after doing that I feel there is definitely some God who has done this today. There is some power, some God who is just now on stage where I am performing. I think, he is playing, I am only a dummy, sitting there, applying my hand on the instrument. Someone else is definitely playing here, just because I have come out of myself, sitting in front of myself, and I am astonished, spellbound. I am hearing so much of my own self, that I have to say, 'It is not me, it is you, you are playing so well, definitely it is not me, it is someone else.'" Vilayat Khan affirms this sense of self-abnegation as key to his musical development. "I always feel like this when I sit alone," he declares. "There is someone who is the better performer than me, some power who I don't see is around us. Perhaps I'm an ignorant or partial man, but I have heard all the instruments in the world, and the sound of the sitar is so Sufi, the sound of sitar is a Sufism." |
Khanshahib has by now achieved the highest acclaim all over the world and has performed in the most prestigious theaters and has the unique distinction of having performed in Buckingham Palace for Queen Elizabeth II. It is also a fact, however, that when he was finally awarded the Padma Shri and Padma Vibhushan awards in 1964 and 1968 - the highest recognition given by the Government of India - he refused them on the grounds that the committee was incompetent to judge artistic creativity.
Thanks Bobda.Frankly speaking I have serious complaint against the ones who decide these awards. The worthy ones are given much later than less worthy ones as compared to them. Too many artists have till date refused these awards.
Bhaskar Da, very well said.!!!!Originally posted by: Bhaskar.T
Thanks Bobda.Frankly speaking I have serious complaint against the ones who decide these awards. The worthy ones are given much later than less worthy ones as compared to them. Too many artists have till date refused these awards.
CID
