In Indian classical music, some melodies belong to the morning and others to the monsoon.
A raga isn't a tune and isn't quite a scale. It is a framework of notes, phrases and rules from which a musician improvises, and each one is meant to evoke a particular mood. In the North Indian tradition, many ragas are tied to a time of day or a season.
The Sanskrit word raga comes from a root meaning to colour or dye, and in Indian tradition the music is said to colour the mind. Both of India's great classical traditions, Hindustani in the north and Carnatic in the south, are built on it. The concept also appears in the Sikh scripture, the Guru Granth Sahib, in Sufi qawwali and in many film songs.
Why is a raga not a scale? Because many ragas can share the same set of notes and still sound distinct. Each has its own characteristic phrases, called pakad or chalan, its own rules about how to rise and fall, which notes to linger on and how to ornament them. The most emphasised note is the vadi, and the second, which sounds consonant with it, the samvadi. And it is not a tune, because a single raga can generate endless tunes. Scholars such as Bruno Nettl describe it as something between the two, closer to a mode, organised to produce a particular rasa, or aesthetic mood, in the listener.
The idea is ancient. The Natya Shastra, a Sanskrit treatise on the performing arts probably compiled between about 200 BCE and 200 CE, describes experiments on the veena with tuning and intervals. The word raga in its modern musical sense appears in the Brihaddeshi of about the 8th or 9th century. Theoretically thousands of ragas are possible, but the tradition relies on several hundred, about 30 are common, and most performers master some forty to fifty.
Medieval theorists began pairing ragas with nature. The 11th-century writer Nanyadeva recommended Hindola for spring and certain ragas for the monsoon; in the 13th century Sarngadeva mapped ragas to the hours, simple ones for early morning, passionate ones for evening. The Hindustani tradition still follows such associations, reflecting a belief that our minds move with daily and seasonal rhythms. The Carnatic tradition, closer to its sung texts, pays them less attention and organises its ragas around a system of 72 parent scales.
Source: Wikipedia — Raga · Text summarised from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
