Stage 1Why Play, and How to Use This Guide

Playing an instrument is the rare hobby in which the first months are mostly failure you can hear. A new painter can hide a bad canvas. A new violinist cannot hide a bad note from anyone in the flat. That is the honest cost of entry, and it is why so many instruments bought with hope end up on top of a cupboard.

It is also why the reward is so solid. Musical skill is built slowly, in the hands and the ears, and it does not vanish. An adult who played the tabla at twelve and stopped at fifteen will find, twenty years later, that the hands still remember more than the head does. Very little else a person learns behaves like that.

This guide is for four kinds of reader at once. The complete beginner wants to know which instrument, what to buy, and how to practise without wasting a year. The returning or practising player wants to fix habits and go further. The serious student wants detail: set-up numbers, the logic of practice research, how instruments fail. And the general reader simply likes the story of how music is made and handed down, in India above all.

How the guide is laid out

Part I is the craft anywhere in the world. Stages 2 to 4 cover choosing an instrument and deciding how to learn it. Stages 5 to 7 are the working core: how practice actually builds skill, how to read notation and play by ear, and how to play for decades without hurting yourself. Stages 8 and 9 cover buying an instrument and playing with other people.

Stages 10 to 12 form a band on care and preservation. An instrument is a working object made of wood, skin, gut, metal and glue, and India's climate is hard on every one of those. If you have just bought something you cannot replace, read those three stages first.

Part II is the Indian story: the Hindustani and Carnatic traditions, the guru and the gharana, the great instruments one family at a time, folk instruments and their makers, and where to learn today. The reference section at the end holds a glossary, further reading and a sourcing sheet for the pictures.

The boxes

Three kinds of box run through the text. First Steps boxes tell a beginner what to do today, cheaply. For the Musician boxes carry the numbers and specifics a serious player wants. Sidebars tell a story or make an argument. Skip any box that is not for you; the main text stands without them.

A note on what this guide will not do

It will not promise the sitar in thirty days, and it will not diagnose an injury. Where pain, hearing or a damaged instrument is involved, it says plainly when to stop and find a doctor, a physiotherapist or a qualified repairer.

Stage 2The Families of Instruments

Every culture sorts its instruments, and the sorting says something about how people think of sound. The system most museums use was published in 1914 by Erich von Hornbostel and Curt Sachs. It classifies an instrument by what vibrates. An Indian system is far older. The Natya Shastra, the ancient treatise on performance, divides instruments into four classes: tata (stringed), sushira (blown), avanaddha (covered, meaning drums) and ghana (solid, such as cymbals and bells). The two systems agree remarkably well, which suggests they are both describing something real.

For a learner, the more useful grouping is the one music shops use: strings, keys, wind, percussion and electronic.

Strings

Strings are bowed (violin, cello, sarangi, esraj), plucked (guitar, sitar, sarod, veena, harp) or struck (santoor, and, inside its cabinet, the piano). Fretted instruments such as the guitar and sitar give you the pitch in a fixed place under the finger. Fretless ones such as the violin and sarod make you find it by ear, every time, which is why they are slower to sound in tune.

Keys

Keyboard instruments lay out every pitch in a row. The acoustic piano strikes strings with felt hammers. The digital piano imitates it electronically and can be played through headphones. The harmonium blows air through metal reeds, pumped by hand in its Indian form. Keys are the easiest way to see harmony, because the whole chord is visible under the hands.

Wind

Wind splits into woodwind and brass, a division based on how the sound is started, not what the instrument is made of. A silver concert flute is a woodwind; a wooden didgeridoo is effectively brass. Flutes (bansuri, concert flute, recorder) split the air across an edge. Reed instruments (clarinet, saxophone, oboe, shehnai, nadaswaram) set a cane reed vibrating. Brass (trumpet, trombone, horn) uses the player's own lips as the vibrating reed.

Percussion

Percussion is either tuned (tabla, mridangam, timpani, xylophone) or untuned (snare drum, most cymbals, shakers). Indian classical percussion is unusual in the world for how finely tuned its drums are: a tabla is tuned to the soloist's tonic, and a good player hears a tabla slightly off pitch as clearly as a flat singer.

Electronic

Electronic instruments make or shape sound with circuits: synthesisers, keyboards, electronic drum kits, and the electric guitar, which is a string instrument whose sound is only fully made in its amplifier. They bring real advantages for learners, including volume control and headphones, and a real risk, which is that the menu of sounds can become a substitute for learning to play one of them well.

Stage 3Choosing an Instrument

There is no best first instrument. There is only the right one for a particular person, in a particular home, drawn to a particular music. Five questions sort most people out.

1. What music do you want to play?

Start from the music, not the instrument. Someone who loves Carnatic concerts will not be satisfied by a keyboard, however practical. Someone who wants to play songs with friends will find the guitar or the keyboard far more useful than the oboe. If the music you love uses the instrument, you will practise it.

2. How soon does it sound like music?

Instruments differ enormously in how long they sound bad. On a piano or a keyboard, a pressed key gives a correct, pleasant note on the first day. The ukulele and the guitar give usable chords within weeks. The violin, the bansuri, the trumpet and the sarangi give scratchy, breathy or cracked sounds for months, because the player must make the tone before the tune can mean anything. That does not make them worse choices, but it is worth knowing in advance.

3. Your body

Hands matter less than people fear: players of every hand size succeed on almost everything. Size matters more for children. Violins are made in fractional sizes, from very small up to full size (called 4/4), and guitars in half and three-quarter sizes. A child forced onto a full-size instrument learns tension and bad posture. Wind instruments need reasonably settled adult front teeth for some embouchures, and teachers often have views on starting age; ask one. Floor-seated Indian instruments suit people who can sit cross-legged for long periods, though many players now use a low stool or platform.

4. Your home and neighbours

Be honest about noise. A drum kit, a trumpet or a nadaswaram in a flat will test every relationship in the building. Quieter paths exist: digital pianos and electronic drum kits with headphones, practice mutes for brass and strings, and nylon-string guitars. Space and climate matter too, and Stage 10 explains why a piano against a damp outside wall is a poor idea.

5. Cost, now and later

The purchase price is the start. Strings, reeds, drum heads, tuning, servicing, lessons and cases all recur. A piano needs regular tuning; a tabla needs its heads replaced from time to time; a clarinet eats reeds. Stage 8 covers buying sensibly.

Switching later is normal

Many serious musicians did not stay on their first instrument. The ear, the sense of rhythm and the habit of practice all transfer, and choosing "wrong" costs less than choosing nothing for another year.

Stage 4With a Teacher or On Your Own

The most common question an adult beginner asks is whether they need a teacher. The honest answer is that almost everyone learns faster and more safely with one, and that plenty of fine musicians taught themselves anyway. The question is what a teacher gives you that nothing else does.

What a good teacher gives

• Correction you cannot see yourself. Posture, wrist angle, bow grip, breath and hand tension are hard to judge from inside. Uncorrected habits set within months and take years to undo.
• Order. A teacher puts things in a sensible sequence and stops you trying the showpiece before the scale.
• Feedback on sound. A beginner often cannot yet hear what is wrong.
• Accountability. A lesson next Thursday is a strong reason to practise this week.
• A tradition. In Indian classical music especially, a teacher passes on phrasing, ornament and a way of thinking about a raga that no book holds. Stage 14 explains why this matters so much.

Learning on your own

Self-teaching works best for instruments with forgiving technique and plentiful good material, such as keyboard, guitar and ukulele, and for people who already play something. The resources are enormous: method books, graded exam syllabuses, video lessons and apps that listen to you play. Their weakness is the same everywhere. They cannot see you.

A sensible hybrid is common: a lesson every week or two with a teacher, and structured self-study between. Even a handful of lessons at the start, to set posture and grip, is worth more than the same money spent later on fixing them.

Finding a teacher

Ask local music shops, schools, temples and cultural societies; watch who accompanies performers at small concerts; and ask other students. When you find a candidate, take a trial lesson and ask:

1. What would you have me doing in the first three months?
2. How do you handle posture and technique?
3. Do you teach from notation, by ear, or both?
4. What should I practise, and for how long, between lessons?
5. Do you prepare students for graded exams, and do I have to take them?

Fees in India vary more than almost any other hobby cost: by city, instrument, the teacher's standing, and whether lessons are one-to-one, in a group or online. Get the fee, the cancellation terms and the lesson length clear before you start.

Red flags

Be wary of a teacher who promises fast results, never corrects technique, discourages questions, or brushes off pain ("push through it"). A good teacher welcomes a student who asks why. Stage 7 explains why pain is never something to push through.

Stage 5How Practice Actually Works

Most practice is wasted. Not because learners are lazy, but because the natural way to practise, playing a piece from the top until it breaks and then starting again, is one of the least efficient ways to improve. Research on skill learning over the last half century has a good deal to say about doing it better, and most of it agrees with what good teachers already knew.

Deliberate practice

The psychologist K. Anders Ericsson spent a career studying how experts get that way, and musicians were among his central subjects. His term was deliberate practice: effortful work on a specific weakness, just beyond current ability, with immediate feedback, repeated and refined. It is different from playing through pieces you already know, which is pleasant and keeps skills warm but improves them slowly.

Slow practice

Slow practice is the single most useful habit a musician can acquire, and the one learners resist most. When a passage is played too fast to control, the hands rehearse the stumble along with the notes. Played slowly enough to be exactly right, with relaxed hands, the correct movement is what gets repeated.

A workable method: find the speed at which a passage is perfect three times in a row. Play it there. Raise the metronome a few beats per minute, repeat, and stop raising it the moment accuracy or relaxation slips. The next day, begin again a little below yesterday's best speed. Progress feels slower than it is.

Small chunks

Break difficult material into the smallest unit that contains the problem: a bar, a single shift, a four-note phrase, a single stroke pattern on the tabla. Fix it alone, then join it to the note before and after. Practising "the whole piece" mostly practises the easy parts, because they come round more often.

Spacing, rest and sleep

Practice spread across days beats the same total crammed into one sitting. Twenty minutes a day for a week generally does more than two hours on a Sunday. Learning researchers call this the spacing effect, and there is good evidence that motor skills continue to consolidate between sessions, including during sleep. The practical upshot is reassuring: a passage that would not come right tonight is often better tomorrow without further work.

Interleaving helps too. Mixing several skills in one session, say a scale, a passage and a rhythm exercise in rotation, feels less productive than blocking each one, but tends to produce more durable learning.

Record yourself

Listening while playing is hard, because attention is taken by the doing. A phone recording played back an hour later is merciless and very useful. Timing that felt steady will rush; a tone that felt full will sound thin. Record once a week and keep the files, and in six months you will have proof of progress on the days you doubt it.

A session, built

A practice session that respects all of this does not need to be long. For a beginner or intermediate player, thirty to forty-five minutes on most days is more than enough, and shorter is fine.

Write a line in a practice notebook at the end: what you worked on, the metronome speed, and what to do next time. Tomorrow's session then starts with a decision already made.

Stage 6Reading Notation and Playing by Ear

Musicians argue about notation with surprising heat. Some traditions are built on it; others were handed down for centuries without it. The useful position is that notation and the ear are two tools that do different jobs, and a complete musician uses both.

Staff notation

Western staff notation writes pitch as height on five horizontal lines, and time as the shape of the note. A clef at the start of the line fixes which line means which pitch: the treble clef for higher instruments and the right hand of the piano, the bass clef for lower ones. A time signature such as 4/4 says how many beats are in each bar and what kind of note gets the beat. A key signature of sharps or flats tells you which notes are raised or lowered throughout.

Rhythm is written as a family of note values, each worth half the one before: whole note (semibreve), half note (minim), quarter note (crotchet), eighth note (quaver) and so on, with matching rests for silence. British and American names differ, and both are in common use in India.

Tablature and chord charts

Guitarists and bassists often read tablature, which shows which string and fret to play rather than which pitch sounds. It is quick to learn and very handy, but it usually shows rhythm poorly or not at all. Chord charts, which give chord names over a bar count, are the working language of bands and of much film and devotional accompaniment.

Indian notation

Indian classical music names pitches with sargam: Sa Re Ga Ma Pa Dha Ni, a movable system in which Sa is whatever tonic the performer has chosen. In the early twentieth century two reformers devised written systems for Hindustani music, Vishnu Narayan Bhatkhande and Vishnu Digambar Paluskar, and Bhatkhande's notation is the one most widely used in books and exam syllabuses today. Carnatic music has its own conventions for writing sargam syllables with marks for octave and duration.

Indian notation is best understood as a memory aid. It records the skeleton of a composition, but the gamaka and meend, the ornaments and slides that make a raga sound like itself, are only partly written and are learned by ear from a teacher. Stage 14 returns to this.

Playing by ear

Playing by ear means hearing a sound and finding it on the instrument. It is not a gift some people are born with and others lack; it is a skill, and it grows with the same deliberate practice as any other.

Ways to build it:

1. Sing. If you can sing a phrase, you can find it. Singing sargam or solfège against a drone is one of the oldest ear-training methods there is.
2. Copy short phrases. Play a recording, pause after three or four notes, and find them.
3. Learn intervals. Get to know how the distance between two notes sounds, starting with the fifth (Sa to Pa) and the octave.
4. Transcribe. Write down a simple melody you know, in any notation, then check it.
5. Play along. With a drone, a recording or a friend.

Which first?

For Western classical and ensemble playing, reading is close to essential. For Indian classical, folk and most popular music, the ear leads and notation assists. Either way, a player with only one has left half the toolkit in the case.

Stage 7Posture, Technique and Avoiding Injury

Playing an instrument means small, repeated movements in a fixed position, often for hours: exactly the recipe for overuse injury. Surveys of musicians have repeatedly found playing-related pain to be common, including among students, and much of it is preventable. What follows is general guidance, not medical advice.

Posture

Good posture is balanced, not rigid. The head sits over the spine; the shoulders are loose; the instrument is brought to the body rather than the body contorted to the instrument. Adjust the height of a piano stool, the angle of a guitar strap, the chin rest and shoulder rest on a violin, and the height of a music stand so the neck is not bent forward.

Floor-seated Indian instruments bring particular demands. Long sessions cross-legged strain knees, hips and the lower back, and a sitar or veena held at an awkward angle loads one shoulder. Use a firm cushion under the hips, change position during long sessions, and ask your teacher about a low platform or stool if sitting on the floor hurts. Many respected players adapt their seating as they age.

Tension, the hidden problem

Most technical problems and many injuries share a cause: using more force than the job needs. Gripping a bow, clenching a plectrum, pressing strings far harder than necessary, locking the thumb, raising the shoulders on a difficult passage. Check yourself regularly in the middle of playing: is anything tight that does not need to be?

Hearing

Hearing damage is permanent and cumulative. Drummers, brass players, and anyone in amplified bands are most exposed, but a nadaswaram or dhol at close range is loud too. Occupational guidelines commonly treat long exposure around 85 decibels and above as a risk. Musicians' earplugs, which lower volume fairly evenly across frequencies instead of muffling it, let you keep hearing the music while protecting the ear. Ringing in the ears after a session is a warning. If it does not clear, see a doctor or audiologist.

Habits that protect you

1. Warm up gently for five minutes before hard technical work.
2. Build up playing time gradually. A sudden jump, before an exam or a performance, is when many injuries begin.
3. Take breaks, a few minutes in every half hour.
4. Vary the work so the same movement is not repeated for an hour.
5. Stop when tired, because technique frays first when muscles are fatigued.
6. Tell your teacher about any discomfort, early.

Stage 8Buying New and Used

The cheapest instrument in the shop is usually the most expensive way to start. Not because price buys talent, but because below a certain level instruments fight the player. Strings sit too high above the fingerboard, pegs slip, keys stick, reeds will not speak, and the beginner concludes that they are the problem. Many give up without ever discovering otherwise.

The threshold of playability

The aim is not the best instrument you can afford. It is an instrument that clears the threshold: it holds its tuning, plays in tune up and down its range, and responds to a light touch. Above that line, extra money buys tone and refinement, which matter later. Below it, money saved is paid back in frustration.

Set-up matters as much as the instrument. On string instruments it means the height of the strings above the fingerboard (the action), the shape of the nut and bridge, and the fit of the pegs. A modest guitar or violin set up properly by a competent repairer will often play better than a costlier one straight out of a box. Good shops do this before sale; ask whether yours does.

Buying new

Buy from a shop that specialises in the instrument, services what it sells and will take it back if something fails early. Ask what is included: a case, a bow, spare strings or reeds, a tuning key. Keep the bill; Stage 12 explains why.

For children, some shops rent student instruments, which lets a family move up through sizes or discover that the enthusiasm lasted six weeks.

Buying used

A well-kept used instrument can be the best value in music, and a badly kept one is a repair bill with strings on. The checks differ by family.

For an acoustic piano, pay a piano tuner or technician to inspect it before buying. It costs little compared with a piano that cannot hold a tune.

Online and private sales

Online marketplaces are full of genuine bargains and a fair number of traps. Protect yourself:

• Ask for a video of the instrument being played, not just photographs.
• See it in person where you can, ideally with an experienced player.
• Do not pay a stranger in full in advance for an instrument you have not seen.
• Be wary of prices far below everything comparable.
• For couriered purchases, agree beforehand what happens if it arrives damaged.

Materials and the law

Older instruments may contain ivory, tortoiseshell or other restricted materials. Read Stage 20 before buying, selling or travelling with one.

Stage 9Playing with Others

Music is mostly a social art. Practising alone builds skill; playing with other people teaches the things practice alone cannot: steady time that survives someone else's mistakes, listening while playing, and the pleasure of a sound nobody in the room could make on their own.

Tuning together

Musicians who play together must agree on pitch. In Western music the agreed reference is concert pitch, with the A above middle C set at 440 hertz, a standard fixed internationally in the twentieth century, though some orchestras tune a little higher. Fixed-pitch instruments such as the piano and harmonium set the pitch for everyone else.

Indian classical ensembles work differently. The soloist chooses the tonic, Sa, to suit a voice or instrument, and everyone tunes to it: the tanpura, the tabla, the accompanying violin or harmonium. Tuning the tabla to the soloist's Sa, often with a small hammer, is part of the visible ritual before a Hindustani concert begins.

Time, listening and leading

Good ensemble playing depends less on individual brilliance than on shared time. Count, and keep counting through rests. Know who leads: the conductor, the drummer, the lead vocalist, or in an Indian concert the main artist, whom the accompanists follow. Watch as well as listen. Many cues in small groups are given with a nod, a breath or a glance.

Listen more than you play. A beginner in a band often plays every chord in every bar; an experienced player leaves space. The accompanist's craft, in any tradition, is to make the soloist sound better.

Where to play

• School and college groups, bands and orchestras.
• Community and amateur orchestras and wind bands, which exist in several Indian cities and welcome adult players.
• Devotional music: bhajan and kirtan groups, church choirs and gurdwara kirtan use harmonium, tabla, dholak and keyboard, and are among the most common places for an amateur to play regularly in India.
• Bands and jam sessions with friends.
• Open mic nights in cafés and small venues.
• Informal Indian classical baithaks, small house concerts where students sometimes play for each other.

Etiquette

Arrive tuned, with the part learned and spare strings or reeds. Do not play between pieces while others talk, and play more quietly than you think you need to.

Nerves

Almost every performer feels nervous, professionals included. Nerves shrink with preparation and experience: play for family, then friends, then at a student recital, and know the first few bars well enough to carry you in. If performance anxiety is severe or stops you playing, talk to a doctor or qualified counsellor, and do not self-medicate.

Care and Preservation

Stage 10Storage: Instruments, Climate and the Indian Year

An instrument is not like a stamp or a coin. It cannot be sealed in a box and forgotten, because it has to be played, and it lives in the same rooms as its player. Most instruments are made of materials that respond to the air all the time: wood, bamboo, gourd, skin, felt, leather, cane and glue, with metal fittings that corrode. A good instrument can outlive several owners. A neglected one can be ruined in a single monsoon, or a single afternoon in a parked car.

These three stages are for the person who owns something they cannot replace: a teacher's old sitar, a family harmonium, a violin saved up for over two years. This stage deals with the air. Stage 11 goes instrument by instrument, and Stage 12 covers cases, travel, repairers, records and a routine for the year.

Wood and humidity: the mechanism

Wood is hygroscopic: it takes up moisture from humid air, gives it back to dry air, and swells and shrinks as it does, many times more across the grain than along it. The thin tops and backs of string instruments are glued to rims and braces that restrain them, so when the air changes, stress builds.

When the air is too dry, the wood shrinks. Tops and backs crack along the grain and seams open. The fingerboard shrinks while the metal frets do not, so fret ends stick out sharply at the edges, called fret sprout. The top sinks and the strings drop closer to the frets, causing buzzing.

When the air is too damp, the wood swells. Tops bulge, strings rise and become harder to press, and the sound turns dull. Glue joints weaken, especially those made with traditional animal glue, which softens in damp and heat. Bridges held on only by string pressure, as on the violin, sitar and tanpura, can creep out of position; glued guitar bridges can begin to lift; necks can bow or twist.

When the air swings between the two, the damage is worst, because each cycle works the joints and the finish. This is why stability matters more than the exact number.

The other enemies

• Heat. Softens glue, finishes and plastics. A parked car in an Indian summer can get hot enough to loosen joints and warp a case; never leave an instrument in one.
• Direct sun. Heats one side of an instrument faster than the other and fades finishes.
• Mould. Grows on case linings, leather, felts, pads, bellows, drum skins and sheet music when humidity stays high.
• Pests. Termites attack wooden bodies and the furniture beneath them. Wood-boring beetle larvae tunnel through wood and gourd. Cockroaches and rats chew leather, felt, glue and harmonium bellows. Clothes moth larvae eat piano felts; silverfish eat paper.
• Salt air. Near the sea, salt speeds corrosion of strings, frets, tuning pins, keywork and electronic contacts.
• Dust. Grinds into moving parts and is drawn into electronics by fans. North Indian dust storms push fine grit into cases that seem closed.

The Indian year

Most Indian homes live through two or three instrument climates a year.

The monsoon is the long danger. Across the coast, the east, the northeast and much of the interior, relative humidity stays high for weeks, indoors as well as out. Instruments swell, pads and bellows grow mould, strings rust and drum heads slacken. The coastal cities, Mumbai, Chennai and Kolkata among them, add salt air to high humidity for much of the year.

The north Indian summer before the monsoon is hot and often very dry in the afternoons, with dust storms. Instruments that came through the monsoon well can crack in May. Northern winters bring room heaters that dry the air near them sharply.

Air-conditioners remove moisture while they run and let it climb back when they stop. Desert coolers do the opposite, blowing damp air into the room. Carry a cold instrument from an air-conditioned room into humid air and condensation forms on it, as on a cold glass. Power cuts stop dehumidifiers and air-conditioners, and humidity in a closed room can climb quickly.

Where in the home

• Choose an inner wall, not an outside wall that takes sun or rain.
• Keep off the floor, away from mopping water and rodents, and off the top of a tall cupboard, where heat collects.
• Stay away from windows, air-conditioner outlets, coolers, heaters, kitchens and bathrooms.
• Check the furniture beneath and behind for termites.
• Use a case or cover when the instrument is not being played that day. A closed case slows every change.

What a cheap hygrometer tells you

A hygrometer measures relative humidity. Small digital ones cost a few hundred rupees and replace guesswork with a number. Keep one in the room and, for a valued instrument, a second in its case.

Cheap hygrometers can read several percent out. Check yours with the salt test: seal it in a plastic box or zip bag with a saucer of table salt dampened to a thick slurry, leave it twelve hours or more at room temperature, and it should read about 75%. Note the error and allow for it.

Humidifiers, dehumidifiers and their risks

Controlling the air helps; overdoing it harms as much as doing nothing.

• Dehumidifiers are the main monsoon defence. Choose one with a humidity setting so it does not overshoot, keep the room closed while it runs, and empty the tank.
• Room humidifiers used in dry seasons can cause swelling and mould if overused, and ultrasonic types filled with tap water can coat nearby surfaces in white mineral dust.
• Instrument humidifiers that sit in a soundhole or case must never drip. Water on wood does lasting damage.
• Silica gel dries a closed case: useful in the monsoon, harmful in a dry season if forgotten. Use it with a hygrometer, recharge it by gentle heating as the packet directs, avoid the older blue indicating type, which contains a cobalt compound, and keep all gel from children.
• Two-way humidity packs hold a case near a set humidity and are gentler than silica gel, but must be replaced when spent.

After a power cut, bring the room back down slowly. A gradual return is kinder than a sudden drop.

Stage 11Care of the Instrument: Strings, Skins, Gourds, Wind, Keys and Circuits

Stage 10 dealt with the air. This stage deals with the instrument itself, and with the parts that wear out, rust, rot or get eaten. Almost all of it comes down to one habit: clean and dry the instrument before it goes away.

Strings

Sweat is salty and slightly acidic, and it corrodes strings from the moment you stop playing. Wash your hands before playing and wipe strings and fingerboard with a dry, soft cloth after. In the monsoon and near the sea, unwiped strings can rust within days.

Change strings when they sound dull, will not hold tuning, will not play in tune up the neck, or feel rough. There is no fixed interval; a player with sweaty hands in Chennai in July will change far more often than one in a dry room.

On instruments whose bridge is held only by string pressure, including the violin family, sitar, tanpura and sarod, change one string at a time. Remove them all and the bridge falls, and inside a violin the soundpost, a small wooden dowel held only by pressure, may fall too. Resetting it is a repairer's job.

Jawari: the buzzing bridge

The sitar, tanpura, surbahar and veena use a broad, gently curved bridge called the jawari, on which the vibrating strings graze. That controlled contact gives their shimmering, buzzing tone. Modern bridge tops are usually bone, horn or a synthetic material.

Strings slowly wear grooves into the jawari and the tone turns thin or harsh. Reshaping it, often called doing or opening the jawari, is skilled work for a maker or experienced repairer. Never file a jawari yourself. On the tanpura the buzz is fine-tuned with a cotton thread under each string on the bridge, often called jiva; replace threads that fray or go damp.

Gourds

The sitar and the north Indian tanpura use a dried gourd, the tumba, as the main resonator, and many sitars carry a second, smaller gourd near the top of the neck. Gourds are thin, brittle and hard to replace with a matching sound. They crack from knocks and sudden drying, and the glued joint to the neck can loosen in heat and damp.

Store the instrument so no weight rests on either gourd and it cannot slide or topple; a fitted hard case is best. Check regularly for small round holes and fine pale powder, the signs of wood-boring insects. If you find fresh powder, seal the instrument in a large plastic bag, keep it away from other instruments and wooden furniture, and take it to a maker or repairer. Do not spray insecticide into it. Conservators do treat infestations, sometimes by controlled freezing or oxygen-free enclosure, but those methods can harm glue and finish and are not for home use.

Tabla, pakhawaj and mridangam

These drums have heads of layered goatskin, tensioned by leather straps or thongs, with a black loading patch built from a paste containing an iron-rich powder. On the tabla that patch is the syahi.

Damp slackens the skins, so pitch drops and the sound muddies, and the patch can turn sticky and grow mould. Dry heat tightens skins until they may split and cracks the patch. Keep the drums covered on their ring cushions, out of sun and air-conditioner blasts; play with clean, dry hands; never wet a head or let oil or cream touch it. Retune with light taps of the hammer, never heavy blows. A split skin or flaking syahi is not a home repair; a maker replaces the head.

The pakhawaj and mridangam need one more habit. A dab of wet dough or paste is pressed onto the bass head before playing. Afterwards, remove every trace and let the head dry, or it feeds insects and mould and rots the skin.

Wind instruments: moisture and hygiene

Every wind instrument collects condensed breath. Dry the inside after every session and never shut a wet instrument away.

• Woodwind such as flute, clarinet and saxophone seal their tone holes with pads, felt discs covered in skin or leather. Wet pads stick, tear, grow mould and leak. Swab the bore, wipe the keys, and keep the damp swab out of the case. Warm a cold wooden clarinet or oboe in the hands before playing hard, or it may crack.
• Reeds go mouldy fast in Indian damp. Rotate several in a ventilated reed case, let them dry between uses, and discard any with mould.
• Brass needs water emptied after playing, valves oiled and slides greased as the maker directs. Pinkish spots working through the metal, called red rot, are corrosion; show a repairer. Keep household metal polish off lacquered brass.
• Mouthpieces should be cleaned regularly and never shared. A damp, uncleaned wind instrument can harbour mould and bacteria; anyone with asthma or another breathing condition should take particular care and ask a doctor if unsure.
• Bansuri bamboo cracks with sudden changes of temperature or humidity. Warm a cold flute in your hands before playing, wipe out moisture afterwards, and keep it in a cloth cover out of sun. Makers differ on oiling the bore; follow yours.
• Shehnai and nadaswaram reeds are plant material: dry them between sessions in a holder that lets air in, keep spares, and never seal a wet reed away.

Pianos and harmoniums

An acoustic piano's soundboard swells in damp and its pitch tends to rise; in dry weather the reverse. A piano tuned mid-monsoon may be out of tune by winter, so tune at least once a year, ideally after the season settles, and more often in an unstable room. Damp also swells felt bushings until keys stick and rusts strings and tuning pins, faster near the sea. Moth larvae eat hammer and damper felts, and rats nest inside. Keep the lid closed when not playing, place the piano against an inner wall, keep plants and drinks off it, and ask your tuner before putting any repellent or heater inside.

The harmonium suffers the same problems in miniature. Its brass reeds tarnish and drift out of tune, its keys stick, its bellows grow mould, and cockroaches and rats chew the bellows. Play it regularly, keep it covered and off the floor, and never lift it by the bellows. Retuning means scraping individual reeds, which is specialist work.

Electronics

• Condensation. After moving equipment from an air-conditioned car into humid air, leave it in its bag for an hour or so before switching on.
• Damp and salt corrode jacks and contacts, bringing crackle and dropouts. Use dust covers and a dry room.
• Power. Voltage fluctuation and surges are a real risk in many places. Use a surge protector or stabiliser suited to the equipment, switch off before plugging in cables, and unplug during thunderstorms.
• Batteries. Remove them from pedals, tuners and wireless units before storage; leaking cells corrode contacts. Store rechargeable devices part-charged, as the maker advises.

Stage 12Preservation: Cases, Travel, Repairers, Records and the Monsoon Routine

This stage covers what surrounds the instrument: its case, its journeys, its repairers, its paperwork, and the recordings and notebooks that hold what you learned on it.

Cases and gig bags

A hard case protects against knocks and crushing and, because it closes well, slows changes of humidity; it is heavier and dearer. A gig bag is a padded soft case, light and convenient, with little protection against impact and almost none against the air. A flight case is a rugged box for touring and checked luggage. Sitars and tanpuras are widely sold with hard cases of fibreglass or wood; tablas travel in padded bags that hold both drums and their rings.

• Fit. The instrument should not move inside, and the neck should be supported.
• Pockets. Nothing in a pocket should press on the instrument; a tuner pushing on a thin top can crack it.
• Linings hold moisture and grow mould. After the monsoon, open cases in a dry, shaded room to air.
• The floor. A case on a damp floor draws up moisture. Keep it raised.
• Never close a wet instrument away, or leave a damp cloth or swab inside.

Storing an instrument unplayed for months

Instruments are healthiest when played. When one must rest for a season, prepare it.

1. Clean and dry it thoroughly.
2. On string instruments, lower the tension a little rather than slackening fully, so bridges and soundposts stay put. For guitars with an adjustable neck rod, ask a repairer.
3. On wind instruments, remove reeds and dry every part.
4. Keep drums covered on their rings, and ask your teacher or maker whether to ease the tension.
5. Close and cover harmoniums and pianos, and diarise a pest check.
6. Put a small hygrometer in the case or beside the instrument.
7. Inspect once a month for cracks, mould, insects and rust.
8. Before playing again, bring it up to pitch gradually and look it over carefully.

Travelling

• Keep it with you. In a train or car, the instrument rides in the cabin, never under heavy luggage or in a hot boot.
• Flying. Airline rules on instruments in the cabin differ and change; check before booking, not at the gate. If it must go in the hold, use a flight case, lower the string tension a little, and accept that the risk is real.
• Let it acclimatise. After a big change of temperature, leave the case closed for a while before opening it.
• Carry papers. Ivory, tortoiseshell and some woods can cause problems at borders (see Stage 20). Carry a receipt and photographs.
• Carry a kit: spare strings or reeds, a cloth, a tuner and a small hygrometer.

When to see a luthier or repairer

A luthier makes and repairs string instruments; wind, brass, piano and drum work have their own specialists, and in India many makers also repair. When in doubt, stop and ask. Most home "fixes" make a professional repair harder and dearer.

Insuring and documenting an instrument

If an instrument is stolen, damaged in transit or lost in a flood, what you can prove about it decides what you recover. Keep a record of:

• maker, model, serial number or the full text of any label;
• where and when you bought it, the price, and the bill;
• photographs of front, back, sides, head, label and any existing damage;
• repairs and set-ups, with dates and who did them;
• any valuation letter.

Keep a copy away from the instrument, in cloud storage or with a relative. Standard home insurance may limit or exclude instruments, especially away from home, so read the exclusions. Specialist instrument insurance exists, and a travelling professional will usually need cover in transit.

Archiving recordings and sheet music

For many musicians the most irreplaceable things are not instruments: the recorded lessons of a teacher who has since died, a first concert, the notebooks in which a student wrote down compositions for years.

Recordings. Keep originals in a lossless format such as WAV or FLAC and name files consistently by date, instrument and piece. Follow the 3-2-1 rule: three copies, on two kinds of storage, one kept off-site. Open a few old files each year to prove the backups work. Digitise cassettes and older formats while machines to play them can still be found.

Paper. Scan or photograph every page of handwritten notation and teaching notebooks. Keep originals flat in acid-free folders or boxes, in a dry room, away from silverfish. Never laminate them or mend tears with sticky tape.

The monsoon routine

Stage 13Two Classical Traditions: Hindustani and Carnatic

India has two great classical traditions, and a learner who picks up a sitar or a veena is choosing one of them. Hindustani music belongs broadly to the north, from Pakistan's borderlands to Bengal. Carnatic music belongs to the south, above all Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana and Kerala. They share a deep common root, and they sound unmistakably different.

What they share

Both are built on raga and tala. A raga is far more than a scale. It is a melodic personality: a chosen set of notes, a way of ascending and descending, notes that are dwelt on and notes that are only touched, characteristic phrases, and ornaments. Two ragas with the same notes can be entirely different ragas. A tala is a repeating rhythmic cycle, of which the most common Hindustani example is teentaal of sixteen beats and the most common Carnatic one adi tala of eight.

Both are also traditions of improvisation within strict rules. A performer does not simply play a composition; they explore a raga live, in a structured way, and much of what an audience values is how.

The two traditions draw on a shared body of ancient and medieval theory. The Natya Shastra is the oldest; the Sangita Ratnakara, written by Sharngadeva in the thirteenth century, is often described as the last great treatise both traditions claim.

How they grew apart

Historians debate how and when the split happened, but the broad picture is agreed. From roughly the thirteenth century, music in the north developed at courts where Persian and Central Asian musical ideas mixed with Indian ones, under the Delhi Sultanate and later the Mughals. In the south, music grew under different patrons, including temples and southern kingdoms, and kept closer to devotional composition.

Hindustani music

Hindustani vocal music has several main forms. Dhrupad is the oldest surviving, austere and grand. Khayal became the dominant vocal form, more flexible and ornate. Thumri and related forms are lighter and more romantic. Instrumental performances commonly begin with an unmetred, slow exploration of the raga, the alap, before the drum enters with a composition, the gat. In the twentieth century Vishnu Narayan Bhatkhande grouped the ragas into ten parent scales called thaats, a system still taught.

Carnatic music

Carnatic music is strongly centred on composition, especially the devotional song form called the kriti. Purandara Dasa, a sixteenth-century composer, is traditionally credited with organising how the music is taught and is often called its father. Three composers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Tyagaraja, Muthuswami Dikshitar and Syama Sastri, are revered as the Trinity, and their kritis form the heart of the concert repertoire. Carnatic theory classifies ragas under a system of 72 melakarta parent scales.

Why it matters to a learner

Choosing an instrument in India often means choosing a tradition, with its teachers, repertoire and way of learning. The two worlds meet in joint concerts called jugalbandi and in fusion, but a beginner does best committing to one tradition first.

Stage 14Guru, Shishya and Gharana: How Learning Worked

For most of its history Indian classical music was not learned from books or in classrooms. It was learned from a person. That relationship, between a guru and a shishya, a teacher and a disciple, and the chain of such relationships stretching back through generations, is called the guru–shishya parampara. It explains much of what is admirable and some of what is troubling in the tradition.

How it worked

Traditionally the disciple lived with or near the teacher, sometimes for many years, serving the household and learning by listening, imitating and repeating. Teaching was oral. A guru sang or played a phrase and the student returned it, again and again, until it was right. Ragas and compositions were carried in memory. Stage 6 explained why notation, when it came, remained a memory aid: the ornament, timing and shape that make a raga itself were passed from ear to ear.

In the Hindustani tradition a formal discipleship is often marked by a thread-tying ceremony, the ganda bandhan, which binds student to teacher. The student's side of the bargain was riyaz, long and disciplined daily practice.

Gharanas

The word gharana comes from ghar, house. A gharana is a lineage with a recognisable style, usually rooted in a family of hereditary musicians and extended through their disciples, and often named after a place. Gharanas took shape largely during the nineteenth century, as musicians moved between princely courts.

Among the well-known vocal gharanas are Gwalior, Agra, Jaipur-Atrauli, Kirana and Patiala. Tabla players traditionally speak of six: Delhi, Ajrara, Lucknow, Farrukhabad, Benares and Punjab. Among instrumentalists, the Maihar lineage of Allauddin Khan and the Imdadkhani or Etawah lineage of the sitar player Vilayat Khan's family have been especially influential.

Carnatic music does not organise itself into gharanas in the same way. It speaks of the lineages of disciples descending from the Trinity and other composers, and of distinctive family styles called bani.

Strengths and costs

At its best the system gave a student years of individual attention, deep immersion and a living connection to a style that no book could hold. It kept music alive through centuries of changing patronage.

It also had costs. Knowledge was guarded, and some teachers withheld material or reserved it for family. Access was shaped by caste, religion, gender and money. Many of the finest musicians came from hereditary communities, including Muslim khandani families and women performers in courtesan traditions in the north, and hereditary temple and court musicians in the south, and these communities often lost status as classical music was reshaped in the twentieth century for new, largely urban middle-class audiences. Historians have written a great deal about that shift, and it is worth reading about.

The system today

Most students now combine old and new: institutions or graded exams (see Stage 21) alongside a personal guru, met weekly rather than lived with, and increasingly online. The ganda bandhan is still performed, and the ideal is unchanged: a long relationship in which a teacher shapes musical thinking as well as technique.

Stage 15Sitar and Sarod

The sitar and the sarod are the two most familiar plucked instruments of Hindustani music, and in the twentieth century they carried Indian classical music to audiences around the world.

The sitar

The sitar has a long, hollow wooden neck with movable curved metal frets tied to it, a resonator made from a dried gourd, a broad jawari bridge (see Stage 11), and two sets of strings. The upper strings are played. Beneath the frets runs a set of thinner sympathetic strings, often eleven to thirteen, tuned to the notes of the raga, which ring on their own when those notes are played. The player wears a wire plectrum, the mizrab, on the right index finger.

The sitar's defining technique is meend: pulling a string sideways across a fret to bend its pitch smoothly through several notes, which lets the instrument imitate the glides of the voice.

A popular story credits the invention of the sitar to the poet Amir Khusrau in the thirteenth or fourteenth century, but historians generally treat that as legend. The instrument recognisable as the sitar took shape in north India much later, probably in the eighteenth century.

Its twentieth-century masters include Ravi Shankar, who brought it to world audiences; Vilayat Khan, celebrated for a singing style of playing, the gayaki ang; and Nikhil Banerjee. The surbahar, a larger, deeper bass sitar suited to slow alap, is closely related.

The sarod

The sarod has no frets at all. Its short neck is covered with a polished steel fingerboard, and its wooden body, carved from a single block, is covered with a skin face. It is played with a triangular plectrum, traditionally of coconut shell, and the left hand stops the strings with the tip of the finger or nail against the metal. That fretless steel surface gives the sarod its deep, ringing tone and its long, smooth slides, and it makes playing in tune a matter of ear alone. Like the sitar, it has sympathetic strings.

The sarod is generally traced to the Afghan rubab, brought into India by Pashtun musicians and transformed over generations. Its leading lineages include the Maihar line of Ali Akbar Khan and the family of Amjad Ali Khan.

Learning them

Both instruments reward patience. The early months on sitar are spent on right-hand strokes and on sitting and holding the instrument comfortably; on sarod, on developing fingertips and nails that can take the steel. Both put stress on fingers and on the left shoulder and wrist. Build playing time gradually, and take any pain seriously (see Stage 7).

Stage 16The Tanpura and the Veena

The tanpura: the sound behind the sound

At almost any Indian classical concert, somewhere at the back of the stage, someone is quietly plucking a tall, long-necked instrument without ever playing a tune. That is the tanpura, called tambura in the south, and it provides the drone against which every note of the performance is heard.

The tanpura usually has four strings, plucked one after another in an unhurried, continuous cycle. It has no frets. Its jawari bridge and cotton threads make each string bloom into a cloud of overtones, and in that cloud a trained ear hears the notes of the scale. Singers tune their voices to it; instrumentalists check their intonation against it.

North Indian tanpuras use a gourd resonator; many southern tamburas are made entirely of wood. The town of Miraj, in southern Maharashtra, has been famous for generations for its sitar and tanpura makers.

Electronic tanpuras and phone apps are now everywhere and genuinely useful for practice, though many musicians insist nothing replaces a well-tuned acoustic tanpura, and learning to tune one trains the ear.

The veena

In Indian iconography Saraswati, goddess of learning and music, holds a veena, and the word once referred to stringed instruments in general. Today, in the south, it means above all the Saraswati veena, the central plucked instrument of Carnatic music.

Its large body, the resonator, is traditionally carved from jackfruit wood, and the long neck ends in a carved dragon-like head, with a second, smaller resonator near the neck end. The 24 brass frets are set in a bed of wax along the neck. The player sits on the floor with the instrument across the lap, plucks four main strings with the fingers of the right hand, and uses three side strings for drone and rhythm. Because the frets are high, the left hand can deflect a string sideways to produce the continuous oscillations and slides, the gamaka, that Carnatic music depends on.

Thanjavur in Tamil Nadu is the best-known centre of veena making, and a veena carved from a single block of wood is especially prized.

Among the celebrated players of the last century and a half are Veena Dhanammal, whose intimate style founded a family tradition; Emani Sankara Sastry; S. Balachander; and Mysore Doreswamy Iyengar.

Other veenas

• The rudra veena, or been, of Hindustani music is a large stick zither with two gourds, among the oldest instruments in the north and closely tied to dhrupad. Zia Mohiuddin Dagar and Asad Ali Khan were among its most respected twentieth-century players.
• The chitra veena, also called gottuvadyam, is a fretless Carnatic instrument played with a slide; N. Ravikiran is its best-known modern exponent.
• The vichitra veena is its fretless Hindustani cousin, also played with a slide.

Stage 17Tabla, Pakhawaj and Mridangam

Indian drumming is a language, and it is taught as one. Every stroke has a spoken syllable, and a student learns to recite a composition before playing it.

Tabla

The tabla is a pair of drums played with the fingers and palms. The right-hand drum, the dayan, is carved from wood and tuned precisely to the soloist's Sa. The left-hand drum, the bayan, is larger, usually of metal or clay, and gives a deep bass whose pitch the player bends by pressing the heel of the hand into the skin. Both have heads of layered goatskin with the black syahi patch, tensioned by leather straps with wooden tuning blocks.

Each stroke or combination has a syllable, or bol: dha, dhin, na, tin, ta, ge, ke and others. A theka is the basic bol pattern that marks out a tala, so that the soloist always knows where they are in the cycle. Students recite compositions aloud, called padhant, before playing them.

The tabla's origins are debated, and stories crediting Amir Khusrau are, again, generally considered legend. What is clear is that it became the dominant drum of Hindustani music, displacing the pakhawaj in most genres. Its masters include Ahmed Jan Thirakwa, Alla Rakha, Kishan Maharaj, Samta Prasad, and Alla Rakha's son Zakir Hussain (1951–2024), who became one of the most famous musicians in the world.

Pakhawaj

The pakhawaj is a two-headed barrel drum played horizontally. It is older than the tabla in its present use, and remains the drum of dhrupad, of much temple music, and of some Kathak dance. Before playing, a lump of wheat dough is pressed onto the bass head to deepen its sound, and it must be removed afterwards (see Stage 11). Its sound is broad and resonant, and its strokes use the whole hand.

Mridangam

The mridangam is the principal drum of Carnatic music: a double-headed barrel drum, its body usually carved from jackfruit wood, its heads of layered skin laced with leather thongs. The right head carries a permanent black loading patch; the left head gets a temporary dab of paste before playing. It accompanies every Carnatic concert and, in the tani avartanam, takes a solo. Its great players include Palghat Mani Iyer, Palani Subramania Pillai and Umayalpuram K. Sivaraman.

Carnatic percussionists also speak rhythms aloud in a spoken art called konnakol, which is performed in its own right.

The supporting drums

Carnatic concerts often add the ghatam, a clay pot made to exacting standards and played with astonishing speed, most famously by T. H. Vinayakram; the kanjira, a small frame drum; and the morsing, a jaw harp.

Stage 18Bansuri, Shehnai and Nadaswaram

Bansuri

The bansuri is a side-blown bamboo flute with six or seven finger holes and no keys. It is the flute of Krishna in countless paintings and stories, and it is one of the oldest instruments in the subcontinent. Semitones and slides are made by partly covering holes and changing the breath, so a bansuri player shapes pitch with the fingertips and the lips together.

For most of its history the bansuri was a folk and devotional instrument. Pannalal Ghosh is credited with bringing it onto the Hindustani classical concert stage in the twentieth century, favouring a longer, deeper flute suited to the slow unfolding of a raga. Hariprasad Chaurasia, who studied with Annapurna Devi, made it internationally famous. In Carnatic music the side-blown flute, often called venu, was transformed by T. R. Mahalingam, known as Flute Mali, and carried on by players such as N. Ramani.

The town of Pilibhit in Uttar Pradesh is well known for its bamboo flute makers.

Shehnai

The shehnai is a double-reed wind instrument with a conical wooden body and a flared metal bell. For centuries it has been the sound of weddings, temple gates and auspicious occasions in north India. It was a ceremonial instrument before one man made it a concert instrument.

Nadaswaram

The nadaswaram is the great wind instrument of South Indian temples and weddings: a long double-reed instrument of wood with a flared bell, extraordinarily loud and carrying, made for processions and open air. It is regarded as a mangala vadyam, an auspicious instrument, and is traditionally played in pairs accompanied by the thavil, a barrel drum struck with a stick in one hand and with hard thimbles on the fingers of the other.

Its reeds are made from a plant reed and shaped by the player. Nadaswaram playing has been carried largely by hereditary musician families, and its twentieth-century masters include T. N. Rajarathinam Pillai and Sheik Chinna Moulana.

Learning a wind instrument in India

Start with short sessions of long, steady notes, rest as soon as you feel dizzy or light-headed, and stop if the jaw, neck or chest hurts. Anyone with a heart, lung or blood-pressure condition should ask a doctor before taking up a high-pressure reed instrument such as the shehnai or nadaswaram. Loud reed instruments played indoors can damage hearing too; see Stage 7.

Stage 19The Harmonium and the Violin: Two Arrivals

Two of the most familiar sounds in Indian music came from Europe. One was argued over for a century; the other was absorbed so completely that many listeners assume it was always there.

The harmonium

The harmonium is a free-reed keyboard instrument: pressing a key lets air from a bellows pass through a small brass reed, which vibrates. European reed organs, pumped with the feet, reached India in the nineteenth century. The portable, hand-pumped version played sitting on the floor was developed in India, and the Calcutta firm Dwarkin & Son is widely credited with an early and influential design in the late nineteenth century.

It spread fast: it was cheap, portable, needed no tuning before a performance and could play any tune at once. It became the heart of devotional singing, qawwali, Sikh kirtan, Marathi and Parsi theatre, film song, and the accompaniment of khayal singers.

The argument

The objection to the harmonium was musical, and serious. Its keys give fixed pitches in equal temperament, the Western tuning system, so it cannot slide between notes as meend requires, nor place a note at the slightly different pitch a raga may want. Critics said it trained singers' ears wrongly. Rabindranath Tagore is often cited among its opponents. All India Radio kept the harmonium off its broadcasts for roughly three decades from 1940, a ban lifted only in the early 1970s.

Defenders pointed to what it had made possible: accompaniment for millions of amateur and devotional singers, and, in the hands of great players, a sensitive, supportive voice. Players such as Govindrao Tembe, Appa Jalgaonkar and Tulsidas Borkar earned it respect on the classical stage, and the solo harmonium recital is now an established form.

The violin

The violin arrived in South India with Europeans, and by the early nineteenth century it was being adapted for Carnatic music. Baluswami Dikshitar, brother of the composer Muthuswami Dikshitar, is traditionally credited as one of the first to do so, and Vadivelu, one of the Thanjavur Quartet of musician brothers, is remembered for playing it at the Travancore court.

What Carnatic musicians did with it is remarkable. The player sits cross-legged on the floor, with the scroll resting against the foot and the body of the violin against the chest, which frees the left hand to slide along the strings. The strings are tuned not in the Western pattern but to Sa and Pa in alternation. The violin's fretless, continuous pitch suits the gamaka of Carnatic music perfectly, and it became the standard melodic accompaniment in the Carnatic concert, following the vocalist phrase by phrase.

The Carnatic violin's masters include Dwaram Venkataswamy Naidu, Lalgudi Jayaraman, T. N. Krishnan, M. S. Gopalakrishnan and Kunnakudi Vaidyanathan. L. Subramaniam has played Carnatic, Western and fusion music on the world stage. In Hindustani music, V. G. Jog and N. Rajam established the violin as a solo instrument.

Stage 20Folk Instruments, Their Makers and the Law

Classical music is only a small part of the music played in India. Every region has its own instruments, made by local craftsmen and played at harvests, weddings, festivals, pilgrimages and in the long evenings of village life. Many of them are simple to make and extraordinarily hard to play well.

Folk and classical have never been sealed apart. The santoor, a trapezoid box strung with many strings and struck with light mallets, was a Kashmiri instrument before Shivkumar Sharma adapted it for Hindustani classical music in the twentieth century. The bansuri travelled the same road.

Folk instruments are often learned within a community rather than an institution; hereditary musician families such as the Manganiyars and Langas of Rajasthan teach within the family. Workshops and festivals open some doors to outsiders; approach them with respect, and expect to listen for a long time first.

The makers

Instrument making in India is still largely a craft of workshops and families, in which skills pass from one generation to the next. A handful of places are famous for it:

• Miraj, in Maharashtra, for sitars and tanpuras.
• Kolkata, long a centre for sitars, sarods, tablas and harmoniums.
• Thanjavur, in Tamil Nadu, for the Saraswati veena.
• Pilibhit, in Uttar Pradesh, for bamboo flutes.

Buying from a maker has real advantages. You can try several instruments, have one adjusted to your hand, and return to the same workshop for repairs. A made-to-order instrument may take weeks or months. Agree the price, specification and delivery date in writing, pay any advance against a receipt, and take your teacher if you can.

Materials and the law

Older Indian instruments sometimes contain materials that are now protected. Ivory was used for bridges, nuts and decoration on sitars, veenas and other instruments; tortoiseshell and bone appear too; and some drums were traditionally covered with the skins of animals now protected. Some woods used in instruments are subject to international trade controls.

India protects many species under the Wildlife (Protection) Act, 1972, and trade in ivory is prohibited. Internationally, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) governs moving many animal and plant materials across borders, and its rules on some instrument woods have changed more than once in recent years.

The practical rules are simple and conservative:

1. Do not buy a new instrument made with a protected material.
2. Before buying, selling or exporting an old instrument that may contain ivory, tortoiseshell, protected skins or regulated woods, take advice from a qualified expert and, where needed, a lawyer.
3. Before flying abroad with any old instrument, check the current rules for every country on the route.
4. Keep receipts and photographs that show what the instrument is and when you acquired it (see Stage 12).

Stage 21Learning in India Today

A learner in India now has more ways in than at any time in history: a personal guru, a neighbourhood music class, a university degree, graded examinations, and lessons with a teacher in another city over a video call. The traditions have not disappeared. They have multiplied their doors.

Graded examinations in Indian music

Several long-established bodies run graded examinations in Hindustani music across India, with syllabuses for voice and for instruments.

• The Akhil Bharatiya Gandharva Mahavidyalaya Mandal grew from the school founded by Vishnu Digambar Paluskar in Lahore in 1901. Its examinations climb through several levels, and titles such as Visharad and Alankar are widely recognised.
• The Prayag Sangeet Samiti, based in Prayagraj, also conducts graded examinations with centres in many places.

Exams give structure, clear goals and a certificate that some schools and employers recognise. They can also turn music into a syllabus to be got through. The best use of them is as a framework alongside a good teacher, not a replacement for one.

Institutions

Among the institutions that matter:

• Indira Kala Sangeet Vishwavidyalaya in Khairagarh, Chhattisgarh, a university devoted to music and the fine arts.
• University departments of music and performing arts, among them those at Banaras Hindu University and the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda.
• ITC Sangeet Research Academy in Kolkata, known for training selected scholars in a residential, guru-based setting.
• Kalakshetra in Chennai, founded by Rukmini Devi Arundale, for Carnatic music and dance.
• The Bhatkhande music institution in Lucknow, named after the reformer.
• The Sangeet Natak Akademi, India's national academy for music, dance and drama.

For Western music, Trinity College London and the ABRSM conduct graded examinations in India, and the KM Music Conservatory in Chennai, founded by A. R. Rahman, offers training in both Western and Indian music.

Concerts as a school

Listening is half of learning, and India's festival calendar is a classroom. Chennai's December music season, anchored by the Music Academy, fills the city with Carnatic concerts. Pune's Sawai Gandharva Bhimsen Festival, Jalandhar's Harivallabh Sangeet Sammelan and Kolkata's Dover Lane Music Conference are among the great Hindustani gatherings. At Thiruvaiyaru, musicians gather each year for the Tyagaraja Aradhana to sing the composer's works together. SPIC MACAY has for decades brought classical musicians into schools and colleges across the country, and many working musicians first heard the music at one of its concerts.

Online learning

Since around 2020, online teaching has become normal in both traditions, letting students in small towns and abroad reach distant teachers. Its limits are real: poor audio hides tone and intonation problems, and a video call cannot show a wrist from every angle. Many teachers combine online lessons with occasional in-person sessions.

Stage 22Film, Independent Music and Fusion

For much of the twentieth century, many Indian instrumentalists earned their living not in concert halls but in film studios.

The studio orchestras

Film songs were recorded by studio orchestras in Bombay, Madras and Calcutta that blended violins, cellos, mandolins, guitars, saxophones and trumpets with sitars, sarangis, santoors, shehnais, bansuris, tablas and dholaks. Composers such as S. D. Burman, Shankar–Jaikishan, Laxmikant–Pyarelal, R. D. Burman in Hindi cinema and Ilaiyaraaja in Tamil cinema wrote for these forces, and many fine classical musicians earned a living in the studios. Shivkumar Sharma and Hariprasad Chaurasia even composed film scores together as Shiv–Hari.

From the 1990s, synthesisers and computer-based production changed the studio. A. R. Rahman's score for Roja (1992) is widely seen as a turning point, and large live orchestras gave way in much film work to smaller sessions and players recording their parts separately. Session musicians still play on film soundtracks, but the work increasingly means recording to a click track, often from a home studio.

Fusion

Meetings between Indian and other musics go back decades. Ravi Shankar recorded duets with the violinist Yehudi Menuhin in the 1960s. In the 1970s the band Shakti brought together the guitarist John McLaughlin, Zakir Hussain and the violinist L. Shankar. Since then fusion has become a genre of its own, from jazz and flamenco collaborations to electronic music built on Indian rhythms.

The independent scene

Outside film, India now has a large independent music scene, helped by affordable recording equipment and streaming. Bands such as Indian Ocean, which blended rock with folk and classical elements, showed that an audience existed beyond film songs, and television and online series such as Coke Studio India brought folk, classical and popular musicians together on one stage. Independent artists now release music directly, and a good instrumentalist can find work in bands, sessions, live venues and weddings as well as in concerts.

Why this matters to a learner

Film and independent music are how many Indians first fall in love with an instrument, and they are a legitimate destination, not a lesser one. The skills are the same: steady time, good tone, a trained ear and the ability to play with others.

Glossary

A

Action — The height of the strings above the fingerboard or frets; high action makes an instrument hard to play. [8]

Adi tala — The most common Carnatic rhythmic cycle, of eight beats. [13]

Alap — The slow, unmetred opening exploration of a raga in Hindustani music. [13]

B

Bani — A distinctive family or lineage style in Carnatic music. [14]

Bayan — The larger, left-hand bass drum of the tabla pair. [17]

Bol — A spoken syllable standing for a drum stroke or a group of strokes. [17]

C

CITES — The international convention that controls cross-border trade in many endangered animal and plant materials. [20]

Concert pitch — The agreed tuning reference in Western music, with A set at 440 hertz. [9]

D

Dayan — The right-hand, wooden, tuned drum of the tabla pair. [17]

Deliberate practice — Effortful practice aimed at a specific weakness, with feedback, just beyond current ability. [5]

Dhrupad — The oldest surviving form of Hindustani classical music, austere and grand. [13]

F

Fret sprout — Fret ends sticking out from the edge of a fingerboard that has shrunk in dry air. [10]

G

Gamaka — Ornamental oscillation or slide of pitch, essential to Carnatic music. [16]

Ganda bandhan — The thread-tying ceremony that formalises discipleship in Hindustani music. [14]

Gharana — A Hindustani lineage with a recognisable style, often named after a place. [14]

Guru–shishya parampara — The chain of teacher-to-disciple relationships through which Indian music was passed on. [14]

H

Hornbostel–Sachs — The classification of instruments by what vibrates, published in 1914. [2]

Hygrometer — An instrument that measures relative humidity. [10]

J

Jawari — The broad, curved bridge of the sitar, tanpura and veena that gives their buzzing, sustained tone; also the work of reshaping it. [11]

Jiva — The cotton thread placed under a tanpura string on the bridge to adjust its buzz. [11]

Jugalbandi — A duet between two soloists, sometimes from different traditions. [13]

K

Khayal — The dominant vocal form of Hindustani classical music. [13]

Komal — A flattened note in Indian music. [6]

Konnakol — The Carnatic art of reciting rhythm in spoken syllables. [17]

Kriti — The principal composed song form of Carnatic music. [13]

L

Luthier — A maker and repairer of string instruments. [12]

M

Meend — A smooth slide between notes, made on the sitar by pulling the string sideways. [15]

Melakarta — One of the 72 parent scales of Carnatic raga classification. [13]

Mizrab — The wire plectrum worn on the index finger to play the sitar. [15]

N

Nadaswaram — The long, loud double-reed wind instrument of South Indian temples and weddings. [18]

P

Pads — Felt discs covered in skin or leather that seal the tone holes of woodwind instruments. [11]

Padhant — Reciting a tabla composition aloud before playing it. [17]

R

Raga — A melodic framework with its own notes, movements, emphases and phrases. [13]

Red rot — Pinkish corrosion working through brass from inside. [11]

Relative humidity — The moisture in the air compared with the most it could hold at that temperature, as a percentage. [10]

Riyaz — Disciplined daily practice. [14]

S

Sargam — The Indian names for the notes: Sa, Re, Ga, Ma, Pa, Dha, Ni. [6]

Set-up — The adjustment of an instrument's action, nut, bridge and fittings so that it plays well. [8]

Shuddha — A natural note in Indian music. [6]

Slow practice — Practising at a speed at which a passage can be played exactly right and relaxed. [5]

Soundpost — A small wooden dowel inside a violin, held in place only by pressure between top and back. [11]

Spacing effect — The finding that practice spread over time produces better learning than the same practice massed together. [5]

Surbahar — A large bass sitar suited to slow alap. [15]

Syahi — The black loading patch on a tabla head. [11]

Sympathetic strings — Strings that are not plucked but ring in response to played notes; on the sitar, the tarab. [15]

T

Tala — A repeating rhythmic cycle. [13]

Tani avartanam — The percussion solo in a Carnatic concert. [17]

Tanpura — The long-necked drone instrument of Indian classical music; tambura in the south. [16]

Thaat — One of the ten parent scales under which Bhatkhande grouped Hindustani ragas. [13]

Theka — The basic bol pattern that marks out a tala on the tabla. [17]

Tivra — A sharpened Ma in Indian music. [6]

Tumba — The gourd resonator of the sitar or tanpura. [11]

Further Reading and Organisations

On practice, technique and musicians' health

• K. Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool, Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise — deliberate practice, from the researcher himself.
• Gerald Klickstein, The Musician's Way — practice, performance and healthy playing.
• Madeline Bruser, The Art of Practicing — relaxed, attentive practice.
• The British Association for Performing Arts Medicine and the Performing Arts Medicine Association — professional bodies concerned with musicians' health.

On Indian music

• Ravi Shankar, My Music, My Life — the sitar and Hindustani music, by its best-known ambassador.
• Bonnie C. Wade, Music in India: The Classical Traditions — a scholarly introduction to both traditions.
• Neil Sorrell and Ram Narayan, Indian Music in Performance — a practical introduction written with the sarangi master.
• Daniel M. Neuman, The Life of Music in North India — Hindustani musicians and their lineages.
• Janaki Bakhle, Two Men and Music — Bhatkhande, Paluskar and the remaking of Hindustani music.
• Amanda Weidman, Singing the Classical, Voicing the Modern — the violin, the voice and modern Carnatic music.
• T. M. Krishna, A Southern Music: The Karnatik Story — a performer's account of Carnatic music and its social history.
• Deepak S. Raja, Hindustani Music: A Tradition in Transition — the forms and how they are changing.
• Namita Devidayal, The Music Room — a memoir of learning from a guru.

On instruments

• The New Grove Dictionary of Musical Instruments — the standard English-language reference.
• The instrument collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and the Horniman Museum, London, both holding Indian instruments.

Organisations in India

• Sangeet Natak Akademi — the national academy for music, dance and drama.
• Akhil Bharatiya Gandharva Mahavidyalaya Mandal — graded examinations in Hindustani music.
• Prayag Sangeet Samiti — graded examinations in Hindustani music.
• Indira Kala Sangeet Vishwavidyalaya, Khairagarh — a university for music and the fine arts.
• ITC Sangeet Research Academy, Kolkata — advanced Hindustani training.
• Kalakshetra Foundation, Chennai — Carnatic music and dance.
• The Music Academy, Chennai — anchor of the December season.
• SPIC MACAY — classical concerts in schools and colleges.
• KM Music Conservatory, Chennai — Western and Indian music.
• Trinity College London and ABRSM — graded Western music examinations, held in India.

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