Here is an alap in Rag Purvi. I’m particularly fascinated by this rag, and the clip here happens to be one of my favorite alaps that I’ve managed to record so far.
Rag Purvi makes for a very interesting comparison with Rag Bhairav which I explored in my last post. It would seem that the two rags have nearly the same pitch material. Bhairav has komal re and komal dha while the other swaras are shuddha; Purvi has those same swaras with the addition of tivra ma. In Western terms, Bhairav has a flat second, natural third, natural fourth, natural fifth, flat sixth, and natural seventh; Purvi has those same pitches with the addition of the sharp fourth that prevails over the natural fourth.
They have similar scales and yet Bhairav is a morning rag while Purvi is a dusk rag. As a student of dhrupad I’ve tried to grasp what it really means for a raga to be associated with a specific time of day. How does being a morning versus a dusk rag impact the way the rag is actually performed? One very concrete impact is on the way the pitches are intoned. Reams of material have been written on intonation in Indian Classical Music and by even mentioning the topic I know I’m treading into an area of much heated discussion and debate. However, to summarize what I’ve learned from my teacher, the pitches that admit flexible intonation like komal re and komal dha should be performed higher in the morning and lower at dusk (though one can find commentators who suggest the exact opposite). The higher intonation creates an active, rising quality in the note that evokes the energy and brightness of morning, while the lower intonation creates a falling quality that represents the setting sun. A good performer does not push the pitch up or down arbitrarily, but rather achieves a higher or lower intonation by changing the reference point that is kept in mind while singing. In Purvi as I learned it from my teacher, the very low intonations of komal re and komal dha arise by keeping shuddha ga, which is very strong in this rag, always in mind as one sings — searching for the re and dha that seem most aligned with the ga. In Bhairav, although there may be a temptation to emphasize ga because it sounds pretty, that swara should not be given too much emphasis and in fact it can be intoned slightly high to give it a less stable quality; in Bhairav, the intonation of dha comes from taking sa as the reference point, and in turn the re emerges from dha.
The clip of Purvi that I’m posting here is the first time I’ve been able to hit the dusk srutis consistently in this rag, though I had worked on the same challenge in my earlier take on Rag Marwa. It is difficult to do. Because the dusk srutis are so low, there is a temptation to make them as low as possible, but that results in their being simply too low; there’s a contrasting temptation to make them too high, since the brighter, morning srutis are perhaps more standard and familiar, and are easier to “find” because sa is an easier reference to work with. However, when the shuddha ga is kept firmly in mind, the intonation of dha and re can settle around it in a way that really does unlock the special mood of a transitional time of day.
[audio src=“https://rudiseitz1.files.wordpress.com/2015/11/ste-048-rs-purvi-preview.mp3"][/audio] ■