Ustad Imrat Khan is widely recognized as a master musician on the Sitar and the Surbahar. He belongs to the centuries-old unbroken musical lineage of the Imdadkhani Gharana (named after this grand-father Ustad Imdad Khan. He received his initial training from his mother Bashiran Begum and maternal grand-father Ustad Bandeh Hassan Khan who belonged to a famous family of vocalists. He learnt the Sitar from his elder brother Ustad Vilayat Khan and the Surbahar from paternal uncle Ustad Waheed Khan. The two brothers, Vilayat and Imrat are credited with establishing the Gayaki Ang of the Gharana.   He has performed all over the world and received several awards including the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award from the Government of India in 1988. He has also lectured in various universities in Europe and the U.S.

John Rahn is Professor of Music Composition and Music Theory, and Professor of Critical Theory at the University of Washington. After an early career as a professional bassoonist (from age 16), Rahn earned degrees in Classics (Pomona), Bassoon (Juilliard), and Composition (Princeton). He served as founding director of the UW School of Music Computer Center (SMCC) from 1988 to 1990, and created the year-long series of Computer Music Seminars, which he taught from 1983 to 1991. His compositions have been widely performed and broadcast in North and South America and in Europe, from Argentina to Romania. As a theorist, he was actively involved in the formation of the Society for Music Theory, and has served on its Board. He served as Editor of Perspectives of New Music from 1983 to 1994, and again from 2000 to the present.

Dr. John Rahn [JR] spoke with Ustad Imrat Khan [IK] on the eve of his concert for Ragamala in the year 1990. Also participating in the conversation is Dr. Ramesh Gangolli [RG], Professor Emeritus of Mathematics and Adjunct Professor of Music at the University of Washington, Seattle.

IK: Whatever training we have is for playing, and we don't have a training for talking.

JR: You're not used to saying what you do.

IK: No, not used to. But what I'm saying is that describing music through talk I always find very hard. It's very easy to talk about music through an instrument, but when it comes to talking, it's very hard to find the words, the exact words to describe the emotions of music or a musical subject. But again, language is important for people. That is another medium for understanding, which goes to one level of our mind; whereas music goes to a slightly different level of our mind. I don't know if you understand...

JR: I agree entirely. In America there are a lot of universities with departments of music. People are trained to play, and to compose, and to make music; but they are also trained to talk about music. Isn't there anything like that in India?

IK: Of course! In our music, as in Western music, there are musicologists and musicians. In India we call them gayak and nayak. Nayak means those who are musicologists; they have knowledge and they can talk about music.But in India, the musicians are mostly involved in singing and playing. Of course, now our music is becoming more accessible to the rest of the world, so it is very important to speak about it and explain what it is all about.

JR: It is a way to learn and understand your music for people who are not in your tradition and have not grown up listening to your music and do not know how to listen to it. It is not easy music to understand for one who has not grown up in the tradition.

IK: Yes, yes, that is very true. But I think we are living in a very beautiful world today. These cultures developed in the West and the East for hundreds of years, if not thousands of years, in such a beautiful way-in a closed environment, with the knowledge accumulated like matured wine and like perfumes that have matured for hundreds of years and then become more and more beautiful and their fragrance is more powerful. So it is very nice that like this mature wine that has been cultivated and matured for
such a long time in one environment, suddenly it is available! And it is beautiful. It is available because of television and radio and planes-- which were not there before-- and recording, especially. I think also that it is a very important period for music and musicians, in that for the first time the music is available to us not through books only but through the listening device, which was not there before. Before, if you want to listen to a master, you may have to go on a horse or a bullock cart for miles and miles [laughs], and then you will reach the master if you are lucky and still alive [laughter], and then you stand outside, and you are not even allowed inside the village and you just stand outside and listen to these masters, you know, standing outside the doors and windows and listening. And that's how the music was available to the people. And if it was sung or played in the durbar, then common people were not allowed. But suddenly we are living in a world where all this fantastic contribution of thousands of years and the work of masters is available to us.

JR: Almost intoxicating, isn't it, speaking again of fine wine, to have all of these vintages,mature vintages that you never dreamed of, suddenly available? I was talking with your son, Shafaatullah, about Indian music and Western art music, and how in some ways the two traditions are the same and in some ways quite different, not just in technical ways-- the scale, the raga-- but also in aesthetic or cultural ways, and of course in the dynamics, the process by which the music is actually made and by which the wine actually matures. In the West a performer, a classical pianist, will play a Mozart piano concerto, which was written down in notation, and he may add just a few little notes, but otherwise the only thing he adds to the score is subtle inflections of interpretation on what has been written down by the composer. You do not have so great a degree of separation of functions between the person who creates the music, the composer; and the person who plays the music, the performer: It's all one person.

IK: It is so nice for us to see that in each culture music is as old as mankind, and everywhere people were thinking about music and people were doing beautiful research, and evolving beautiful systems. And for us it is beautiful to see, speaking as an Indian musician, the organization of Western music, how it was written down, how it was handed over to the musicians. So the entire system developed to perfection in a very beautiful way. Whereas in India the same thing happened in an entirely different way; and it is very beautiful for us to come to each other now with something to offer each other and something to appreciate from each other. This is very, very nice, I find. In Western music, the composer has to write it down, and there are different divisions, and the musicians have to play. The system of composing in the West developed so powerfully because you also found a medium for writing. A very nice notation system developed side by side with the music. But mind you, the Western music developed, in my humble opinion, definitely according to the imagination, but very much according to what could be written down. So it was only developed as much as it can be written down.

JR: The music notation itself has lots of music theory built into it. The rules of music are built into the notation, but that just makes the notation part  of the tradition. If you feel the need to innovate, to do something new that cannot be written down, you invent a new notation,  if you must notate.

IK: Yes, if you must notate. So the music developed according to the notation system. And also it developed in the balance and counterbalance of harmony. Because it could be written down, the musicians of the West had the idea of playing together and developed quartets and quintets and orchestras and symphonies. The whole thing developed like a mountain, and it is so beautiful. Whereas in India, the whole thing developed very much out of the temples and the prayers and the self expression of the artist. And always the music developed in such a way that the control of such a performance remained in the hands of the performer. The artist himself became more powerful. The composing aspects did not become separated from the artist, but he was also allowed to do his compositions, because it developed side by side with the virtuosity and the perfection of the musician and musicianship. Because this aspect is so powerful, the musicians also took the liberty of composing on the spot or creating the music on the spot, when the mind is working. This philosophy of music, which is slightly different from other civilizations' music, is so very powerful and has so much beauty of its own that they did not restrict it to writing; they thought writing might make a limit, and so at that time the musician just gave his life. So it is an entirely different philosophy of music. And yes, it cannot be reproduced again, but what does it matter? It is produced today, and tomorrow I may be able to produce something else, or my son or my student will do it-take it one step further. So in that way I am very grateful. It's a very different concept of music, a tradition where we left a lot to nature. And therefore we may have lost a lot of musical values, but we have gained a lot, because it was always evolving. It was like fashion-- the person remains the same, but the dresses are always changing. So we have many things from the past handed down from the masters to each succeeding generation; but that also guaranteed the survival of the music, because it was not stagnant in one place.

JR: I've been enjoying very much your performance on the Nimbus compact disc of Miya Ki Todi and Bilaskhani Todi.¹ With respect to the point you just made about handing down from the masters, how different is the Miya Ki Todi that you played on the disc from what might have been played by Mia Tansen?

IK: Here we are completely lost, because although Mia Tansen lived not very long ago-- it was only in the sixteenth century-- it's very hard for us to find how he brought rain and how he melted stones, because all of these miracles are associated with his performance and with his music. We musicians very strongly believe. We don't think it is a myth. Modern science is also trying to find these musical powers. The fish and the cows and the birds are listening to music. It is very, very obvious; when the snake charmer plays the music, the snake starts to dance. A lot of things we see happening today--the miracle of music is still there. I believe that if the miracle remains, it remains in music and nothing else. But scientifically we are discovering that music has much more to offer; perhaps in those days they went deep enough into it. I wish we had a recording system or a writing system like the ones in Western music, so we would be able to know at least what were the patterns. But whatever we have surviving in this generation, we still have a lot of recipes which preserve the Indian raga performance system. When I perform, if I try to play pathos, it has that effect. It may not melt the stone, but it sometimes does bring tears to the eyes of the listener. When we are playing exciting music, it does not start raining or the clouds do not gather, but you feel a kind of tension and it stirs something in the heart. So what is it? I think this is a miracle. I think that if a musician can make people feel that happening, then it is true, isn't it? What difference does it make that it didn't literally happen? If you felt it, then it is enough.

JR: It happened for people.

IK: It happened for people. I think these are very important elements of creation of this art that are very nicely preserved in our music, and I very much hope that these aspects of the art are understood by the people. So they can feel it more. And for the musician and musicianship, I think this aspect is the most important which Indian music has to offer.

JR: We can move to a more technical area also related to tradition and innovation. You and your family have been innovators. You have begun using the surbahar-- I believe that is new in your generation, for the alap and so on?

IK: The surbahar was invented in my family. The greatest contribution of my family concerning musical instruments is that my family introduced the surbahar to the spectrum of Indian music in the galaxy. But it was very limited at first, so my great-grandfather made a lot of modifications to this instrument, and when it became one of the most beautiful instruments he named it "surbahar." He made it work very hard with his own son Ustad Imdad Khan, my own grandfather, who made it the most popular instrument among the instrumentalists. He taught many people surbahar. He also created a bowed instrument called sursagar. Unfortunately, that instrument could not gain popularity, because it was as difficult to play as surbahar is today. He taught sursagar to one musician, Ustad Mamman Khan, the most famous musician of that time, but after him the instrument fell into disuse. Then my father Ustad Inayat Khan kept the surbahar alive, and he had a lot of students. My grandfather taught surbahar to his two sons and other students. My father and my uncle Ustad Wahid Khan knew the full development of surbahar. When my father died, I was only two years old, so the instrument was there, and actually it was my mother who was there and always reminded me, "Look, when you grow up, you have to play this instrument."

JR: It's a beautiful instrument.

IK: It is, it is very beautiful. At the beginning of my life I was developing myself as a singer, because after the death of my father I had the blessing of my maternal grandfather and my maternal uncle and my mother, those who come from a singing tradition. So my voice was very good and I was singing very well, but the surbahar was always there, and my mother always reminded me that "You have to play surbahar." And then I got the finest opportunity, that my uncle agreed to teach me, Ustad Wahid Khan. And he was the only man alive to teach that instrument. I'm most grateful, I'm blessed that I went under his training. That was also the period when my voice was changing from childhood to manhood, so I completely devoted myself to surbahar. I am one of the luckiest musicians, whose training was under the guidance of my maternal uncle and my mother, who was a fantastic singer and musician-- she had great knowledge of music. So after the death of my father, she was all the time teaching me from the beginning the khayal and dhrupad and dhamar and tappas, tarana. She had immense knowledge. As soon as she could hand me over to her brother, Ustad Zindesaab Khan, we moved to Sahranpur. My uncle taught me, and then I had the blessing of learning from my maternal grandfather, and as soon as we moved to Bombay, then my uncle was there and she immediately made me a student. You see, in our gharana we have to become the student or official student. Your father or uncle will not do. The relation does not count. Officially I had to be the student of my uncle for surbahar. It was very beautiful that I had all these masters, giants around me. And my brother, of course, Ustad Vilayat Khan, who taught me the values of the gharana on sitar. So in my gharana the sitar and surbahar developed side by side. Now I must tell you why. Why two instruments? Because the field of Indian music, the galaxy of Indian music, is very vast. Starting from dhrupad, dhamar, khayal, tarana, all these subjects are very vast-- then thumri, dadra-- so our musical traditions developed a vast range. To express this entire sort of thing, perhaps my family needed two kinds of instruments, to express the musical imagination.

JR: What is it the surbahar allows you to do that the sitar isn't good for?

IK: As you know, the dhrupad is the most serious and most devotional side of Indian classical music, which developed for centuries in India. Our music is very closely linked with singing. We believe in Indian philosophy that the mother of music is voice or singing. So a lot of musical imaginations are
directly linked with singing. But then, side by side, musical instruments also started developing, and that aspect which was dhrupad dhamar was side by side developed on the been, which is our old instrument and is associated with our gods and goddesses-- Shiva is considered the creator of the been. So a lot of instrumental values are directly related to the been. Surbahar is one step more refined from the been, because although the been is a fantastic instrument, it's a very beautiful instrument, been was always much more an instrument of self expression. It's too deep into the bhakti or devotional aspect. If you really hear the sound of been, it's not very loud, and it's very sensitive; and it's an instrument which is inward.

JR: Isn't it correct to think that it is designed to be heard by a very, very small number of people, because of the sound, and that it looks inward rather than speaks to other people?

IK: This is a very interesting thing, that been is a very devotional instrument. You know, a time comes in a been player's life when it doesn't matter if anybody is listening at all. It keeps you withdrawing inside. The been is an instrument which always draws you away from people.There are two ways of
spirituality also. Sometimes the devotional aspect in a person develops to such a degree that they leave the world and go to the mountains, and they just sit down on the mountain and they don't care what anybody. . . .But by sitting on the mountain, they do care for humanity. They are doing what they want to do for humanity, for the people. But they just sort of melted with what you call their faith, their beliefs, Allah, or Bhagwan, or Jesus Christ or Buddha or whatever it is. You know that all the religions lead to that law. So been always slowly takes you in. But at the same time, the masters for centuries developed the art to a very high degree. Surbahar is produced from the been, but it has developed much more practical aspects, because now the meend, which is the slurring part, is developed much more. Then my great grandfather added the tarab, which is not on the been, so the strings can hold much more. And he changed the strings around. The been has the main thin playing string at the top and the thickest playing string near the palm of the pulling hand, while the sitar and surbahar are reversed, making it easier to pull the thinnest string. Also the fingerboard is made wider, to make it strong enough to be able to pull. The strings actually only cover the middle of the finger board, and the other half is empty, so there is room to pull. All of these aspects have been very methodically developed.

JR: That would be a big difference, then, in technique in playing the been, if you could not pull so well. How could you pull then?

IK: So the been was always a very difficult instrument to play. And to express musical ideas to that degree where the music was developing through singing, through dhrupad and dhamar, whereas the instrument was limited in expressing the ideas. So the instrument had to be brought into a new
dimension, which was done by my great grandfather Ustad Sahebdad Khan on surbahar.²

JR: So the surbahar now resembles the sitar?

IK: Yes, but it is much bigger and heavier.

JR: It's a perfect eleventh lower than your lowest note on the sitar- very low?³

IK: Yes, very low.

JR: Does that make it easier to pull with greater inflections on the surbahar than on the sitar, the fact that it is tuned so low?

IK: Nothing is easier on the surbahar. But you see, it is a musical concept, it's a sound which is very attractive, and perhaps to match the dignity of the musical imagination the surbahar is necessary.

RG: I've always been struck by the instrument's proximity to the human voice, especially in the lower register. When the sympathetic strings begin to vibrate and the playing string is held in such a way as to sustain the sound, and when the different glissandos are being performed, it sounds exactly like a bass voice.

IK: I'd like to say something about the natural sounds, which remain the main ingredient of Indian music. Natural sounds always have a countersound production, which very much exists in the Western music in the chords and the sympathetic notes. This sympathetic note becomes very important, because when I'm playing sa, the pa is there, the fifth is there. And from the fifth, the higher fifth is there, and the third is sounding, and all of this natural outburst of overtones is so fascinating. The surbahar is such a fantastic instrument that all these sympathetic notes and counternotes come so beautifully, and actually our ear is not powerful enough to hear all that, but if you really put your ear onto the tumba (gourd) or bridge of the surbahar, you can really go on listening to the miracle of music which is there. And from my childhood I have been fascinated with this.

JR: When you play surbahar, do you hear all of those harmonies all of the time? And you're playing with the hamonics, as well as the.. ?

IK: Yes, yes.

JR: That's fascinating. I recognized when listening to your recording of Miya Ki Todi that you hardly ever plucked the pa string, and yet pa was still there as a harmonic.

IK: Yes, it's so beautiful. And you know that by the grace of God, nothing that I do is very much mine, it is all the development of my forefathers and the masters they were, but it was very wonderful for me to discover. I do not restrict myself when I am playing surbahar. I like to play surbahar like a child plays with a ball in a field. [Laughs] I just throw myself around, and I just run and jump, and I do all kind of things. I really play surbahar not in the sense of a performer, but like a child. The most beautiful thing is that the surbahar takes me, the field is there, I can throw my ball as far as I want, and I can still reach the ball, and I can run as far as my strength gives me, and that is the most beautiful thing about surbahar, whereas other instruments limit you. The surbahar tells me, "How much strength you have?
Come on, show me. How many ideas do you have? Come on, show me. How much can you pull? Come on, show me." I can use my whole body strength to perform, and also the mind strength. Always my imagination is pouring out but the instrument is asking more. And that is something very beautiful about the instrument. I think that applies to most of the very few instruments which are perfected by mankind. There are thousands of instruments, but some of the instruments are perfected to such a degree that they become a chdenge for our imaginations.

JR: Sometimes very simple instruments such as the Japanese shakuhachi flute bring about very spiritual playing.

RG: Yes, the sound of that instrument is almost ethereal, is it not?

IK: It is very fascinating for us to understand that beauty lies much more in simplicity than in the kind of material things we create too much around us, or in an instrument. The beauty lies where it becomes simpler and simpler and simpler. Then your imagination starts working much more. So that goes a lot into the technical development of the surbahar. I mean the playing technique of the surbahar. So, if you notice, I play surbahar, which has unlimited resources, with only two fingers of my left hand-- I don't use five fingers-- and on my right hand I only use one finger. Again, this is very important for musicians to understand. Why is that? I have by the grace of God five fingers on my right hand. But the perfection of technique was so fantastic, developed by my forefathers in this field. The one finger has unlimited variations. Perhaps if I start using two fingers, I will be restricted. And that is something very beautiful to understand. Well, then, coming back to musical ideas, the surbahar has these aspects to appreciate and understand. As you know, in our Indian music two systems of singing developed to the highest degree, one in the dhrupad dhamar which is the dhrupad side, and the other khayal, which was invented in the fifteenth century, and is associated with Hazrat Amir Khusru, and developed in other directions. Khayal means imagination. There the system gave musicians and singers a kind of liberty to go into the imagination with less restrictions. In that way singing developed to a very high degree in
Indian classical music. When the sitar developed in my gharana, in my family, we two brothers were very fortunate that we had this singing influence on our maternal side, although I noticed that the singing elements were already introduced into sitar from the time of my grandfather and father, listening to those recordings. Here let me tell you in brackets that I am a very fortunate musician, in that we have four generations of recordings. My grandfather recorded, my father recorded, I recorded, and
my sons have recorded, so one can listen to all the developments in the instrument and how the new ideas were introduced and how the modifications of the instrument and the sound and the subject were added. This is very fascinating.

JR: Do you think the presence of recording technology will alter the way in which tradition is developed?

IK: What we try to do since the development of this technology-- microphones, amplification, and all that-- is not to give in to this technology. We do not reduce the size of the strings-in fact, we play the thickest string on sitar among all sitar players. We make the sitars as they used to be made-- thicker board and thicker tabli-- so we can play very loud and very hard. We don't change the instrument in order to please the technology.

JR: But the fact that every succeeding generation will be able to hear recordings-- like the wine maturing process, again, you will be able to taste the wine from each preceding generation. It's different from the way it used to be when you had traditions but you didn't know exactly what was played, you knew some patterns, but. . .

IK: Here I must say that I am very grateful to have sat at the feet of the great masters, those who gave us the information directly. I think this information is emotionally more vital than the music itself, because they gave us their values. It's a philosophical thought, that a child receives the values, the
importance of something, which is more important than the mathematical calculation itself, because then his mind starts working into something that could be even higher. This tradition is very deeply rooted, respect for masters, the values of masters; what they say is marked on stone, and this is very much in our blood. And this is my message also to the younger generation. Sometimes the younger generation do not look to their masters with so much devotion and such deep respect as we do in India.

JR: And without that, there can be no real creativity.

IK: No. Because this is like a faith, like a faith in Jesus Christ. And it is the faith which brings the tears, not that pattern which Tansen sang. How is it that a pattern which was perfected over thousands of years brings tears in America? It is my faith in those notes.

JR: That's what makes communication, that's what makes it possible.

IK: Yes.

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