Word: ragas
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...Methodist hymns and Handel"). He has mapped the world folk-song families, found surprising links between them. The pinch-voiced, samisen-playing geisha finds an echo in the Spanish mountain-farm laborer thumping a ximbomba drum; "the lonesome, death-ridden American cowboy is a blood cousin to the raga singer in India...
...occasionally puzzled. The sitar itself is a confusing-looking instrument, shaped like an oversized guitar (up to 12 ft. long) and equipped with six playing strings, 13 "sympathetic" resonating strings, and two gourds which serve as sound box and resonator. Indian music is based on melodic forms known as ragas. Neither scales nor modes, ragas are separate, individual series of notes-there are thousands of different ragas-most of them passed orally from one musician to another. In combination with the drummer's rhythm, a raga gives the starting theme of a composition. The sitar player can improvise...
...composition (dedicated to the Flonzaleys) had ever been played. There were critics who instantly dubbed it a tour de force, a term which critics find invaluable and sometimes even apt; it was, at all events, a tour. In the Evocation Catalane, the Flonzaleys went to Spain; in the Raga, to Kashmir; in the Ireland-aise, to Ireland; in the Gasal, to Persia. Clever, literary music it was, each division telling a story. The Fonzaleys told those stories with their fingers...