The Sixth String of Vilayat Khan

by Namita Devidayal

In the early 1950s, similar ideas about the potency of Indian music and its capacity to create harmonies within and among people travelled into the mind of the great master violinist Yehudi Menuhin. Long before the term ‘world music’ was coined, Menuhin became its biggest missionary. Although he was raised in America, he always turned to other cultures for inspiration. He wrote about his fascination with India in his memoir, Unfinished Journey: Having grown up in competitive America where survival was by will power and pesticides, I could not find other than marvelous a world which drew its strength from the encouragement of so much life and the destruction of so little . . . To belong to such continuity relieves the individual, I think, of much of the burden of uniqueness. Life and death are not all and nothing, but stages in a process, episodes on an infinite river to which one trusts oneself and all other phenomena. So, it is that Indian music reflects Indian life, having no predetermined beginning or end but flowing without interruption through the fingers of the composer–performer; the tuning of the instrument merges imperceptibly with the elaboration of the melody, which may spin itself out for two, three or more unbroken hours. Melodically and rhythmically, Indian music long ago achieved a complex sophistication which only in the twentieth century, with the work of Bartok and Stravinksy, has Western music begun to adumbrate . . . What Indian music has not, and Weste...