Page 214 - Communication Processes Volume 3 Communication Culture and Confrontation

Say It in Singing! 189

The Intonation of Grindmill Songs
In the examples shown in Figures 6.2 and 6.3, the dotted pitch line is
the one predicted with the aid of models of ‘conventional’ intonation
that take into account semantic and/or syntactic features. In sung
-
poetry such as ovı, the syntactic structure is almost nonexistent, as
will be demonstrated later. Therefore, the conventional tonal canvas
is not a syntactic/semantic structure, it is the tune on which verses are
sung. Most performers of grindmill songs find it difficult to abstract
tunes from the lyrics of songs when prompted to do so in group
interviews. Besides, it is not common to hear women humming tunes
when they try to remember songs. In most cases, the song is remem-
bered as an integrated object, even though occasional adjustments of
the tonic and melodic patterns may be witnessed in the performance
of the first distichs. In 1997 we worked with a talented sarangi player
trained in both classical music and Punjabi folk. When confronted to
the task of interpreting grindmill song tunes, he would listen to the
recordings and write down not the sargam, but the phonemes he had
been able to capture! It was unexpected that a musician trained in
V.N. Bhatkhande’s system of music notation would try to conceptualize
songs in terms of textual rather than tonal content, the more so because
he had no knowledge of the Marathi language.
In analogy with speech intonation, we may expect that the rhet-
orical processes at work in this form of singing are traceable in terms
of ‘deviations from the tune’. This poses a great difficulty when
tunes themselves are vaguely defined. There is no point in referring
to a musicological model (such as raga) and normative concepts of
tunefulness (unavoidably those of ‘art music’). Should we, for instance,
declare that singing E flat (komal ga) instead of E (shuddh ga) is a
significant deviation (as the minor/major dichotomy would suggest),
or, on the contrary, that both E and E flat are equivalent positions in
the tonal space of a particular song? There is no direct answer to this
dilemma since performers are not able to articulate views on theoretical
musical problems of this kind.
Still, there is no reason to be pessimistic if we only remember that
‘intonation’, in this context, is not just a matter of tonal positions and
scales—a controversial topic that pervaded Indian (ethno) musicology
for a long time (Bor 1988). Intonation comprises recurrent brief
melodic patterns that may only be identified on visual transcriptions,