Alain Daniélou, recorded by Nicolas Nabokov, with music by Guido Roversi
INTRODUCTION
A first cousin of the writer Vladimir Nabokov, Nicolas Nabokov was born in Russia and became an American citizen in 1939. He was a composer, musicologist, and writer. In 1955, in Madras, he met Alain Daniélou. The two men remained very close. While serving as cultural advisor to Willy Brandt, then mayor of Berlin, Nicolas Nabokov suggested that Alain Daniélou move there to found his “Institute of Comparative Music.”
TRANSCRIPTION
I went to India without any preconceived ideas and stayed there because I felt I had found elements of civilization, notions of values in all areas that seemed to me to be perhaps the most important in the history of humanity.
To my knowledge, I am the only foreigner of my generation who has completely integrated into Hindu civilization, from the point of view of all forms of thought, whether artistic, philosophical, religious, social, or moral. I lived as a Hindu for many years.
And I also participated very actively in a whole movement that was created to try to restore and, in a way, save everything that this civilization represented in terms of values. A movement that had its origins in Sannyasi, a monk of extraordinary culture and intelligence, for whom I was, in a way, an advisor on foreign affairs.
He was called Sannyasi because his real name is unknown. Travi Ravanom of Saraswati. He belonged to the Saraswati sect, which is the highest form of esoteric initiation in the world of Hindu monks. He was popularly known as Karpatri, meaning “he who has no other object than his own hand,” a name indicating poverty, which is one of the rules of these monks. It was through him that I was regularly initiated into Hinduism and collaborated on magazines and newspapers that presented the different aspects of Hindu thought and civilization.
At that time, I probably did not think about returning to Europe. It was only after India’s independence, when traditional movements realized that the new leaders of India, the so-called Indians who had taken power, were in fact fake Europeans, fake Englishmen, even more harmful to culture than the English had been, who were fairly indifferent. They didn’t care at all. As long as they were allowed to organize their interests, they left cultural issues aside. Whereas the new leaders very treacherously attacked all the traditional Hindu institutions, creating as a substitute a kind of false religion that was a mixture of Christianity, Buddhism, and a kind of philosophy that had nothing to do with traditional Hinduism, which was what people like Gandhi, Aurobindo, and even Tagore.
That was my first contact with India, and Tagore was extremely kind to me. I spent a long time in Shantiniketan at the beginning. It was a very interesting way to penetrate, superficially but truly, into the Indian world. In reality, Indian music was a very diluted and already modernized form. That’s Tagore. He even asked me at one point to run his music school, which actually says a lot about the kind of school it was. At that time, my knowledge of Indian music was still very superficial.
And then at that moment, not only myself, but all the leaders of the traditionalist movement, including Swami Karpatri, thought and told me that what I was interested in could not be achieved in India because the government would expel me, but that on the other hand, it could be extremely useful if I could be a kind of free ambassador for certain values.
So it was a plan; it was not at all by chance that I returned to Europe and began to try to see how the values of the traditional Hindu world could be presented as a means of safeguarding this world. And we know very well that for music, this was the only way.
But it’s also true in other areas. That is to say, we know that musicians in almost all Asian countries are despised and discredited because fashion dictates it and the authorities want to assimilate them into a kind of international show, and so they disregard everything that makes them unique. But if this originality becomes an asset from an international perspective, then they are forced to reconsider, which is why it was so important, for example, to help great Indian artists, and the same for other Asian countries that I worked with later, to make themselves known in the Western world, not at all as curiosities but as perfectly valid, perfectly contemporary art forms, albeit with conceptions that are fundamentally different from those of the West.
In Hindu thought, one aspect of the world cannot be separated from another. The dogmatic conception that characterizes what we call religions is in itself inevitably absurd. The whole effort of Hindu thought in all fields is a search for knowledge that can therefore never be closed. It is therefore much more extensive to a whole aspect of cosmology, metaphysics, mystical experience, what we might call a scientific attitude. This means that it is always open to any new undertaking, any new research. Either we know something to a certain extent and we try to verify it and go further, or we declare that no, from today onwards, I no longer think, I decide that what we know is the end of knowledge. Such an attitude can only be absurd, which means that Christians, like Muslims and Buddhists, live with slogans from the Stone Age or the Bronze Age or whatever people’s knowledge was at that time, and this is absolutely contrary to the Hindu attitude.
One thing that is very surprising to a Hindu mind, for example, is that if we take music, for example, as a means of communication through sound, it does not seem that Westerners have ever worried about the possible limits of this communication, the reasons that make it possible, all the mechanisms of our ear and brain that allow us, through a Schubert melody, to feel a certain emotional state, a certain vision of the world.
And what differentiates the music of northern India from that of the south is precisely this. Musical creation cannot be analyzed according to external criteria. The system we use, like the language we speak, is not very important. What is important is the inner attitude and what we are trying to express. Now, in the modal system, which is the Indian system, we construct a structure that has symbolic values, which is linked for reasons that can even be justified mathematically, in a way, to a whole cosmological theory that corresponds to realities, to real factors, not only to the general structures of the world, but to structures that inevitably correspond to the way we perceive these structures of the world.
There is absolute cohesion between the structures of matter and the structures of our perceptions. And this correspondence means that, for example, in the field of sound, we have very specific limitations, very definite possibilities of distinction, and very definite possibilities of classification. And it is by seeking out, for example, the sensitive points and the kinds of emotion that sounds can provoke that we classify sound systems to express certain things.
At that point, all modal music is based on what is called “improvisation,” that is, on a way of thinking internally within a certain framework that is determined by what we want to say. A bit like the theme of a speech, we know in advance what we want to say, but we don’t know how we will say it. And in this way, it becomes a kind of inner vision where we develop a theme in order to express it with as much nuance and sensitivity as we ourselves possess, as we have more to say.
A system such as the Hindu system is all the more difficult because you have to master the entire language. Obviously, it’s not improvisation in the sense that you can do anything you want. It’s an elaboration of discourse, but this naturally implies that you can’t go beyond the limits of language. And it is this notion that Westerners sorely lack, that they have no sense of what musical language is in a certain sense, and they think that one can go beyond certain forms, that one can make grammatical mistakes, and they find that very original.
This is not possible in true discourse. If it is to be effective, if it is truly a means of communication, it must adhere extremely strictly to the limits of language. But this does not mean at all that we cannot express everything that language allows us to express through language—on the contrary, it is the only way. And that is what improvisation is in the Hindu sense.
It is not surprising that Western musicians find it difficult to understand that these relationships, which we can express in numerical form but also in emotional forms, believe that they do not exist, because they only use sounds that have no meaning.
For example, when studying ragas, there are three types of B flat. They can be expressed numerically if we want to analyze them very easily. But when studying them, we learn from our teacher that in this raga, we use the B flat that is sad. We use the B flat that is tender. No, you express the one that is happy. And in fact, if you experiment with these different intervals, anyone is amazed.
I have experimented with musicians. They said to me, “But this difference in expression is not possible. You are using other acoustic systems, it’s not possible.” ” But it’s a fact. And what’s astonishing is that musicians, with all their scientific pretensions, all their electronic instruments, etc., are completely oblivious to this relationship, to certain categories of relationships that we can call numerical with our sensations from the point of view of musical expression.
We are vaguely aware of this in other fields. We know that certain proportions in architecture give us a certain satisfaction and that if they are not right, we notice it immediately. But in music, it is exactly the same. I don’t think there are any major obstacles in this regard.
For example, I myself am a good Indian instrumentalist. For me, there is no problem in finding precisely those intervals that are considered minimal in Western theories, which represent a completely different world in the Hindu vocabulary. The masters with whom I worked for many years found that my expression was completely accurate; I had assimilated it. And now we have this German collaborator named Julius, who spent ten years studying music in India and is an excellent sitar player in terms of his relationship to sound and in terms of expression and subtlety of form.
So, there are no major obstacles. But obviously, we mustn’t think that this can be an extension of our musical concepts. We have to completely forget everything we imagined music could be in order to learn a completely different art form, a completely new art form, which, like any art form, naturally requires a very long apprenticeship.
This is naturally a problem that always arises for an artist who wants above all to succeed, who needs success. And at that point, if they realize that by performing circus tricks, by doing brilliant but often worthless things, they can more easily attract a certain audience, it is difficult to blame them for doing so. If they are a great artist, they will not do it. And that’s where, for example, musicians of Ravi Shankar’s generation played an important role in the sense that they were perhaps the first to make people aware that Indian music existed. But the other often feels that it is still necessary for the future, a bit like what we do in what are called folk groups or things like that, where we do things for tourists that no longer have much to do with the deep values of an art form. Other artists like the Dagars refused to do this, says Bismillah.
I saw, for example, the great European oboist listening to Bismillah playing his apparently very simple instrument and raising his arms to the sky, saying, “How does he manage to achieve such subtlety, such nuance in pitch, such glissandos on an instrument that has keys?”
Art only exists insofar as there is someone to receive it. It takes someone to give it and someone to receive it. So a minimum of audience education is necessary. In this sense, although from an artistic point of view it is not excusable, we can sometimes excuse people who, at a certain period, make concessions that are detrimental to their own value. Art of a certain level must be presented for what it is, that is, not at all for specialists, but in large concert halls. This has been the work we have strived to do since we were able to create this Institute, whose goal was to disseminate music.
And I must say that in 10 years of experience, the growth of the audience has been truly extraordinarily comforting. That is to say, today we can present great artists who make no concessions in terms of time or the severity of art and who have an absolutely wonderful audience even in Europe.
I was the one who created a small school to hear Malabar before the war in order to save some of the great masters of Kathakali who were out of work. And it is from them that the great school is distributed.
When I went to Iran, for example, no one thought that Iranian music could be saved. Now they do, because we found musicians that no one knew about and had them play in big concerts. Now they are on the radio and invited to the palace. And a religion that seems absolutely hopeless to everyone is the survivors of pre-Columbian music in America.
And in fact, there are still many extremely important things, but among people who are completely terrorized and cannot express themselves because it would call into question the whole policy of Christianization or contempt for ancient values. What survives is still completely hidden. And there are a few people who are interested in it, who consider it almost lost, that nothing can be done.
And I must say, after the meetings I’ve had, I’ve just received some absolutely heartbreaking letters from people who are being given a glimmer of hope. I don’t know if we will achieve anything, if we will find the means to do so, but there is a whole tradition that survives in hiding, slowly dying, and all it would take is to bring it back into the light to suddenly give it new life and the possibility of continuing.
Musicologists in general, if they deal with Western music, have a certain idea of its structures, its reasons, its history. But ethnomusicologists, according to the very principles of ethnology, are concerned with nothing but the so-called scientific study of a document as it is. However, you cannot study a language, you cannot study a form of expression without taking into account purely external factors, without speaking that language, without knowing what the words mean. Now, in everything that is the so-called ethnomusicological approach, you are dealing with people who have no idea what music represents, either from a human point of view, or from a ritual point of view, or from a social point of view, or from a magical point of view, or from any point of view at all. They have established a completely absurd method of purely external analysis that misses all the realities.
Naturally, this can only lead to absurd results.
And then, someone like me, who knows Indian music thoroughly, I believe, who plays it, who knows what it means, who knows what it expresses, is told: “What you are doing is not scientific.” But what does that mean? A man who knows nothing about the country, who knows nothing about the music, who does not know what it means, who is incapable of playing it, who is incapable of recognizing a raga, invents a little system of notation and analysis and calls it “scientific.” These are such atypical and absurd themes that it is obviously difficult to even understand that they could exist.
However, precisely because we are interested in music, art, and human beings, we have had terrible conflicts. We have had all the musicologists and ethnomusicologists in the world against us, trying to put obstacles in our way. I have just become interested in the survivals of Greek music, and according to all the specialists, there is Greek folklore, from which a few small melodies are transcribed in a more or less absurd way. And I immediately classified 11 different traditions that are current in Greece today and that have no structural relationship with each other.
You have forms of ancient Greek music, modal improvisation on a fixed tonic, as was the case with ancient music, which is similar in principle to Indian or Persian music. But you also have Gypsy influences from India via Afghanistan. You have Celtic influences, you have Venetian influences, you have forms that probably come from Romania, from what I call “Dacia,” with very, very ornate music in a very small range. There are also other influences, of course. There are Roman influences that we call “Byzantine,” etc. A series of systems.
Before you can begin to understand anything, to make any analysis whatsoever, you have to be able to separate one thing from another. To do that, you have to hear them, you have to understand them. And one is absolutely stunned by the incredible primitiveness of what is called “musicological science” in these areas.