This piece was first left as a review on the website RateYourMusic.com. I was reviewing Ragas Abhogi & Vardani, an archival recording of two pieces played by Ustad Zia Mohiuddin Dagar. I think it's worth disambiguating what I meant here at some point in the future, because having written it myself I know there is an idea here worth talking about, but this business with naming “the east” and “the west”as coherent cultural traditions is orientalist. I have been more careful about this habit since 2018, but perhaps I could be more careful still.
Before we all used computers to have drones deliver our curries, music was largely contrapuntal. We seem to know, here in the west, that complexity is a good thing. The monks that developed our system of harmony did so to heap greater praise upon God, officially. Practically though the development of western harmony was largely because we kept building bigger and bigger churches and suddenly found that chanting only one note didn't quite fill the room up.
One of the fundamental differences I think between Western and Eastern ideas of God is that he represents the infinite in the former, and oneness in the latter, and there is a difference. In the west there is this shared idea among religious artists that the act of creating art is to exercise the part of ourselves that God created in his image.
In the East they are not so concerned about God having created everything, and more concerned with the everything itself. Existence penetrates all of itself from every point at once. Dhrupad developed from the chanting of Om, and the name means immovable verse. All the love for existence that pours and radiates out of every fibre of the masterpieces of Western art doesn't pour and radiate here, it isn't being channelled. It just lies still in the heart, like a stone in a great fire. Ustad Dagar doesn't need to fill a space up with this music, all he needs to do is bring our attention to where it lies.