Post 5

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hArUiFv2FaY&feature=related

I chose to listen to this song by Nikhi Banerjee. He is a sitar player that is considered a master of sitar playing.

The song being played has one sitar, one tambura and one talba player. The sitar, sitting in the center, starts off slowly and easily, very soothing. There is a lot of bending of the pitches. Though there is most likely a mode, the song is probably mostly improvisation. There is quite a bit of repetition of notes but since the player of the sitar bends pitches and plays a slightly different rhythm each time it doesn't feel too repetitive. The song in general is decidedly minor. The tabla player doesn't start right away, but starts about 1min 20sec into the song. Talba isn't completely audible but it is present so that if it were not there the audience would notice something was missing. All the while, the tambura is in the back providing a drone to everything. The drone note is played repeatedly with a certain rhythm to keep things interesting. The tambura player mostly stays out of the way of the sitar while remaining present in the musical texture. This makes the song homophonic with the sitar as the melody and the tambura as the harmony creating chords with the notes the sitar is playing.

Overall, the song starts off mellow, slow and soothing and remains that way for most of the song until the last minute or so when the sitar player starts playing a much larger amount of notes. The build-up to this from the beginning is done so the transition isn't so abrupt. Although there isn't an immediate recognizable singable melody, there could be one. Despite this, the song never makes the audience feel lost.

There is good communication between the performers as they are constantly looking at each other suggesting that the song is probably mostly improvised (if not completely). Although the performers are performing for an audience, they don't seem to really take the audience into much thought in their performing. The players seem to be enjoying their music. They perform music for themselves as well and the audience simply gets to listen because sounds waves travel.