Passages from India
When cellist Nancy Lesh walks into the room, her sari rustling and
long, blond hair flowing, it’s easy to understand why she causes such
a stir when she plays recitals in India. A Westerner in a sari? Playing
ancient Indian music on a European instrument? Although she usually
opens for more senior artists, it is Lesh who gets reviewed in all
the Indian newspapers—much to her chagrin.
"Many of them have never heard a cello before," says Lesh, who lives
and teaches in Madison, Wisconsin, and has a self-titled CD on the
India Archives label (IA 1033, available at www.bn.com).
"Then I start to play a raga that they recognize, and they totally
freak out. It’s rather embarrassing; in the States, the reception
is much less."
Lesh plays North Indian classical music in the dhrupad style of performance—quite
a departure for a musician who was classically trained in the Western
tradition. She was principal cellist of the Rome Festival Orchestra
and the Orchestra del Maggio Musicale of Florence under the direction
of Riccardo Muti before Indian music called her.
In 1981, Lesh took a three-month holiday to India, during which she
gave a Bach recital. Afterward, the dean of music at Banares Hindu
University, Dr. Ritwik Sanyal, commented that the cello is perfect
for dhrupad music. Lesh, then 21, thought it might be fun to learn
something about it. "I didn’t take it too seriously. I thought I would
return to the orchestra after a month."
She went to a lesson with Sanyal, expecting little. "As soon as I
heard his voice, it changed everything for me," she recalls. "It was
so beautiful. I couldn’t believe it. And what was even more astounding
to me was that after listening to him at my first lesson, I could
right away repeat what he was singing, phrase by phrase, on the cello.
That was a thrill beyond belief."
Dhrupad began as temple music in the 1300s. When the moguls established
kingdoms throughout India in the 17th century, they hired temple musicians
to live and perform at court. But when the British abolished those
kingdoms, court musicians had to fend for themselves. On the verge
of extinction for most of this century, dhrupad has been revived through
the dedication of a few, says Lesh.
Sanyal forbade her to notate anything, so she had to learn everything
by rote. He would play a phrase; she would imitate it. He would give
her scale patterns to play and technical exercises to help with intonation.
Then they would do the music. After her lessons, she would run home
and try to notate what she had learned, but the music is essentially
"un-notatable," she says now.
"Indian music begins simply and gains complexity as it goes. It starts
with a single note that’s held, and that note is a tonic. So the first
note you play blends perfectly with the accompanying instrument. Little
by little you depart, add complexity, a wider range, and different
rhythms, and build into the higher register," she explains.
Lesh had to alter her tuning to C#-G#-C#-G#—with a tonic on the C#
alternating with the fifths. However, some Indian ragas don’t have
a fifth in them, so she tunes them with fourths—C#-F#-C#-F#—adjusting
her fingerings accordingly. Instead of sitting in a chair, she sits
on a carpet with back straight and legs crossed. The cello is positioned
more horizontally, and Lesh has devised a crosspiece for her endpin
to keep the instrument from rocking back and forth.
She also added a chikari, or drone string, to produce a tone
similar to that of the veena, an Indian instrument with two drones.
Drone strings should be very soft and ringing, Lesh explains; hers
is an octave above her main tonic pitch. To attach it, she drilled
a hole in the tailpiece and attached a fine tuner. The string passes
over the same bridge as her playing strings, as well as its own bridge
affixed near the pegbox. She had to drill another hole in the pegbox,
"which was very hard," she says. "But I realized that I might as well
just do to this cello what I need to do." She plucks the string with
the meat of her pinkie—not with the nail, as Indian musicians do—essentially
performing a left-hand pizzicato.
In addition, Lesh had to unlearn technique considered necessary in
Western music, such as the use of vibrato. "And intonation is absolutely
essential. So when you play a tonic, it has to be exactly in tune
with the harmonic series, not a tempered tuning like we have on piano.
In fact, to an Indian musician, a piano sounds very out of tune."
Though there are hundreds of ragas, Lesh learned only ten from her
guru. Indeed, she spent her first two years of study on only one raga—despite
attending daily lessons and practicing six to eight hours every day.
A raga is extremely complex, with various "levels" rather than movements.
The first level is a floating, improvised melody that can last 45
minutes to an hour. The second level is a more rhythmic section; the
third is faster, with difficult virtuosic playing. The fourth is a
rhythmic cycle of six to 14 beats.
Ragas must be played at certain times of day, and each has a certain
mood that permeates the entire piece. A piece with a reflective, meditative
mood is reflective even when played fast and loud, and the mood builds
from beginning to end. "You become just infused with this mood," Lesh
says. "It’s like a meditation in sound."
Lesh no longer plays Western classical music. She quit 20 years ago
when she realized that she wouldn’t have time to do both properly.
"It’s a lifelong avocation, just like Western music," she says. "When
I went to India, I thought I could pick this up in a few months, and
it’s not that way at all. One life is not enough."
—Susan M. Barbieri
