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A Principal Measure With Little in It

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A Principal Measure With Little in It

Todi is one of the principal parent forms of the Hindustani classical system, a morning measure of considerable standing, and its section in the Guru Granth Sahib is short.

The mismatch is worth being explicit about because it corrects a natural assumption. The Granth's selection of rags is not a survey of the available repertoire and does not rank the measures it uses. It records what the Gurus and the bhagats composed in, and the length of a section reflects nothing but that. A measure with enormous prestige in the classical tradition can occupy two pages here, and a regional measure of no classical standing at all can occupy fifty.

This is one of the reasons the volume is useful as evidence about sixteenth and seventeenth century musical practice rather than only about doctrine. It is not a treatise on rags and makes no theoretical claims about them. It is a body of composed work with its measures recorded, which is a much rarer kind of document: the theory of Indian music survives in abundance, and dated, attributed bodies of composition with their measures specified do not.

The section itself carries hymns of the later Gurus. Its brevity is the fact about it, and stating that plainly is better than inflating a short section into an important one because the surrounding sections are long.

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