Var or ode is a heroic measure famous in the A Punjab, a land of war and heroes. With the large though unified scope of its theme and the wide and thrilling sweep of its music, this form of lyric is best suited to rouse the martial spirit in men and steel them in the face of danger. Recounting the mighty deeds of heroes, it is sung by bards before armies marching to battle, or with the Lyre and Tabor is made enliven the parties of great men with the praise of their ancestors. It is generally tragic or dithyrambic, and the music sad but moving.
The Sikh Gurus took up this measure, as they did other similar measures of their native land, for their own religious purposes. There are twenty two such odes in the Holy Granth, set to seventeen different kinds of music. Among them is one, called Coronation Ode in Ramkali, composed piece by piece, as the occasion arose, by two Mohammedan bards, Satta and Balwand, in praise of the first five Gurus.
The stanzas in honour of Guru Nanak and Guru Angad were sung in the presence of the latter and the others at the installation ceremony of those Gurus to whom they refer. These odes were sung in Sikh congregations by especially-appointed bards who were well-versed in the art of music and knew the particular tunes to which such compositions were to be sung. As much of the spirit and the effect depended on the proper handling of the music the Gurus were very careful in preserving it. Guru Arjan, who compiled the sacred compositions into the Holy Book, set each piece to its own music, and when after some time there appeared a danger of the far-flung congregations forgetting the complicate music of some of the odes, Guru Hargobind affixed the proper tunes to them. There are nine such tunes; each of them being after some ode of a heroic theme, well-known at the time but now almost wholly forgotten, There may still be found here and there a stray old minstrel, with a rebeck, who could fairly reproduce the tunes to which these odes were originally sung; but, if our present neglectful attitude towards music continues they will be lost to us forever.
Asa di Var, or the Ode in the Asa measure is one of the three Punjabi odes of Guru Nanak, found in the Holy Granth, it forms the daily morning service of the Sikh congregations, and being in Asa, is sung before the early dawn. It consists of pauris and shlokas. Which I have chosen to call stanzas and staves. The stanzaic part is the essential part of the Ode, the staves being added to explain and introduce the stanzas. In Guru Nanak's time it consisted of twenty-four stanzas and forty-six staves, stanzas all of Guru Nanak. Then in the time of Guru Angad, or after, fourteen more staves were added from the compositions of Guru Angad. In spite of the passage being complete in themselves and some of them selected from other places, the whole is very artistically arranged, and in the method sequence, and coherence of thought, it is as perfect as the Japji. The stanzas express the ideas in general terms, while the staves illustrate them in descriptive terms, adducing examples from the particular customs and views prevailing at the time. To give a point to the main idea in stanza. The last line is short and epigrammatic.
In the construction of its music it resembles some what the ancient choral ode in Greek, the stave corresponding to the strophe and the stanza to the antistrophe. The staves are sung in solo and the stanza in chorus, the stanza being repeated again in recitative. The staves singing is spontaneous, and anybody from the audience can bear a part in it. Usually one verse is sung by a person at a time, and then another takes up the tune, in this way when the staves are over, the fixed choir takes up the stanza, which is repeated again recitatively by one man in a clear and distinct intonation, so that the audience may grasp the whole meaning of the passage.
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