Morning To Midnight (Ragas) (Audio CD)

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Classical Instrumental.
Ustad Bismillah Khan (Shehnai)
Ustad Imrat Khan (Sitar)
Pandit Hari Prasad Chaurasia (Flute)

Raga is India’ gift to the world of melody Raga etymologically means color and also love. Each raga born of a special scale, drawing from the individual character of each note in that scale and weaving itself into a dialect of phrases born of combinations and tonal relationships between notes has a palpable, vivid almost visual image and character life a person with the power to color one’s mind with specific emotions, colors, rasas, and imageries.

This nature of rage provides the canvas for a variety of extra musical association the relationships with time of day being a significant one among them. Each hour of the day has a special character and energy to it. If forms brings freshness dew, hope, prayer, and a pious joy, predusk moments bring a moment of inner disturbance late evening and early night bring sensuous romance and glitter, late night the dark moments ranging introspection and the occult to sensual union.

While scientific correlates between scales, ragas and the time of day can be seen in the clustering of ragas from certain types of scales into specific periods of the day of the modern listener it is the imagery involved that is significant. This 12 part series entitled morning to midnight Ragas is brought to the listener as a series of musical catalysts to help him invoke the true spirit of the specific hour of the day and savor the intense aroma of distinct emotions and mood related imageries.

The hour leading to sunset and the end of the day can bring a distinct of disquiet to the sensitive mind. The predusk hour is a period of opposing energies and dusk brings to the inner consciousness and awareness of mortality the slipping away of time and the balance of life and activity. The disquiet has perhaps led the collective human consciousness to instinctively pray at this hour to the unknown unseen higher force with a sense of longing. This album brings four celebrated and intensely sensitive ragas which vividly evoke different shades of this poignant period of the day. Multani paints the picture of vulnerable loneliness intensely aware of a vast and forbidding external expanse. Marwa takes this feeling deeper to a sharper degree of lonely outpouring shree connects this outpouring to God through a prayerful expression. Puria Dhanashri reflects the setting down of the mind now beginning to look toward the oncoming colors of the exciting evening.