Resonating tones : Tim Jones

This is the first of 2 articles. It is a story from a particular time and place, with the resonance of 2 particular notes, the notes of the ground and the heart.

Music has become (it crept up on me!) my devotional path, a line of inquiry that began 25 years ago with a question. Confronted with the 'time theory' of Indian music where notes and ragas (melody forms) are linked to times of day and seasons, and with the concept of 'rasa' (a codification of emotion and feeling common to all Indian art forms), the question arose, "what is the reality of that?"
I still ask the question.

In this first article I hope to convey the feeling of receiving teaching both from experience and from my teacher.
The second article will look at the concept of 'rasa', a concept common to all Indian arts and found in both Ayurveda and Jyotish, and at its development in meditation (both 'sound' and 'sitting') as 'a perceptual organ of intuitive awareness'.

Indian music is based on notes named as they are sung and heard against a drone or ground tone. Each is always a relationship, the note in relation to the ground The notes are called Sa Ri Ga Ma Pa Dha Ni. The kirtana 'Sobhillu Saptasvara' by Tyagaraja, names them the 'Seven Shining Tones'.

I begin with a memory, of my father taking me to his factory on the Isle of Dogs. He worked as an industrial chemist making colour pigments. In the factory, huge vats sat in rooms the walls of which were splashed bright with primary colours. What a great job, I thought, aged 6, stirring huge paint pots all day.

In Sanskrit the word for musical note is ‘svara’ which holds a meaning of ‘self-shining’. Amongst the many echoes and correspondences for each note (gem stone, planet, animal cry) are, of course, colours.

My search began. Which colour for which note?

I saw Krishna’s blue seeping from a bhodi tree in the temple at Amballapura, enveloping me in its mist, imbuing me with a spirit that loved and accepted all I had to offer. My teacher, Sivasankara Pannikar, was a temple musician there for 27 years.

And that blue is the note called MA, the note of the heart, a melting note.

Part of my play with this music is to put musical patterns on graph paper, each tiny square a note and time value, and with magnifying glass, ink and pen colour each note – green, gold, red.
But which colour for which note?

My search continued. I visited a professor at a music school in Tripunithura. He sent me further on to the temple at Guruvayur which houses the beautiful image of Bala Krsna, originally worshipped by Brahma. Here is a famous school of mural painters who, tradition has it, have that esoteric knowledge matching colour with note. They grind the indigo plant, the gallnut, charcoal, substance disintegrates and their brushes dip into visible sound which flows into the painted deity: Ganesh, Visnu, Devi.

In one of the Upanishads it says that singing a raga is like painting your beloved – each curve caressed, the mouth, the eye, the navel, each line, each curve sung until the beloved sits before you.

And SA is the pink/white of the lotus, containing all notes, the ground, the earth. Hearing all the harmonics buzzing from one string of the tambura, the girl said, “That sounds like a rainbow.”

I took this esoteric knowledge back to guruji. He was proud his compositions could be painted as he had wanted. He sat stick thin and tired from diabetes and a gangrenous infection, swathed in a purple wrap on his white hospital bed. He was taking a short break from teaching (nurses, doctors and visitors had all begun singing during his stay.)

“Of course, the colours don’t really matter”, he said. He put his hand on my heart. “You will always have the notes here.”

Tim Jones