Dear lovers of Oriental music traditions, by now we have posted over 500 LPs, cassettes, radio broadcasts and also a couple of CDs. We hope you enjoyed them and we also hope that we are able to continue this journey for a while.
A remark: as in Western music, especially pop music, there is mainstream music and music which is not at all mainstream, so in classical Indian music and other Oriental music cultures, there are musicians and musical forms which are mainstream and others, which are not mainstream at all. These are often very little known and neglected by the general public, even in their own countries.
About fifty and more years ago, when in India the Gharanas had still quite marked identities and great masters of these Gharanas were still living and well known, Indian music was still more diverse and this contibuted greatly to its fascinating richness. Todays public often hardly knows about the greats of these Gharanas and hardly perceives these identities, as nowadays the differences between them have nearly completely been washed away. In mid last century there were quite a number of musicians which were in one or the other way quite extreme or extremely intense, sometimes even bizarre. In todays music one looks in vain for these qualities. Compare for example, in Dhrupad, old masters like Rahimuddin Dagar or the Senior Dagar Brothers with the extremely intense Nasir Moinuddin Dagar or Ram Chatur Mallik with todays Gundecha Brothers: worlds apart. But todays public for sure opts for the easily appreciable Gundecha Brothers.
The same is true for other musical cultures: in Uzbek Maqam music, for example, in the music of the older masters which we posted, there is an intensity and depth and a minimalism in the instrumentation that makes this music a universal music, whereas todays music, by its sentimentality and also its instrumentation, close to folk music, is reduced to a just local music.
Or Iranian Dastgah music: the music of the old Radif masters had a universality and depth and an inner architecture or logic hard to grasp and only revealing itself, at least partly, after listening to it many many times, and therefore always remaining fresh and new, because one hardly ever is able to grasp it completely. This quality most later musicians don't have anymore, except for the very few ones which understood the old masters and are their heirs.
Right from the beginning our focus was always on the quality of the music, not on the fame of musicians. Our choice of music has always been a very personal one, looking for depth and intensity. Not for the immediately appreciable, which soon looses its interest. Though part of the public of this blog is not interested in a lot of the music we post, we will continue to remind of musical jewels, musicians and musical forms, which are more or less completely forgotten. In between there will show up musicians, which one could consider more or less mainstream, but which we like a lot.
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