I'm nothing like an expert, but I do know that a raga is more than just a scale, it has a melodic component, and I think it has elements of genre about it too. I think it's somewhere between the three things, in a way that isn't exactly replicated in Western music.

This is more like it. Great thread! I've tried understanding all this before but it's mind-bogglingly sophisticated and subtle and I end up with my head spinning even more alarmingly than when trying to distinguish tenor tubas from baritone euphoniums from Wagner hecklephones. The one idea I do remember being told to hang onto is to think in terms of the mode and/or the individual raga in terms of its notes and their (melodic and other) characteristics, rather than so much in terms of a sequence of intervals.

I suppose from that perspective it ought to be possible, in theory at any rate if you know your stuff (which I don't), to identify the raga (and hence the generic mode it is taken from?) fairly early in the piece. Very early, presumably, if the raga is 'stated' at the outset as I assume it often (always?) is.

Look forward to learning much more from other contributors.

Ragas are not only associated with different moods and times of day but are also divided into male (raga) and female (ragini) types (errrr... maybe I shouldn't have mentioned that). Here's an interesting set of articles

http://www.wyastone.co.uk/nrl/world/raga/intro1.html

which are condensed from the liner notes to this 4-CD set



which I highly recommend to anyone interested in the subject. While the pitches of the mode, the order in which they're introduced, the characteristic turns of phrase that go with them and so on are fairly easy to get one's Western head around with a little patience and a lot of listening, at which point one can begin to appreciate what an accomplished soloist is doing with them, all of the associations mentioned above have remained quite beyond my comprehension (I did spend some time studying and even trying to play ragas many years ago). An Indian musician once told me that whenever he heard a mode whose second degree was a semitone above the first it reminded him of morning. This just goes to show how culturally relative all of the more allusive aspects of musical expression are.

Electric guitar, I'm afraid.

Do compositions frequently 'modulate' from one raga to the next? Or would that be at cross purposes with the 'function' of music? The little music that I have heard seems to stick with one mode/raga, and certainly only one Sa.

It's not the fact that the frets are there that's the problem (sitars have frets too), it's the fact that they're positioned according to an equal-tempered chromatic scale. It isn't possible with a standard electric guitar to bend notes upwards as far as one would like in this kind of musical context, though in 1975 the jazz guitarist John McLaughlin did have an acoustic guitar made with the fingerboard scalloped behind the frets (so that the fingers touched only the strings rather than the fingerboard as well), and also 7 sympathetic strings, in order to create a kind of hybrid between guitar and sitar (which he played extensively for some years in his group "Shakti", which also featured Indian musicians). The one illustrated below is the second version of three. My friend and long-time collaborator Daryl Buckley had a similar instrument made in the 1990s but neither he nor I ever found any real use for it: I was initially excited by the possibilities of extended string-bending but the reality (on the instrument in question anyway) was that the spacing between the strings, being that of a normal guitar, precluded anything really interesting in this regard.



CD, as far as I know compositions never modulate from one raga to another. And - I thought you'd disappeared somewhere. If in fact you haven't, I think it's time you said a little more about Shostakovich op.87...

Formalist!