The practice of Traditional art or classical art is a discipline, a defense against fantasy, against ephemeral fashions and harmful errors of mediocrities. So, let us focus on classical music and its impact on visual art.

The term “Classical music” originates from the Latin classics, meaning first-class, or for the Romans, artistry of the highest order. In India the word for ‘Music’ now used is ‘Sangeet’. This is a comprehensive “performing Art” of singing, Playing instruments, and dancing. Moreover, this art is a part of Drama and even Bharata, the earliest writer of a dramaturgy, had only a few chapters on music in his great treatise “Natyasastra”.

There are two ways of appreciating any music – cerebral and emotional, or from the mind and the heart. Cerebral listening requires a mental effort on the part of the listener, while our emotional response is usually automatic and lies in our subconscious. Western classical music is composed, Indian classical music is improvised. All Western classical music compositions are formally written using the staff notation, and performers have virtually no latitude for improvisation. The converse is the case with Indian classical music, where no ‘work’ is ever written down, and the teacher-student tradition of learning Indian classical music leads to each performance as an improvisation. Indian classical music is primarily homophonic, which means its focus is on melodies created using a sequence of notes. Indian classical music’s magic is primarily experienced with different melodies constructed within the framework of the “RAGA”. A “RAGA”, as the sages say, ” RAGA ” is a particular form of sound that is adorned with notes and melodic phrases and enchants the heart of men. The mind is the refuge of imagination and thought. It is perceived by the senses called ‘feeling’. No fever or chord is perceived by the senses in the form of ears, but the senses are inert, the melodious sound waves of fever and anger reach the level of the brain through the ears and the vocalist carries the sound to the level of the mind, and then the reformation of joy and sweetness takes place in the mind. The conscious level of the mind is then tinged with anger and the mind is melodious and obsessive. When the devotee imagines anger through form and colour. Colour, energy creates electric light and energy. Inanimate objects are nothing more than the sum of vibrations. Vibration has strength and speed. In the 15th-16th century AD, the observers imagined the deity-like form of raga, the pious poets’ composed meditations, and the painters and sculptors conceived Raga-Ragini’s real colour images and stone motions. The level of imagination becomes a real or direct means of spiritual pursuit. 

There are two doctrines in society, one is materialism and the other is spiritual idealism. The last doctrine, however, should be adopted in the psychological analysis of ‘raga’-objects, at least in terms of Just as the creator imagined ‘creation’ in his mind at the time of creation and the result of that imagination is the real world, so too man first imagines something and then manifests it in real form. On the throne of sadhana, an artist finds the path to success, and the door to eternal consolation, that’s when the art of India took place. Indian classical music has a closer, intimate association with nature than Western classical music. Ragas have specific times of day or seasons of the year associated with them. The roots of Indian classical music are spiritual.

The RAGA is derived from the word RANJ (Sanskrit) meaning – to please emotion and colour. 

The melody is based on seven basic notes of Sargam. Every note represents an individual colour. Like

With the help of this colour reference, Ragamala paintings have been created, such as:

To wrap up, quoting Rabindranath Tagore:

“For us, music has above all a transcendental significance. It disengages the spiritual from the happenings of life; it sings of the relationships of the human soul with the soul of things beyond. The world by day is like European music; a flowing concourse of vast harmony, composed of concord and discord and many disconnected fragments. And the night world is our Indian music; one pure, deep and tender raga. They both stir us, yet the two are contradictory in spirit. But that cannot be helped. At the very root, nature is divided into two, day and night, unity and variety, finite and infinite. We men of India live in the realm of the night; we are overpowered by the sense of One and Infinite. Our music draws the listener away beyond the limits of everyday human joys and sorrows, and takes us to that lonely region of renunciation which lies at the root of the universe, while European music leads us a variegated dance through the endless rise and fall of human grief and joy.”