If you listen to Indian classical music, it’s not just pentatonic. Some of the ragas that they use are very chromatic, all sustained over a root and a 5th that doesn’t change, and by using these chromatic scales they can imply all these other kinds of harmonies.
India Quotes
For years I had something called Music On The Desert Road, which was a recording of all kinds of different ethnic musics from different places in the Middle East. I used to listen to that all the time – I liked that kind of melodic feel. I listened to Indian music, Ravi Shankar and so […]
The Hindu genius is a love for abstraction and, at the same time, a passion for the concrete image. At times it is rich, at others prolix. It has created the most lucid and the most instinctive art. It is abstract and realistic, sexual and intellectual, pedantic and sublime. It lives between extremes, it embraces […]
In India, I found a race of mortals living upon the Earth, but not adhering to it, inhabiting cities, but not being fixed to them, possessing everything, but possessed by nothing.
I come from an Indian Muslim family, but I experience India as a very pleasant country, whereas in Pakistan I feel ill at ease. You would think it should be the reverse. But in spite of its many defects, India is a rich and open society, while Pakistan is culturally an impoverished and closed society.
Those whose only aim is to barter the energies of life for gold, or name, or any other enjoyment; those to whom the tramp of embattled cohorts is the only manifestation of power; those to whom the enjoyment of the senses is the only bliss that life can give- to these, India will appear as […]
In India, our religions will never at any time take root; the ancient wisdom of the human race will not be supplanted by the events in Galilee. On the contrary, Indian wisdom flows back to Europe, and will produce a fundamental change in our knowledge and thought.
Nearly all the philosophical and mathematical doctrines attributed to Pythagoras are derived from India.
Perhaps no one has embraced nothing as strongly as the Indians who never had a fear of the infinite or of the void. Hinduism has embedded within it, a complex philosophy of nothingness, seeing everything in the world as arising from the pregnant void, known as Sunya.
When one considers the sublime disposition underlying the truly universal education (of traditional India)… then what is or has been called religion in Europe seems to us to be scarcely deserving of that name. And one feels compelled to advise those who wish to witness religion to travel to India for that purpose.
