Musical Expression and Voice – IDC Outreach Lecture June 26 and 27

India Discovery Center is pleased to announce to host the first lecture on Saamagaana for the western world on Saturday, June 26, 2021 as a part of the Outreach Lecture Series organized by the Center.  The lecture will be offered by Dr. Rishiraj Pathak, a young researcher and musician, now in the Faculty at Delhi University, India. The lecture will be followed by another lecture on the musical rendering of emotion through voice as exhibited in Indian literature on June 27, 2021.  The lectures will be virtual and begin at 9:30 AM (US EST, 7 PM India Standard Time).

That our voice carries natural capacity of expressing the events in the universe was a discovery of the ancient India.  The discovery becomes the basis of using language as a mode of human communication.  Besides observing and receiving information through our senses, we ae endowed with the faculty of imagination, which also finds expression in our voice.   The voice becomes a tool to map the events both real and imaginary through our capacity of expression.

The earliest documentary evidence of the voice rendering of nature and emotions is technically called Saamagaana.  The vocal rendering of the description of an object was called a Saaman – which are the earliest modes of spontaneous poetic expression.  The rendering is called gaana – an expression of the voce.  So, we have the phrase “saamagaana”, the vocal rendering of the saaman.  The musical codification of the Saaman was called the Chhandas, the art of recitation.

Saamagaana created the foundation of Indian music with the gradual discovery of seven notes through the voice.  Through several millenia of experimentation, the notes were ascribed to sound units called syllables, Syllables became the basis of words and the complete grammar was constructed by the early grammarians.  The grammar and the syllables gave rise to the prolific Indian literature, unparalleled in the world.

The lecture will be a tutorial on Vedic musicology and the foundational science of voice encoding.  The lecture will be beneficial to all music teacher, musicians, language enthusiasts and students of voice.

The registration for the lectures is via https://www.indiadiscoverycenter.org 

The bio for the award-winning speaker and the abstracts are posted in  https://www.indiadiscoverycenter.org/voice-rendering-and-literature/

|