S-R-gG-m-P-d-nN-S

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Chandranandan (‘Moonstruck’) is a modern classic, created by Ali Akbar Khan in a spare studio moment via spontaneously blending concepts from the Kaunsi family (“Three minutes and it was finished…They asked me for the name, but I never thought of the name, I never thought about the notes. I just thought of my father and played…”). The recording sold wildly – but, when audiences called out for the raga, he found he had forgotten how to play it (“I told them I’d forgotten which notes I used, and needed time…I had to buy the record and listen for six months”). The Ustad‘s paradox-laden path of rediscovery is a truly curious tale, shining light onto his nuanced, multifaceted view of raga itself – encompassing everything from mythological visions and ancient rasa theory to metaphors of chess (in full below: including new information from the Khan family archives, kindly shared by his son Alam). Also see the four ragas which Khan drew from (Malkauns, Chandrakauns, Nandkauns, & Kaunsi Kanada), and the nearby Chandrakaushiki (created by Maihar stablemate Nikhil Banerjee around the same time), and the prakriti Enayetkhani Kanada (another recent Kanada innovation) – plus other Khansaab ragas including Gaurimanjari, Prabhakali, Malayalam, Medhavi, and Suha Todi.

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Aroha: nSgmdnS

Avroh: SRNSR, ndPm, GmgS, ndngS

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Chalan: e.g. SndnS; mgRS; GmdPm; PdSndm; m(N)S; SRn; dndgRS; SRmRSnS; S(N)S; RndPm; mP; GmG; mdm; nPgd(N)RnP(G); mPmg; SmgS; RSndnmgS (Campana)

–Ali Akbar Khan (1973)–

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“Do you know what true music is? To an artist, music should be the supreme deity: who will be worshipped with the eagerness of an undivided mind – and tears shall be his ritual ingredients…” (Allauddin Khan)

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—Context—

Origins, myths, quirks, & more

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Tracing the history of a raga can lead quickly to the realms of myth. Composers may be heroic, half-legendary figures: Miyan Tansen is said to have been able to summon fire with Deepak and rain with Malhar, astounding the onlookers at Emperor Akbar’s 16th-century durbar. They can even be the gods themselves – Malkauns is said to have been created by Parvati to soothe Lord Shiva’s tandav dance of destruction.

 

Retracing the actual sounds of the past is even more of an estimation game. Unlike in the West, compositions often go unwritten, meaning the precise patterns of the pre-recording era are largely lost to the winds. Artists modify instruments and tweak tunings, and sonic fundamentals can drift far from their moorings over the centuries. In the end, few musical facts survive the churn of time: many ragas have lost their original structures, and some have even swapped names. We’ll never really know what many of the great ragas sounded like in their earliest days.

 

This brings modern creations such as Chandranandan into sharp focus. The fact that you can pinpoint its origin to a specific place and time almost feels unsettling. In the late 1940s, emerging sarod pioneer Ali Akbar Khan sat in an HMV recording studio, and was challenged by the label’s boss, eminent musicologist G.N. Joshi, to record something he would never have heard before. Khan recounted the story in Peter Lavezzoli’s excellent book The Dawn of Indian Music in the West:

 

“I was still a young man at the time, and I felt that he was insulting my father [Allauddin Khan] by asking me to play a raga that he had never heard before. But he meant it another way: maybe my father taught me something that he hadn’t heard. He wanted something unique for the recording. I was angry, but I was also in a good musical mood. So, I was nervous for a second, then I remembered my teacher, my father, and said I was ready. I played a few notes, little alap, little gat…”

 

(Allauddin & Ali Akbar Khan, circa 1933)

Chandranandan is often said to be a blend of four ragas – Malkauns, Chandrakauns, Nandkauns, and Kaunsi Kanada. But to see its original cut as a diligent, studied interweaving of these existing forms would be to romanticise. Khan explains: “When you [mix ragas], you must blend the flavours like punch…you can’t taste the individual flavours, but some new taste is there. You can’t make an animal with the head of a cat, and feet like a bird: it looks funny, and you have no raga“.

 

He elaborates: “I didn’t ‘mix’ the ragas. I took notes from the Kaunsi family…It’s like coins. One pound, fifty dollars, ten rupees. I can go to the bank and change them into one kind of money. Chandranandan is like that”. While these mundane monetary metaphors sit in stark contrast to the divine myths that accompany many other ragas, such snapshots help to humanise our heroes – reminding us that the stars of the musical pantheon led everyday lives too. Stars of the distant past were no exception either, but history tends to filter away such details.

 

Khan certainly doesn’t want us to mystify things: “Three minutes and it was finished! When I finished, I didn’t like it…but I wanted to listen. I never listen back to my recordings, after I’m finished I just go away. But that day I asked to hear it, and it really sounded good…They asked me for a name, but I never thought of the name, I never thought about the notes. I just thought of my father and played. So I said, ‘let’s go outside and smoke’. We stepped outside, and ‘Chandranandan’ suddenly came out…” [chandra: ‘moon’, nandan: ‘beauty’].

 

The impromptu experiment was soon released as a 78-rpm, and its searching minor-key chromaticism became an instant hit in India. But the ragas emergence into the world soon featured another unexpected twist: “The audience was shouting for Chandranandan…I told them I had forgotten which notes I used, and needed time. I had to buy the record, and listen for six months to understand the ascending and descending lines. Still sometimes, after a long gap, I have to go through the book.”

 

Khan’s seminal recording didn’t come until 1964, almost two decades on from its original inception. The raga’s strange story leads us to consider the fundamentals of the form. Why was his brief initial take considered to be a raga rather than just a sketch? And how did he become satisfied that the relearned version was tied to the same essence as the first? Examining these questions shines light into the conceptual heart of raga.

 

(‘…the brightness of a million stars, the full moon…’)

• When did it ‘become’ a raga? •

Chandranandan’s first cut was only a few minutes long. But we typically think of ragas as inherently detailed, taking hours to perform and years to learn. They are deeply encultured phenomena too, associated with particular gods, seasons, or hours of the day. Basant is inseparable from the ceremonies of springtime, and Miyan ki Malhar‘s fluid glides signify the monsoon rains. Saraswati is named for the Hindu goddess of music and learning, and Bhairavi for the goddess of destruction.

 

Many are tied to the nine rasas: an ancient Sanskrit concept variously translated as ‘juice‘, ‘taste‘, ‘essence‘, or ‘self-luminosity‘. Bhimpalasi represents shringara (romance, attraction) with passionate melodic outpourings, and Malkauns‘ sparse scale is linked to veera (courage, heroism), signifying determination and the absence of delusion. Chandranandan arrived fresh, with few of these cultural signifiers – and its original sketch was too short to define much in musical terms either. So, was awarding it ‘instant raga’ status to downplay these deeper elements, or perhaps even erode the concept in some way? (…and did Khan do similarly by naming it off-the-cuff during a smoke break?)

 

Here we should turn to back two millennia to the Natyashastra. The influential aesthetic treatise describes raga as ‘mood, flavour, that which colours the mind‘. Each one aims to create detailed emotional effects from within certain formal limits, designed to summon the right blend of tensions in the hands of a master. So, a raga must have the power to leave a unique impression – it must distinctly entrance. Chandranandan certainly had this particularity from the start – even a short recording led audiences to call for it by name. While just a sketch, it spoke to listeners directly, giving idiosyncratic musical shape to a particular shared mood. A raga is not the sum of its rules: which only exist to aid in the creation of an overall flavour. This flavour is the true focus.

 

So for me, the brevity of its initial presentation doesn’t matter very much. Chandranandan not only had the basic sonic hallmarks of Hindustani raga – single-line, composition-focued melodic development, supported by tabla rhythms and a tanpura drone – it had a nuanced, distinctive, and immediately recognisable emotional colour too. In the words of its creator, “some new taste is there“. Audiences could feel that there was much more behind it, and were eager to peer further in.

 

(Khan teaches at the Ali Akbar College)

• How did Khan reaminate the raga? •

But Khan had to relearn the raga first, and these explorations took time. He certainly wasn’t joking about forgetting it: “I knew that the notes were there, but how were they coming? How did they move? That particular mood, those particular notes, I tried to do it again, but it didn’t have the same effect“. He elaborates on the challenges faced: “I had to go out and buy my record to try and find out the ascending, descending, all these things…that much I could learn by heart and could play, but performing for the public, I had to play for hours – and six minutes is nothing. So I started thinking about that raga, and it took me five years to mature.”

 

Where did it go in the time it was forgotten? Was it in some way lost? A condensed form of it was on a big-selling record, but no scholar would conflate a raga with the sum of its performances. They are abstractions, never defined by a single recording. But for a while Chandranandan existed as a half-sketched studio cut, with only a faded imprint left in the mind of its creator. How could he be satisfied that his recreation captured the same essence as the original? Khan’s approach to resurrecting the raga illuminates how he sees the fundamentals of the form. He connected musical exploration with visual imagination and cultural association, with all three paths allowing him to elaborate different aspects of its ‘new taste’. For him, a raga can only reveal its full spectrum when drawing on multiple forms of cognition.

 

Musically, Khan worked to unlock and extend the mood of the original, gradually amassing a set of theoretical principles. He made no secret of his struggles here – five years is a long time for anyone to work on one piece. But the difficulties came not in relearning the melodies of his first cut, a bread-and-butter task for such an intensively ear-trained master. His challenge was to recapture the mood: only then could he reverse-engineer the right musical tools to build on it. He knew that experimenting in the right directions would build the required fluency, and reveal clues about where to go next.

 

The process was painstaking. For one thing, he had to be careful not to internally overwrite the sentiments he was seeking with those he was exploring – perhaps a particular challenge for such an adept improviser, who could naturally fall into making pretty much any tone-collection sound coherent. Breakthroughs did not come easy, but they arrived eventually. A finely detailed picture emerges: for example he notes that “shuddha Re comes more than shuddha Ni: which only comes when you go up to the antara side, and a little bit – a touch – in the lower part. Re is strong, not as strong as in Darbari or Kafi, but it is there…” (for more melodic depth, see Phraseology section below).

 

(Khansaab immersed in his riyaz)

• Inspiration from broader realms •

The Ustad knew he had to develop Chandranandan’s emotional landscape to fill out an hour-plus performance. And if a raga is about flavour rather than theory, then why not explore it in non-musical ways too? Seen this way, his turn towards visual imagery and Hindu myth is no surprise. Khan intuitively looked beyond his sarod, explaining that lunar visions of the raga’s name had fed back into its sound: “When you look out at the brightness of a million stars on the night of the full moon, full of endless mystery…that is the mood of Chandranandan“. You can even zoom in on some precise points of metaphoric confluence: he later spoke of the komal re as being ‘hidden’ late in the melody, “like behind a cloud”.

 

The classificatory concepts of old established their own gravity too, with Khan ascribing a blend of rasas: karuna, shringara, and veera (compassion, romance, and courage). Explicit focus on these shared reference points will have helped him ground the raga within Hindustani music’s familiar emotional canon. He also turned to metaphors of shatranj (an ancient chess variant) when explaining how to find expressive freedom within its tight melodic framework – hinting at a patient, strategic mindset: “The ascending and descending are fixed, but more in a curved way…like in the game shatranj, you can move in so many ways. You have to play the raga like that…but in the end you don’t kill the king!”

 

Conceptualisation occurred on other symbolic and cultural levels. He came to associate its sentiment with “Krishna and the gopis [milkmaids] playing with the moon“. Krishna is a complex deity, variously described as a ‘god-child and a prankster’, ‘a model lover and a divine hero’, and ‘a manifestation of the universal supreme being’. What is the significance of Khan looking into the raga’s melodic tangles and seeing such a nuanced character, intertwined with looping, clashing mythological narratives?

 

(‘Krishna and the Gopis in Braj’)

• What does Khan’s approach reveal? •

The threefold nature of his strategy demonstrates the interconnectedness of raga. Chandranandan was first explored in musical terms – through the trial-and-error process of uncovering guiding principles, which could then be used to summon the basis of its flavours at will. It was also nurtured in Khan’s visual imagination – images of the moon helped him shape its overall sentiment more viscerally and directly. And its encultured associations with Krishna, shatranj, and rasa theory will have left their own imprints too.

 

But it is perhaps overly Western of me to suggest at such neat categorisations. In the end, even the most disparate facets of a raga cannot truly be separated. They all influence the whole, and can only be fully understood in relation to each other. Chandranandan demonstrates this – despite its relative youth, its sound has already become altered by its own nascent folklore. Khan only named the raga after recording it, but these newfound lunar connections helped him crystallise its musical elements. Who knows what it might sound like if the clouds had been out that night? And would it have a different name – and thus a different sound – if he had run out of tobacco?

 

Khan knew that ragas only come to life when considered as complex intertwinings, uniting theoretical abstractions with sensory experience and flashes of cultural colour. His method of reigniting Chandranandan, which connected the musical, the visual, and the mythic, is mirrored in the accounts of other Hindustani artists. Ashwini Bhide-Deshpande told me in an interview that she conceptualises ragas in strikingly humanistic terms (“They have their own likes, dislikes, and angularities…I want the raga to befriend me too“), and Sanju Sahai can visualise tala cycles as characters (“I can see dhamar as a warrior moving slowly forward, as if riding an elephant”).

 

Some are more abstract still. Debasmita Bhattacharya told me she sees ragas as “illusions”, and Soumik Datta says that elaborating a raga is like “spiralling inwards…towards the centre” – while Shahid Parvez, describes Hindustani music as “like a great ocean…I will never run out of space”. Others describe the learning process as being like ‘walking around an object which can never be seen from all sides at once’, or ‘placing your hands on a sculpture hidden in darkness‘, gradually building an impression of its overall form.

 

(‘…spiralling inwards, towards the centre…’)

• How did Chandranandan evolve? •

Far from being static, ragas are improvised for the precise time and place of performance. They may aim to crystallise universal sentiments, but performers cannot help but set them to their own moods. The resulting musical churn means they are modified, expanded, and reinterpreted over time, as artists search for new territory amidst a shared understanding of certain essences and inviolable boundaries.

 

Khan formulated the raga’s original flavour in just a few minutes. But those seeds would bring a rich harvest over the coming decades (he later reflected that “Chandranandan has more depth now…like a wine, it tastes different after many years of maturing”). He would find inspiration in it until his death in 2009, stating that “whenever I play it, I find some new approach“. His disciple George Ruckert describes these nuanced shifts in his guru’s performances, including a growing emphasis on the komal re (…did he see it emerging from behind the clouds?). Later takes – such as an astounding 1981 recording – elevate the raga to even greater heights, with elaborate ornaments set against sudden bursts of space and fury. Each brings its own surprises, but all are bound to the same emotional core (“the same liquid in the bottle”).

 

As per a generous 2024 email from Khan’s 37-year disciple Ken Zuckerman, “He taught Chandranandan to us many times in class…not only alaps and instrumentals, but also vocal pieces, mostly composed on the spot: sargams, khayals, and taranas. He was a firm believer that a full understanding of any raga was only possible by learning to sing it (saying ‘when you play a raga on your instrument, you are singing inside’)…”. Many, including Zuckerman himself, have also recorded it, although Aneesh Pradhan considers Khan’s originals to be so captivating that few others have managed to extend its melodic character very far beyond these idiomatic expressions. I’m mostly inclined to agree, but nevertheless, plenty have hit the mark within this space (see Listenings).

 

Chandranandan’s lunar focus also, in turn, inspired Khan into another impromptu act of raga creation. In 1997, during an invitation to the White House, he was allotted only ten minutes to perform. Before taking the stage, he stood on the balcony of the Ben Franklin room, staring at the moon, and adapted Chandranandan’s framework into Raag Chandra Dhani (‘Moon Over the Capital’) for the occasion.

• Roundup: mortal speculations •

Chandranandan’s strange journey tempts us into further speculation. Imagine that we unearth unseen lakshanagranthas from centuries past, which detail the theoretical characteristics of long-forgotten ragas. How much could we really empathise with the precise emotional colours of our distant ancestors? And if modern musicians took up these forms again, then would we say that the ragas had ‘stopped existing’ for the intervening centuries? To me, it doesn’t sit right to say that they had really vanished. But does this mean that ragas can exist independently of human experience? (Are they ‘sustained in the minds of the gods’?)

 

In the end, the definitional edges of complex aesthetic forms will always be frayed, and fresh questions will inevitably arise at each turn. When two musical lineages take an emerging raga in contrasting directions, then how do they first come be seen as separate? And if ragas are about universal sentiments, then are they more ‘created’ or ‘discovered’? Some artists speak as if they were ‘always there’ in the fabric of nature, just waiting to be unearthed. But in the case of Chandranandan, this inevitability seems like a stretch. After all, who knows what would have been created in its place if Khan had been in a different mood that day? Would it exist at all if the tape had run out a few minutes sooner? And would recording it after a coffee break have added an extra tinge of nervous excitement?

 

Violinist Yehudi Menuhin called Ali Akbar Khan “a genius…the greatest musician in the world”. In his youth, he practiced for up to ten hours a day, and his boundless mastery placed the sarod at the forefront of modern Hindustani music. Listening to Chandranandan is a humbling experience, showcasing near-unattainable heights of human musicianship. Its curious tale not only illuminates some fundamentals of raga itself, but also helps to bridge this divide: improvised to fill spare studio tape, hastily named on a smoke break, soon forgotten by its creator, and then relearned with painstaking difficulty. Most of us can relate to unpredictable mess more easily than divine visitations. What mortal wants to believe that creativity is the rarefied preserve of the gods?

 

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–Ali Akbar Khan & Alam Khan (2002)–

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(Many thanks to Alam Khan, Ali Akbar’s son and student, for his input to this article – particularly for sharing invaluable material from the family archives. May this article serve as a dedication to the Ustad’s continuing legacy…)

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—Phraseologies—

Melodies, movements, characteristics…

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George Ruckert, one of Khan’s senior students, published an analysis of the raga in 1996 with input from his guru. He places Chandranandan within Asavari thaat, and details Khan’s approach of mixing several Kaunsi ragas, tied together by their common source – Malkauns. He gives the vadi and samvadi as ma–Sa, and offers several possible aroha–avroh shapes: all variants tend to go up in straight lines (e.g. SgmdnS), then descend in vakra spirals (e.g. SRNSR, ndPm, GmgS, ndngS).

 

But Khan and Ruckert also caution against working ‘forwards’ from theoretical description: “You cant show a raga with just ascending and descending…In the old way they never taught like that. You learned the compositions“. Ruckert thus considers the raga’s identity to derive from specific melodic phrases rather than scalar progressions, and also notes the challenges posed by the original melody’s mid-matra resolution (I’m barely scratching the surface: buy Ruckert’s book!).

 

John Campana suggests a chalan of SndnS; mgRS; GmdPm; PdSndm; mNS; SRn; dndgRS; SRmRSnS; SNS; RndPm; mP; GmG; mdm; nPgdNRnPG; mPmg; SmgS; RSndn; mgS. Despite Khansaab stating that “I didn’t mix the ragas…it’s like coins, [which I can] change into one kind of money”, tonal material from Chandranandan’s four parents still turns up in relatively ‘unadulterated’ fashion: e.g. SmgS; SndnS (Malkauns), mNS; SNS (Chandrakauns), GmdPm; GmG (Nandkauns), and SRndPm; dndgRS (Kaunsi Kanada)…

 

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[MORE SOON: click here to hasten the project’s expansion, so all 365+ raga pages can eventually look more like these]

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–Ali Akbar Khan & Dhyanesh Khan (~1980s)–

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“If you practice for ten years, you may begin to please yourself. After twenty years, you may become a performer, and please the audience – and after thirty years you may please even your guru. But you must practice for many more years before you finally become a true artist. Then, you may please even God…” (Ali Akbar Khan)

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—Listen—

A brief selection of superb renditions

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–Ken Zuckerman (2021)–

• Senia-Maihar sarod (12m): one of Khansaab’s seniormost students brought the raga to Darbar‘s 2021 Festival at London’s Barbican Centre – showcasing a stronger use of shuddha Ni in the buildup to Khan’s classic sthayi, used here as a lehra for Surdarshan Chana’s tabla solo [as per an email followup from Zuckerman himself, “Thanks for including this clip. This [composition] is from the first recording of Khansahib that I ever heard, back in 1972, and is one of my all-time favourites. I’ve recorded it many times over the years…I think my understanding and execution has evolved a lot…It is a huge raga!“. He also pointed me to renditions from 2023 (Hyderabad), 2022 (London), and an early 1990s show in Switzerland (alap & gat)…]:

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[lehra, e.g. 7:12] SGm, Gmd, md/Sn, P/ndP, dPdm d(dPm)P; SGm…

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–Rajeev Taranath (2016)–

• Senia-Maihar sarod (13m): a superb suggestion sent in by reader Satya Pesh, who rightly pointed out that no discussion of Chandranandan’s continuing legacy could be complete without including Taranath‘s interpretations – witness his performance for Hariprasad Chaurasia’s Vrindavan Dharohar project (update: as noted by Jaideep Roy, “Besides Khansaheb himself, and perhaps Nikhil Banerjee, there is no version of Chandranandan as complex, profound, and deep as the one by Rajiv-ji”: recommending this filmed rendition):

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[motifs, e.g. 5:58] n(d) d(P) P, n(d) d (dP)m m, dPm g(mPmg) g, d(nd) d(P) P, gg g\S, GG GGm; n(d) d(P) P, n(d) d (dP)m m, dPmG, G, m, dP g(Sg) R(g) g g(S); SGmdN/S S(d) g(S), n(d) d(P) P, g(Sg) gg(S), GGm…

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–Further Recordings–

• Deepak Kshirsagar (5m): “A humble [guitar] tribute to my elder brother Zafar Khan Sindhi, in a raga which was close to him…”
• Rita Sahai (11m): a light-classical vocal setting (Awata Mori Galiyana), offering chayas of Malkauns and Chandrakauns
• Vinay Bharat-Ram (14m): the Maihar vocalist and textiles tycoon sings a traditional bandish (Man Haran Chale Kanha)
• Purbayan Chatterjee (28m): following a more recent trend to emphasise Nandkauns‘ double-Ga (present in his sitar tuning)
• Brij Bhushan Kabra (44m): another student of Khan’s, who uses his guitar‘s tenser strings to inject florid melodic instability
• Ali Akbar Khan & Dhyanesh Khan (46m): the raga’s originator plays it with his son, who sadly passed away in 1990
• Praashekh & Abhishek Borkar (56m): an amazing duet from the ever-maturing sarod duo, supported by Tanmay Bichu
• Zarin Sharma (62m): inspired to take up sarod aged six after seeing Khan play, Sharma’s interpretation shines fresh light
• Krishna Mohan Bhatt (68m): 1982 take by the Jaipur sitarist, who studied under Khan, Ravi Shankar, & Nikhil Banerjee
• Ali Akbar Khan & Nikhil Banerjee (103m): a stellar jugalbandi from the Maihar pair, rarely recorded together in full flight

• Guitaragas •

My attempts to capture the raga on electric guitar (see more of these clips)

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—Chandranandan (electric guitar)—

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My brief electric guitar cover of the Ali Akbar Khan gat above…

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• Classifiers •

Explore hidden inter-raga connections: swara geometries, melodic features, murchana sets, ragangas, & more (also see the Full Tag List):

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Swaras: -4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10+

Sapta: Audav | Shadav | Sampurna

Poorvang: SRGM | SRG | SRM | SGM

Uttarang: PDNS | PDS | PNS | DNS

Varjit: Re | Ga | Ma | Pa | Dha | Ni

Double: rR | gG | mM | dD | nN

Thaat: 10 | 32 | Enclosed | Inexact

Chal: All-shuddha | All-komal | Ma-tivra

Gaps: Anh. | Hemi. | 3-row | 4-row | 5-row

Symmetries: Mirror | Rotation | Palindr.

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Aroha: Audav | Shadav | Sampurna

Avroh: Audav | Shadav | Sampurna

Jati: Equal | Balanced | Av.+1 | Av.+2

Samay: Morning | Aftern. | Eve. | Night

Murchana: Bhup. | Bihag | Bilaw. | Charu.

Raganga: Bhairav | Malhar | Kan. | Todi

Construction: Jod | Mishra | Oddball

Origin: Ancient | Carnatic | Modern

Dominance: Poorvang | Uttarang

Prevalence: A-list | Prachalit | Aprach.

• Prakriti: Enayetkhani Kanada

–Proximate Forms–

Gunji Kanada = ‘Chand. only ni‘

Jaijaiwanti = ‘Chand. shuddha Dha‘

Shivmat Bhairav = ‘Chand. komal re‘

Chandrakaushiki = ‘Chand. only Ga‘

Darbari = ‘Chandranandan only ga/ni‘

(n.b. these are just ‘scalar similarities’, with nothing particular implied about phraseological overlap)

–Swara Geometries–

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• Core form: S–R–gG–m–P–d–nN–S

• Reverse: SrRGmPdDnS

• Negative: 4-5-3

• Imperfect: 2 (Re, Ni)

• Detached: none

• Symmetries: none

• Murchanas: (none found)

–Global Translations–

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• Carnatic: (~Amrithavahini)

S-R₂-G₂-G₃-M₁-P-D₁-N₂-N₃-S

• Jazz: Aeolian (dbl. 3rd/7th)

1-2-b3-3-4-5-b6-b7-7-8

• Pitch classes (‘fret-jumps’):

0-2-3-4-5-7-8-10-11-0

(2–1–1–1–2–1–2–1–1)

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o • o o o o • o o • o o o

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• Tanpura: Sa–ma (+dha)

• Names: Chandranandan, Chandra Nandan, Chandranand

• Transliterations: Hindi (चन्द्रनन्दन)

—More—

Further info: links, listenings, learnings, etc

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• Raag Chandranandan: To learn more about the raga, see Khan and Ruckert’s aforementioned melodic breakdown (published in Evening Rags of Asavari Thaat, Vol. 2), as well as Peter Lavezzoli’s book The Dawn of Indian Music in the West – and a rundown of renditions from Aneesh Pradhan (The Magic of Chandranandan). And for more on the multivariate essences of raga itself, refer to Deepak Raja‘s book The Raga-ness of Ragas (an analytical tour-de-force spanning ancient aesthetic theory to modern cognitive science, examining concepts such as raga evolution, musical authenticity, and the purposes of sound).

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• Header audio: Sarod gat in tintal by Ali Akbar Khan (1966)
• Header image: Khansaab in California, immersed in riyaz (kindly supplied by Alam Khan)

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