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The A-B-A-B-A form that characterises the Western song form provides the structure upon which elements of five Indian genres are mixed: that (deriving from a scale type), khyal (an Indian vocal genre in which the sdrangi doubles the voice, although such function is here assigned to the dilruba), saval-javab (in Indian music a form of interplay between sitar and tabla, here taking place between sitar and strings), bhajan (an Indian devotional music genre with spiritual contents) and Indian film music.
The modes (the Khamaj, Kafi and that of North India), melodic contours, rhythmic structures, instrumentation and performance techniques are directly borrowed from Indian music, but to the expert ear ‘the overall effect is of several disparate strands of Indian music being woven together to create a new form; and the structural elements of Indian music have taken on a new meaning in the context of a pop song’ (Farrell, 1997:185–186). Although the Indian instruments, genres and performance techniques are not entirely used according to the conventions of Indian music, undoubtedly George Harrison manages to create clear cultural connotations of the Hindu tradition and at the same time fuse such references with the form and performance techniques of Western pop music (for example, as Farrell points out, the fragmented use of the sitar is much more similar to the function of an electric guitar in a pop song, than to its traditional use in Indian music).18
Example 2: Excerpt from Within you without you Both the Indian modes and instrumentation provide an appropriate symbolic framework for the English text, which is decisively inspired by Hindu philosophy, but mixed with social concerns of a Western character; as the ethnomusicologist Gerry Farrell points out ‘the lyrics are a naive mixture of various strands of Eastern and Western religious and philosophical thought’ (Farrell, 1997:187). The setting of the context is clearly constituted by four Indian cultural connotations: i) the melodic material, that is the Indian modes, ii) the Indian instruments, although not |