“Nuit Alain Daniélou” by Caroline Bourgine
France Musique. May 1, 1996
The complete radio interviews can be consulted on the archives site.
TRANSCRIPTION
Presenter: It’s nearly one o’clock in the morning on France Musique, and contrary to our usual habits, we won’t be in the company of the Hector programme, but in the company of Caroline Bourgine, who invites us to an Indian night, all night long on France Musique. Good evening Caroline.
Caroline BOURGINE: Yes, good evening or good morning. It’s an Indian nocturne to which I invite you tonight. An invitation to travel, an inner journey in the company of Alain Daniélou, to whom we are going to pay tribute.
Alain DANIÉLOU: For the Oriental that I have become, the Western musician always seems to be creating some kind of musical object. And this is a totally foreign concept to an Indian musician who lives a kind of experience that is not determined in time. It’s a journey, a discovery that you make each time in a particular musical world, a state of mind or a way of expressing yourself. And the approach is absolutely the opposite because it’s a completely inner experience, which means that there’s always a certain link with a mystical experience. It’s really an extraordinary concentration and a kind of walk through sounds and feelings, looking for sensitive points that allow you to evoke ideas, landscapes and emotions.
Hinduism is not a religion in the sense that we understand it. It is an attitude to life and a form of thought that is much more philosophical than what we call ‘religious’. Hindus do not separate the notion of science from the notion of metaphysics and the notion of spirituality. All these are aspects, degrees in the knowledge of creation.
We mustn’t forget that at no time do Hindu deities represent active people. They are symbols of levels in the cosmic order. For example, in cosmology, the symbol known as “Vishnu” represents the centripetal force, everything that brings things together, everything that condenses them. That’s why people who want to accumulate wealth are Vishnuites. Shiva, on the other hand, is the centrifugal force. The force by which everything gradually dissolves into absolute space. He is also the god of destruction and death, but also of transcendent knowledge. And in this sense, nothing exists except by a contrast of these two forces, which we find in atoms, in solar systems and even in ourselves, in every aspect of our being.
Caroline BOURGINE: Two years ago, Alain Daniélou died in March at the age of 84. As he himself wrote in his autobiography “Le Chemin du Labyrinthe”: “You can paint several discontinuous and contradictory portraits of any man. As far as I’m concerned, I’ve given myself totally to the most varied of presents and activities. Yet it seems to me today that destiny was waiting for me at every turn, that it used me and led me to play a certain role without my ever having wanted or chosen it.
Alain Daniélou is a link between two civilisations whose work has been projected in a multitude of directions. He is an initiator, like all those who make it possible never to hold on to a definitive attitude and who, by this very fact, help us to move forward.
Throughout the night, the worlds of Indian music will reflect different states of mind. The poet Tagore said: “Let your life dance with lightness on the edges of time like dew on the tip of a leaf”. Ravi Shankar will be the first to make his sitar resonate with lightness. Then we’ll listen to Nagesh Vara Rao, a Vînâ player like Alain Daniélou himself. We will then evoke the world of the poet Rabindranath Tagore, who will lead us in a snake dance, performed on the flute by Mahalingam. Then it’s time to move on to another climate with Narendra Bataju and Ram Narayan.
At around half past three in the deep of the night, in the diffuse light of the stars, the Dagar brothers will sing their Dhrupad song. An hour of grace and elegance, followed by the voice of singer Lakshmi Shankar, accompanied on the violin by her son-in-law Subramaniam. Before daybreak, the Bharata Natyam dance will awaken us and Daya Shankar’s shehnai will lead us towards the first light of morning in the company of Vinay Bhide, then Vilayat Khan and, to leave us, Ram Narayan again to the sound of the Sarangi for a dawn raga.
Having the rare privilege of being the only Westerner with whom Alain Daniélou – as he says himself – has always felt profoundly at one with, Nicolas Nabokov, the cousin of Lolita’s father, offers us his first portrait.
Nicolas Nabokov: For me, Alain Daniélou was a kind of Hindu myth, more of a myth than India itself. I knew that he had left Benares at that time and that he had settled near Madras in a place belonging to theosophists called Adyar. And one day, I was asked to give a lecture on the comparison of Indian music with Western music and then, at the end of the little lecture I gave and in which I think very few people understood anything – perhaps I was the first – came someone who immediately spoke my language, that is to say the language of a musician, the language of someone intuitive and the language of intelligence mixed with a kind of rare kindness and a rare elegance of thought.
This person, Alain Daniélou, was asked to say a few words about our conference. In the lecture, I remember I said something to the effect that “Before comparing phenomena, you have to know them”, and that’s what Alain Daniélou took up in English and gave a lecture on, but he really whipped up the lecture by saying that too often we compare phenomena that we don’t know at all, and that we also have to know the human and historical background from which these phenomena emerge. If we don’t know these things, we’ll go adrift.
You know, they tire you out by letting you hear bad singers, bad musicians, even bad dancers. They make jets with their eyes, they make movements with their feet, making sounds, little donkey bells, and it’s donkeys and donkeys that do it. And he immediately said, “No, you mustn’t see that, but you must see that and you must see this person dance.”
It was there, for example, that I first heard the name of the great Indian dancer Balasaraswati from Alain Daniélou. It was also from Alain Daniélou that I heard a lot of names of Indian musicians, and not just Indian. I was amazed.
I remember very well the first evening when I went back to my hotel in Madras and, as I was going to bed, I said to myself: “My God, what is this character? It’s as if we’re dealing with someone with long antennae and his antennae cover almost the entire Eastern world with an immediate perception like what we call in English with an “inside”. You are precise.
Caroline BOURGINE: Interviewed by Marie Hélène Baconnet, Nicolas Nabokov had, according to Daniélou, that lightness of soul that gives a true understanding of the sacred. Shiva is the god of the universe, the lord of creatures, trees, animals and humans alike. In these temples, an erect phallus is worshipped, a source of life, but also a symbol of voluptuousness and pleasure, an image of the divine state.
This god was indeed the one I had been obscurely searching for and sensing since my childhood. Shiva’s protégé, Shiva Sharan, was the name given to him by the Brahman who introduced Alain Daniélou to Hinduism. In 1978, Alain Daniélou was interviewed by Jacques Brunet.
Alain DANIÉLOU: You know, I lived in India for many years and studied music there as an Indian student. And when I came back to the Western world after about twenty years, I was completely surprised by the total ignorance that existed at the time, not only of the existence of music, but of the quality that certain forms of music could represent. At the time, it seemed completely absurd to interest an audience not of ethnologists, but of musicians and music lovers in things like great Indian music.
Jacques BRUNET: And that was the Ravi Shankar bomb, which you dropped if my memory serves me correctly.
Alain DANIÉLOU: I think so. I knew Ravi Shankar when he was a student. I got to know his master very well and I think I was the one who made Ravi Shankar’s first recordings, as many others did. Incidentally, it wasn’t entirely my fault, if I dare say so, because recording equipment didn’t become available, or at least didn’t exist, until after the war. At that point I rushed to New York and bought the first quality recording equipment. At first I had wired recorders which, unfortunately, were useless, but then I got huge, very cumbersome recorders which, even then, enabled me to make recordings that are still valid today, which were really very interesting recordings.
I was absolutely fascinated by this work, which was to reveal the great artists who had been neglected outside their own country and often even in their own country. I have the feeling that today, first of all, there are many others like me who have undertaken this work, who are doing it very well, who have taken a very deep interest in various civilisations, and that the basic problem no longer exists, I think.
You could say that today there is a universal interest, but all the same, there is a great openness and the problem is becoming rather the opposite, to preserve great culture from an invasion of mediocre things made by semi-amateurs, by technicians who don’t know the culture, who don’t know the language. And in fact, our battle today for the collections that we produce, the UNESCO collections, is to make a choice and to be strongly on the defensive, to really only present things that represent real art value. The colonialist era has created a sort of obligatory contempt throughout the world.
Jacques BRUNET: Inevitable.
Alain DANIÉLOU: Inevitable in every country. People had to speak Western music, dress Western-style and eat Western-style. There was this complex. And to make people understand that they had more to gain by keeping their personality, that there was more advertising for them, you had to go to a lot of trouble.
I know, for example, in countries like Iran, I’ve had to fight a lot to create this interest and the fact that artists become international, immediately, gives them considerable value in their country, but that’s also true here.
Caroline BOURGINE: Alain Daniélou was given a small Vînâ when he was living in Benares by Shantou Babou, considered at the time to be one of the best Vînâ players in North India. Alain Daniélou followed his teaching for six years. Here is what he has to say about this period in his memoirs:
“The work was very demanding because Shantou Babou only agreed to play the ragas at the prescribed times. It was only after two years that I was allowed to play for a few moments in front of my master. He gave me some advice. He told me that my playing was abominable, but also told his sons that he was very satisfied.
After four years, Shantou Babou kept telling me that I was no good at anything, but he would tell anyone who would listen: “He’s my best pupil, the only one who can carry on my tradition. The Vînâ is India’s oldest stringed instrument. According to some, it is of Egyptian origin. In southern India, it is dedicated to Saraswati, the Hindu divinity of the arts, knowledge, music and speech.
Traveller, do you have to leave already?
The night is calm and the darkness fades over the forest.
The lights are shining on our balcony, the flowers are fresh and the young eyes are just waking up.
Has the time come for you to leave already?
Traveller, do you have to leave already?
Has the heart of the sleepless spirit, the heart of the night, ever touched you?
These are all questions posed by the poet Rabindranath Tagore, who in the 1930s welcomed Alain Daniélou to his refuge of peace, the Shantiniketan, the only place where, he said, Europeans and Indians could meet on an equal footing.
Alain DANIÉLOU: Tagore was a poet. He hated education. He proved that there had to be a place where children and young people were king. In Tagore’s university, classes were held under trees, each teacher had a tree and the students were never punished, only the teachers. The children did whatever they wanted.
In fact, they worked very well and many of the personalities who went on to play a very important role in the life of India, in political life and literary life, passed through this place which, basically, was the only place, you could say, the only modern school because in India, on the one hand, On the other hand, there were the Anglo-Saxon schools, where people learned English and no longer knew anything about their own civilisation, and I spent some time there.
Then, in fact, Tagore, at that time, asked us to go and see his friends to look for funds, and Tagore’s friends were Paul Valéry, Romain Roland, Benedetto Croce, lots of people, André Gide. All in all, very interesting people.
And after a stay in India that interested me enormously, I came back to Europe and I also got in touch with Tagore’s friends, which was great fun, and then I went back to India several times and finally I stayed there, not in Tagore’s house but in the real India, in Benares.
Caroline BOURGINE: For Alain Daniélou, the first thing to realise in order to understand modal music is that it is constructed in relation to a fixed tonic. The tonic is like a carrier wave that transmits other waves. It establishes a constant sound level. It is the invariable point of reference that makes it possible to recognise precise intervals and very small interval differences. In 1976, on the occasion of an Indian evening at Studio 104 of the Maison de Radio France with great masters of music such as Narendra Bataju or Pandit Ram Narayan who we can listen to in a few moments. Daniel Caux was joined by Alain Daniélou, and it was an ideal opportunity to review the entire glossary of Indian music without any sophistication, with the first question being: “What is a raga?
Alain DANIÉLOU: A raga is defined in all sorts of ways that, to us, seem a little curious, in the sense that a raga means a state of mind. It’s a question of creating the musical elements, the basic structures that will enable a certain state of mind to be expressed. And it so happens that these certain emotional states are closely linked to certain musical intervals.
We know a little bit that a minor mode for us was perhaps less cheerful than a major mode, well, we see a certain difference. But in a system like the Hindu system, which is much richer in terms of scales and interval possibilities, we have a whole range of possibilities for constructing, let’s say, a scale of a series of sounds corresponding to a certain kind of feeling. This is the very basis of the raga, which we can define as a scale, but we use very subtle interval music from India. In fact, we also use it in our music, but we’re not aware of it.
If you analyse a very good singer of Lieder, for example, you’ll see that he doesn’t always use the same B flat, but he does it by instinct. In Indian music, these subtle intervals are very well defined and, for example, the music master won’t say to you: “In this mode, you use a harmonic third or you use a Pythagorean third”. No, he will tell you: “You use the third that is aggressive or the third that is loving.”
By putting yourself in the state of mind that corresponds to this feeling, you automatically arrive at the rightness of the interval. So, theoretically, there is a scale of about sixty sounds in an octave, 22 of which are the main ones, which we choose and on which we establish this basic structure that we have to assimilate and which is made in relation to a fixed sound: a tonic that must always be held and this is the characteristic of modal music. That’s why you can’t have complex harmonisation or polyphony, because you always have to refer to a single sound.
Psychologically, this is very important because if, for example, you use a very sensitive, very sad, very melancholy A flat in a raga, it will always be – because your tonic is fixed – exactly the same sound. So there is this identification of the sound, the pitch of the sound and the value of the interval, and the value of the feeling. This means that, psychologically, you will gradually be bombarded with a certain sound that you will have to wait for, that will be insisted upon, and then your state of receptivity is greatly increased and the effect that a raga can have on an audience when it is played very well by a great musician is something quite extraordinary.
When it is said that in the past, the Greeks considered that there were modes that made you sensual and others that made you courageous, and that up until the Middle Ages, certain modes were forbidden in the church because they were considered, as we would say today, to be pornographic, this is not at all untrue, but it cannot be experienced except in a system like that of ragas in which there is this identification of sound and feeling.
Caroline BOURGINE: In Sanskrit, alâp literally means without words, and according to Daniélou?
Alain DANIÉLOU: It’s the prelude in which you establish the emotional climate of the mode without having any embellishments at all, without having very defined rhythms. You simply establish the mood very slowly until the musician and the audience are in the right mood, after which you can do all sorts of musical acrobatics and other things, but the alâp is always the essential part that establishes the mood of the mode.
Then there’s the alâp itself, which is practically arrhythmic. You have these early forms of development where the tonic string is used to give rhythmic elements before the drums come in.
Daniel CAUX: That’s it, and that’s the Gat.
Alain DANIÉLOU: Yes, Gat means variation. There can be several Gats. In general, there is no Gat if the raga is really developed because it lasts a very long time. But in the modern world, it’s generally difficult to play a raga for four or five hours in a row. So we have a Gat which is a kind of reduced and characteristic formula of the raga, a variation, let’s say.
Caroline BOURGINE: I’d like to take you back to one of the great concerts of this Indian night in tribute to Alain Daniélou, with Narendra Bataju on sitar, Krishna Govinda on tabla and Devi Shâkuntalâ on tamboura. The rest of the concert is just as prestigious, featuring Sarangi master Ram Narayan. Daniel Caux, who presented the concert at the time, gave an educational overview of the instrument with Alain Daniélou.
Alain DANIÉLOU: The Sarangi, which is a string instrument in the violin family, has a very rich sound. It’s a bowed instrument that’s usually just used to accompany singing. And it’s only recently – relatively recently – that various musicians have sought to use this instrument as a solo instrument, and among them, Ram Narayan is obviously the most famous today. He is a very exceptional musician.
In fact, you could even say he’s an original because he’s very self-taught. He’s a very creative musician who doesn’t exactly belong to one of the great traditions, but he draws inspiration from different styles and obviously has a remarkable technique and extraordinary brio. He is much disputed by the purists, but is nonetheless a great musician.
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For a Brahmin, even playing an instrument or singing is considered a serious offence. It is not his role. In fairly tolerant periods, there were people from high castes, either Brahmins or princes, who practised music. But then, as is always the case under caste rules, it has to be purely for their own pleasure or that of their friends, and not in any way professional. Because, all the same, one of the essential points and the great strength of the caste system is that it is a corporate society, i.e. you don’t have the right to take the work of another corporation. Corporations are therefore limited, and it’s difficult for people to leave their family trade, but at the same time they have a security that doesn’t exist in our society.
I believe it was also like that to a large extent up until the Middle Ages in Europe with the guilds and you mustn’t think that this presents a social scale where people feel inferior or superior. People are absolutely proud of their race, their caste, their family profession. For Kathakali dancers and the theatre, for example, children are dedicated when they are five or six years old. They are given to the group, to the caste that has this profession, which is also linked in some way to the temple and religion. At that point, they are part of a particular guild and at that point, they have the privileges of that guild, but naturally, they cannot return to another profession, to another caste.
Caroline BOURGINE: Let me remind you that Alain Daniélou was himself a Vînâ player, an instrument he played daily for 15 years during his long stay in Benares.
Alain DANIÉLOU: There was a very dangerous period for music and dance in India when the public authorities really demanded that we should only be interested in Western forms. Unfortunately, this tendency exists almost everywhere in the world. And the troupes that belonged either to a village or to a small local prince were rather neglected and tended to degenerate and modernise. There was a famous troupe in Trivandrum where they got rid of the masks, changed the costumes and the thing degenerated very quickly.
Then there was this great poet from Kerala called Vallathol whom I knew very well and who created this centre which became the great Kathakali school, Kerala Kalamandalam. It was entirely the work of one man who took a deep interest in this traditional art, found all the great masters, brought them together and took an extremely strict training, recovered old crowns or whatever and established this centre which, obviously, because it had a certain success, was gradually recognised by the public authorities. But Kalamandalam wasn’t recognised by the Indian government until after we had organised its first tour abroad. First to Japan and then to Europe.
So, all of a sudden, the sort of people who say: “This is the New Delhi”, have realised that this is a cultural asset. Before, they had never thought about it. They thought they had to look after the Bombay Symphony Orchestra, things like that, incredible things. But this mentality is the effect of colonialism and it’s everywhere, and that’s why it’s so important to give the great traditional art forms an international reputation . And we all have a sort of responsibility here.
Caroline BOURGINE: Alain Daniélou, to whom we are paying tribute all this night, independently made numerous recordings of musicians who were major innovators in Indian music. When he returned to Europe for good, he set up an institute in Berlin to promote non-European musical systems, at the suggestion of his lifelong friend Nicolas Nabokov. In 1963, this led to the creation of an international institute for comparative studies, which Daniélou directed for a dozen years. Specialists in Indonesian music such as Jacques Brunet stayed at the institute for two years, as did Simha Arom, Christian Poché and Habib Touma, who revealed the great Baghdad musician Munir Bashir.
Daniélou then went to Venice to set up a new institute with the help of the Ford Foundation. It was a new impetus that gave new dynamism to a sector that had never before been seriously considered: festivals, with, as Alain Daniélou still writes in his memoirs, somewhat mysterious characters who controlled the whole of musical life in Europe, such as Stockhausen, Jerzy Grotowski, Maurice Fleuret, Claude Samuel and Ninon Karlweiss. In an interview with Maurice Fleuret, Alain Daniélou talks about his reasons for founding these institutes.
Alain DANIÉLOU: I had the impression that all civilisations other than the West were terribly threatened and that the only way to help not only musicians but other aspects of culture was to try to rehabilitate them in some way on an international level, and I thought that music was perhaps the least dangerous. If we attack social institutions and religion, we meet with perhaps a little more violent opposition because people don’t take music that seriously.
So I concentrated on music and I set up this institute in Berlin, the purpose of which is precisely to make known and give a chance to great musicians from different Asian countries, and I think that in ten years or so we have made extraordinary progress. Records, because I publish all these UNESCO record collections, and now it seems like just another collection, but we mustn’t forget that it was the first collection, the only one, and that we had a lot of trouble finding someone willing to publish exotic things, especially without presenting them in an arranged, folklorised way, in fact, without degrading them.
But I do believe that we have achieved something here, and in many countries the musicians we have helped and for whom we have been able to organise concerts have now become national celebrities, and in many cases the most dangerous period is over. But obviously there is still a huge amount of work to be done and we shouldn’t limit ourselves to music. I still don’t know whether I’ll decide, despite my advancing years, to undertake similar work in other areas of thought.
Maurice FLEURET: And how does your work and your mission differ from what is known, according to ethnomusicology?
Alain DANIÉLOU: How dare you use such a horrible word? I’d like to know how you’d feel if ethnomusicologists came to the October Festival to study the curiosities of your behaviour. It’s precisely an abominable colonialist conception that has led to the study of non-Western music being limited to a kind of falsely learned study, using stupid notations, analysing that in such and such a piece there are 25 semitones and three and a half tones and that the chord is like this. This is of no importance whatsoever if we are talking about an art through which people express themselves and want to say things that are admirable.
You have to practise the arts and above all you have to understand them, but you have to look for their semantic aspect. You have to look for ways of expressing yourself. And for me, for example, it’s very funny, I realise very well that certain emotional and aesthetic aspects I also find in, say, a Schubert apprentice or in a raga, even though there’s no connection in terms of structure.
And I believe that, in fact, we are only enriched on a true cultural level if we don’t always try to synthesise. You have to stay and the different experiences, the different ways of thinking have to be separated. That’s why learning a new language is an enrichment, not because you can say the same things in it, but because, on the contrary, what you can say and think in it is something that doesn’t exist in the language you spoke before.
Caroline BOURGINE: India was the country of Alain Daniélou’s spiritual birth, given birth to by one or more gurus. Alain Daniélou was himself an initiator. Jacques Cloarec, who helped and supported me through this long night, gave this outline of the definition of his guru during a conference on the first anniversary of Alain Daniélou’s death in 1995: “He had a technique for never sticking to a definitive attitude. I was never able to attribute to him a quality or a flaw that was not immediately contradicted by its opposite. He was a personality governed daily by wisdom and passion. He was an agitator, a ferment of our society who considered that his Hindu orthodoxy was in no way in contradiction with this attitude, but on the contrary, that it respected to the letter the philosophy and teachings that he had received from the pandits of Benares”.
For the surbahar and the sitar, I invite you to listen to Alain Daniélou’s presentation of this instrument.
Alain DANIÉLOU: Sur means svara and bahar means outside. It’s a large sitar in which the tonic note is on a string outside the neck, outside the strings that are used melodically. It’s an instrument that’s a little lower, a little deeper, and in fact allows for the kind of very low, very deep ornamentation that’s normally characteristic of the Vînâ, but on an instrument that’s more widespread today, so to speak, because the Vînâ is an extremely difficult instrument that hardly anyone plays any more, and that’s the surbahar, which is trying to replace the old Vînâ with its gravity and depth.
Caroline BOURGINE: I would like to invite you once again to hear the voice of Alain Daniélou, to whom we have been paying tribute for an hour this morning, interviewed by Martine Cadieu in 1977.
Alain DANIÉLOU: In the Indian conception, time, silence, is the basis of music and it’s a conception that fundamentally exists among certain great musicians, even in the West. It’s basically the art of silence on which the world of sound is built. And I believe that the musician who builds noises without taking into account the basis of silence is not a true musician.
Music is not sound. Music is not noise. It’s a harmony that is, after all, fundamentally inner. The fact that we transmit it through sound does not mean that music exists in sound, but in its conception, in the feeling it evokes. We don’t exactly listen. We experience a certain form of sound.
It’s very tiring listening to Western music. You have to pay attention to a lot of things and after a while you get fed up, you can’t stand it any more. But if it’s a kind of climate that surrounds you, that develops around you, that creates a kind of cloud, a kind of atmosphere, a kind of ambient emotion, you don’t need to bother listening to it. You experience it, and little by little, you live it. At that moment, the audience creates a kind of identity with the musician, which is an extraordinary thing. Really, a great Indian musician creates a state of mind and everyone experiences it.
And basically, you could say, it’s a form of magic. A real musician is a magician because he transforms you. He makes you see things. He makes you understand things you haven’t the slightest idea about, and yet it’s he who brings them to you, and in the end, it’s exactly like a magician who makes you see extraordinary things. I think there are few psychological agents as powerful as music as it is conceived in the Indian world.
In fact, almost all the great musicians of India are, in a way, a kind of saint. They are extraordinary characters. That doesn’t mean they don’t drink whisky. That has nothing to do with sanctity – thank God – in the Indian world. But in terms of a spiritual experience, of real inner values, many of the great Indian musicians are very extraordinary characters. The whole concept of the arts in India, which is explained in the great Bahrata treatise of the 5th century BC on theatre, is that theatre and music are the highest forms of teaching. It is through them that we learn to know the stories of the gods, spiritual and moral values and to attain certain forms of experience, of contact with the supernatural world in which music plays a fundamental role.
Presenter: Thank you, Caroline Bourgine, for this exceptional night of traditional Indian music, a tribute to Alain Daniélou. You’re listening to France Musique, it’s 7 o’clock.
Summary
An interesting way of presenting Daniélou as a man who wanted to preserve diversity; portrait of Daniélou by Jacques Cloarec
For the “Nuits Indiennes” festival, Caroline Bougine pays tribute to Alain Daniélou with a portrait based on interviews with friends who knew him well, interspersed with selected music.
Retransmission of Daniélou’s definition of Hinduism: an attitude to life rather than a religion
The successive portraits are introduced by a self-portrait (from Le Chemin du labyrinthe)
Retransmission of a portrait of Alain Daniélou by Nicolas Nabokov
Clarifies Daniélou’s position in musicology: don’t separate the field from the beautiful music you hear
Broadcast of an interview with AD :
Shivaism; emphasises its non-Western approach to the study of music.
Music: AD put Ravi Shankar on the map and is committed to ensuring that great artists from outside Europe are recognised first and foremost in their own countries for what they are and not for Western musical values.
A look back at Daniélou’s musical initiation in Benares: extract from Le Chemin du labyrinthe.
A retransmission of an interview with Daniélou recounts his encounter with Tagore: the Shantiniketan school and his first approach to a singular India.
Daniélou explains what a râga is and its psychological effects on listeners.
Reminder of the importance of giving legitimacy to learned traditional music: example of Vallathol, a poet from Kerala who worked to this end.
History of the Institute of Musicology in Berlin and Venice 1963 Nabokov initiative. Aims and Daniélou’s wish to extend these aims to other fields: thought.
A desire to preserve differences for intellectual enrichment.
A quotation from Jacques Cloarec, who, on the anniversary of Daniélou’s death, painted a portrait that was a complete contradiction.
Broadcast of an interview with Daniélou in 1977 on the importance of silence in Indian music.