'''Music Schools'''


In 1896, Vishnu Digambar Paluskar ran away
from his teacher Pandit Balkrishnabua
Ichalkaranjikar, a court musician at Miraj. Like
his contemporary, Ravi Varma, in the visual
arts, Paluskar wanted to move away from
feudal patronage and address the marketplaces
of growing urban centres. He started a
music school, the Gandharva Mahavidyalaya, at
Lahore in 1901. Over the next thirty years,
dozens of similar schools spread throughout
Northern and Western India, e.g. the Saraswati
Sangeet Vidyalaya in Karachi (1916), the Gopal
Gayan Samaj in Pune (1918), the Gandharva
Mahavidyalaya in Kolhapur (1920) and the
School of Indian Music in Bombay (1925).
Paluskar’s action stemmed from a nationalistic
disaffection from the feudal gharana system
which was then sponsored and owned by the
nobility who kept its repertory available only to
the Guru’s kinsmen. His colleague, V.N.
Bhatkhande, compiled and published all the
available classical musical compositions in an
accessible textbook, Hindustani Sangeet
Paddhati (1921). Equally influential was the
simultaneous effort to define a primitive
notation system capable of recording the
complex performance codes. Barring a few
notable exceptions, the bulk of the students in
the new system lacked the rigour of the
traditional discipline, but they were also free
from the conservatism of gharana ideology.
They usually found their way into the
recording industries of Lahore, Karachi and
Calcutta, into the Sangeet Natak and
Company Natak troupes and, after 1932, into
film. Master Krishnarao was trained at the
Bharat Gayan Samaj, actress Shanta Apte at
the Maharashtra Sangeet Vidyalaya,
Pandharpur. The parent school in Lahore also
produced several musicians and composers
central to the Lahore-based film industry: Rafiq
Ghaznavi, an extremely popular ghazal singer
with best-selling records in Karachi and an
actor-music director in films like Prithviraj
Sanyogita (1933), Bahen Ka Prem (1935) and
later in some Mehboob and Sohrab Modi
films. Prof. B.R. Deodhar, disciple of Paluskar
and key ideologue for the music school
aesthetic, stated in 1933 a position closely
analogous to that prevalent in the art schools.
In his opinion, the major issues facing classical
Indian music were those of voice production
and the antithetical relationship between
Indian music and Western principles of
notation, which made it difficult to arrive at
indigenous systems of orchestration as well as
to find equivalents for perceiving pure sound
effects (like thunder or rain sounds). His
polemical view was that these could only be
solved through borrowing from Western
classical musical systems (Deodhar, 1933).

[[Glossary]]