PART I: IMPROVISATION, STRUCTURE AND FORMULAS IN NORTH INDIAN CLASSICAL MUSIC

usicians, musicologists and teenage backpackers alike speak of “improvisation ” in modern-day Indian classical music.1 Musicians use the term to draw attention to differences between different portions of a performance, distinguishing between the “composition ” of a particular performance (in vocal music, a short melody, setting a couple of lines of lyrics) and the rest of the performance, which involves musical material that is different in each performance and that musicians often claim to have made up on the spur of the moment.2 In their article “Improvisation in Iranian and Indian music, ” Richard Widdess and Laudan Nooshin draw attention to modern-day Indian terminology which reflects a conceptual distinction between improvised and pre-composed sections of a performance (2006, 2–4). The concept of improvisation has also been central to Western imaginings of North Indian classical music in the twentieth century. John Napier has discussed the long history of Western descriptions of Indian music as “improvised ” or “extemporized, ” which he dates back to the work of Fox Strangways in 1914. He points out the importance the concept took on, for example, in the way in which Indian music was introduced to mainstream Western audiences in the 1960s; he notes that the belief that the performance of Indian musi