There have been very few practitioners of music in our tradition who have also delved into history and a theoretical understanding of music. This is not to say that the top of the line practitioners have been unaware of the theoretical side of music, far from it.
Actually they all added to the theoretical understanding of music by incorporating it into their practice but did not venture out to write about their contribution to the theory of music or its induction into their own practice. They left it to others to analyse, sum up and critically evaluate their contribution.
This combination is thus rare, and all the great and perceptive critics, theorists and historians of music have been practitioners of music as well. For without its practical aspect it is well nigh impossible to understand and feel the quality and the arcane nature of music, albeit all music and in particular our music.
May it be Bhatkhande or Thakur Nawab Ali, this connection has been vital for a proper understanding, though it can be said that they have not been as outstanding as practitioners as they have been theorists, documentarists and analysts. All have had their incremental role in the growing body of musical knowledge.
This absence of connection has had a very detrimental effect on the growth of our music. Since music is a performing art it had to be transferred and transmitted to the next generation through its practical manifestation and not just its theoretical understanding. This highly specialised form was transmitted in a personalised manner from an elder to a younger, the father to the son or the guru to the shishak.
It had all the conditions or the characteristic of becoming an in house activity. Shutting out of the external world, the inbreeding guaranteed great excellence but not enough dissemination for the making of initiated audiences.
This became critical when the diverse and wide audience became a crucial factor in the growth of music. Facilitated by the proliferation of technology, the wider audience or the potential wider listener ship meant greater variation in the taste.
As it generated varied response, the thrust of arriving at the lowest common denominator of musical taste appeared to be irresistible -- a very worrying proposition given the character of a tradition that had thrived on exclusivity.
The small highly initiated audience which provided a sounding board or a feedback to the artiste was not ever present and therefore new methods or means had to be explored to seek the development of music under changed conditions.
Ustad Badar uz Zaman has an advantage of sorts that he does not belong to a family of musicians, hereditary musicians, and has acquired the craft and the intricacies of music as an outsider. We all know how difficult a task or an effort this can be because there is or was hardly a system for transferring music to outsiders who wanted to achieve a reasonable level of competence. This was further reinforced by a lack of tradition, or an environment that facilitated it.
From both the sides, it was either discouraged indirectly and the learner found it impossible to make some headway within the given conditions. As a result, very few survived a combination of passive hostility and active discouragement, and only the ones totally committed succeeded. One such person is Badar uz Zaman.
He has authored many books mostly based on his research. But Sada e Mausiqi is more directed towards an academic understanding of the practice of our classical forms like dhrupad, kheyal and thumri. As he himself concedes, the book has been written keeping, potential learners of music in mind. This particular book, unlike some of the others, has a pedagogical intention to it.
Besides some of the terms and concepts, the main body of the book dwells on the classification of music, our music, into primary modal structures. These have been called samasthan, melas and of later thaats.
The current classification of the musical system into these fundamental modes has been attributed to Pandit Bhathkhande. He divided it into 10 thaats and since then many a scholar has found these thaats are not comprehensive enough to include all the raags and their variations into a unified system. So many others have come up with different manners of divisions.
In history too there have been many other divisions by outstanding musicologists of the medieval phase like Venkatamakhi, Harde Narayan Dev, Ahobal, Lochan, Somnath, Rammatiya, but all partly inscrutable, with partially surviving text, lost to the mist of history. The major shortcoming being that primary evidence except for the last hundred years is not available and one has to rely on secondary sources like words.
The most convincing has been its division into 32 thaats. But as Badar uz Zaman has been quick to add, even this classification does not appear to be comprehensive enough but is tentative and lacks adequacy. The actual problem is that though a definite number of surs in music may create the impression of it being mathematically determined, the apparent similarity is deceptive for it is not mathematically determined but by the compulsions of being an art form.
In this case, since art or its practice has preceded its theoretical construction, it belies any mathematical pinning down. It is like the flow of expression in language always exceeding the parameters determined by the grammatical rules of that particular language.
But this is a valuable addition to the very scant resources available on the theoretical and philosophical side of music. It has added to the already impressive list of publications of the author and he should be commended for raising this prickly issue and to reignite the debate about the classification of modes in our music.