UC Santa Barbara

Vishnu Narayan Bhatkhande (1860 – 1936) was one of the most prominent musicologists in the history of India who wrote the first modern treatise on North Indian Classical Music, an art which had been propagated earlier mostly through oral tradition. Early in the 20th Century CE, he wrote a series of books of great current renown; perhaps the best-known of these is his Hindustānī Sangīt Paddhati – Kramik Pustak Mālikā (System of Hindustani Music - Book Series), written in the North Indian language Marathi, in which he outlined his system of the categorization of the North Indian modal system: he classified the hundreds of known rāga-s (scales replete with instructions for melodic movement) into ten modes called thāṭ-s which form the basis of current North Indian Classical Music theory. This six-volume work illustrates the rāga-s and their thāṭ-s by the inclusion of ~1900 different short Hindustani classical music compositions. In 1968 the Czech-born composer Walter Kaufmann, then professor of musicology at Indiana University, Bloomington, published his book The Ragas of North India, in which he transcribed into Western staff notation a generous selection of the compositions in Bhatkhande’s Kramik Pustak Mālikā. However, Bhatkhande’s work – apart from Volume I, a very brief introductory booklet comprising only 68 pages – has never been translated into English. This project has as its goal the porting into Western staff notation of all ~1900 compositions in the 3500-odd pages of the Kramik Pustak Mālikā to make it accessible to the Western music community. Given the large scope of the work, the solution is to leverage and build technology into the software platform - InSargam - Indian Classical Music Notation Editor that can export Western staff notation and accomplish this task.