Songs from musical theatre like Marathi Natyageet or the Tamil stage songs of Shankaradas Swamigal or indeed film songs have been used as memory tricks to identify ragas. One way to identify a raga for the novice is via stock tunes in it, perhaps lines of songs in it and if that melody occurs in a raga elaboration or composition, then you know what raga it is. Identifying ragas is an intoxicating and often frustrating challenge for a lay listener, and it can become an obsessive yearning. It involves a gestaltic operation - hearing a snatch of a melody and hearing it as Kalyani and not Sankarabharanam, hearing it as Marwa and not Puriya is more complex than hearing a tune and identifying it as Yeh Zindagi Usi Ki Hai or The Shape of You. The kind of memory involved in these tasks and that in identifying a raga are different, the latter demanding many layers of memory and interpretation. It is not like identifying a Mozart piece. What kind of perception is involved in identifying raga-s? It is not like identifying a song. “And, do you know,” he told me with wonder, “they all sound so different! I could not have known they were performances of the same raga, except that the labels say so.” A gentleman who discovered classical music late in his life told me that when he first heard Raga Durga he loved it so much that he went on to buy as many recordings of musicians performing Raga Durga as he could find.
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