Friday, September 01, 2006

Music

The museum has an excellent collection of ancient Indian terracottas, some found in excavations in and around Varanasi itself. Most of them date back to the Mauryan, Sunga and Gupta periods; a little belong to prehistoric times, unearthed at the Indus Valley sites. Indus Valley terracottas have a special charm; they are often tiny - only two or three centimeters in height. Other bigger ones belong to the Gupta period. There is a Gupta sculpture of the fifth century, from the Varanasi region, of the little chief of Shiva's army sitting astride a peacock whose glorious tail spreads out like a canopy at the back. The Dancing Ganesh is poised for movement, his foot prepared for action. Alasa Kanya is a languorous woman, yearning with aspiration.

Music is an art, entertainment, or other human activity that involve organized and audible sounds and silence. It is expressed in terms of pitch, rhythm, harmony, and timbre. Music involves complex generative forms in time through the construction of patterns and combinations of natural stimuli mainly sound. As a human activity, music may be used for artistic or aesthetic, communicative, entertainment, or ceremonial purposes. The definition of what constitutes music varies according to culture and social context.

The broadest definition of music is organized sound. There are observable patterns to what is broadly labeled music, and while there are reasonable cultural variations, the properties of music are the properties of sound as perceived and processed by humans.A more conservative definition would be: Music is harmonious sound created by the playing of instruments as a whole or independently. It is a direct expression of human emotions designed to manipulate and transform the emotion of the listener/listeners. Music is designed to be felt unlike sound which is heard.