The Indo-European Idea: Histor(iograph)ical Contexts

If it is difficult today to disentangle the history of Indo-Europeanism, or Aryanism, from that of the Shoah, the teleology toward extremism overshadows many subtler avenues by which its logics infiltrated art and science alike. Understanding the full range of Indo-Europeanist thought is essential not only to making greater sense of wide swaths of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century intellectual and artistic production, but also to better grasping the epistemic and cultural foundations upon which Aryanist extremism took root. This section offers brief historical and historiographical contextualization of the Indo-European hypothesis and its disciplinary apparatus, comparative philology, to ground the subsequent claims regarding French musicology and composition.Footnote ¹⁰

The history of the Indo-European hypothesis is inextricably bound up with British imperialism in India. The observation of significant similarities between Sanskrit and Persian, Greek, Latin, and the Romance, Germanic, Slavic, and Celtic languages is usually attributed to a much-exalted 1786 address given by William Jones, colonial jurist in Calcutta and founder of the Asiatic Society of Bengal.Footnote ¹¹ Jones, a precocious polyglot, undertook Sanskrit with the intent to redress (or rather undermine) the Indian scholars advising him on Hindu legal traditions through his own textualist interpretation of dharma. Sanskrit’s apparent affinities with this startling array of languages led Jones to hypothesize a common linguistic fount, a theory which unleashed a frenzy of research across Europe over the early nineteenth century. Grammarians including Franz Bopp, Wilhelm von Humboldt, and the Brothers Grimm distilled shared characteristics of Indo-European languages by systematically comparing linguistic elements against a common field of grammatical concepts, thereby giving rise to the discipline known as ‘comparative philology’.

For many, however, the true stakes of language history were human history. Taking the spread of language as an index for that of people (following a Herderian logic), scholars sought more elaborate (or convoluted) means of extrapolating the comparative method beyond language, suggesting that common linguistic roots evinced a broader, ‘Indo-European’ patrimony. Friedrich Max Müller, Oxford’s first professor of comparative philology (and son of Wilhelm), devised a ‘science of religion’ by linking Indo-European languages to belief systems through analyses of metaphorical expression. Adolphe Pictet (friend of Liszt) invented the technique of ‘linguistic palaeontology’ in efforts to deduce from shared vocabularies what early ‘Indo-European’ societies were like. Through the accumulation of such slippages the premise of an Indo-European linguistic family escalated into constructions of ‘Indo-European’ culture, mentality, and ‘race’, also dubbed ‘Aryan’ (based on a reappropriated Vedic term). Against ‘Indo-European’ languages were contrasted the ‘Semitic’, notably Hebrew and Arabic; against ‘Aryans’, ‘Semites’ — Jewish and Muslim alike. Such concepts of ‘race’, derived by a plainly tautological feedback cycle, were subsequently construed as the ontological basis for wide-ranging cultural and historical phenomena.

Comparativist sciences thus reconfigured European constructions of human history along what Vasant Kaiwar has called the ‘Aryan model’, with ‘two main pillars, one Greek, one Indian’.Footnote ¹² The study of Sanskrit — presumed among the earliest ‘Indo-European’ languages — not only upended European beliefs in the historical and divine priority of Hebrew,Footnote ¹³ but also reformulated Europe’s relationship to Greco-Roman antiquity, as reference to Sanskrit texts and Hindu spirituality suddenly appeared essential to understanding Greek and Latin language, mythology, and society. Fustel de Coulanges’s landmark history, La Cité antique (1864), situated Greece and Rome along an ‘Indo-European’ continuum, thereby placing modern France — already the self-proclaimed inheritor of Greco-Roman ‘civilization’ since Louis XIV — as the recipient of an even more extensive ‘Indo-European’ cultural, turned ethnic, heritage.Footnote ¹⁴ ‘Indo-European’ essentialism nourished Aryanist supremacism as popular texts such as Émile Burnouf’s La Science des religions (1864) and Édouard Drumont’s La France juive (1886) sharpened comparativist research into racist invective. By the fin de siècle, the Indo-European idea had spiralled from linguistic hypothesis to ethnocultural weapon, causing consternation among more scrupulous intellectuals such as Salomon Reinach — whose lucid critique of language comparison as a proxy for human relations was published as L’Origine des Aryens: histoire d’une controverse (1892). The fact that subsequent linguistic scholarship repositioned Sanskrit not as ancestor of Greek and Latin but rather on a separate branch of the ‘Indo-European’ linguistic family tree, with its roots now speculatively in central Asia, did little to curb entrenched perceptions of India as an ancestral ‘cradle’. And so India — variously conceived as remote ancestor, distant cousin, or ‘exotic’ stranger — frustrated binaries of Self and Other at a time when the politics of nationalism and imperialism increased the stakes of identity.

Comparative philology (and by extension Indo-Europeanist discourses) have been described as ‘hegemonic’ in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century European intellectual production.Footnote ¹⁵ Notions of Indo-Europeanism infiltrated scientific empiricism just as they did Romantic spiritualism; they were wielded to justify colonialist and anticolonialist ideologies;Footnote ¹⁶ they were touted as proof of Jesus Christ’s divinity, and as proof of the opposite. Yet even after several generations’ critical historiography, attention to how Indo-Europeanism infiltrated and shaped artistic production remains scarce, in part because some of its cultural manifestations only came to fruition decades after its scientific heyday.Footnote ¹⁷ In the context of music studies, the particularity of Indo-Europeanism’s impact has often been concealed beneath more diffuse critiques of ‘exoticist’ and/or ‘neo-classicist’ representation. Meanwhile, in the context of French historical studies, the ‘Aryan myth’ has often been subsumed within studies of nationalism and antisemitism, while largely eluding French postcolonial historiography — after all, the hypothesis emerged directly from British more than French imperialism. The French Colonial Empire had its own fluctuating presence in India extending from the seventeenth century until 1954 and an even longer history of missionary and trade activity,Footnote ¹⁸ which generated wide-ranging representations of the subcontinent from the eighteenth through twentieth centuries in the arts, the press, and expositions.Footnote ¹⁹ Yet the exoticism and fantasy that have largely dominated postcolonial studies of the French Indian imaginary serve as a foil to the abstract, classicizing construction of India that prevailed in European philology in the wake of Jones’s hypothesis, even as exoticism and classicism mixed in cultural representations in complex ways.Footnote ²⁰ Reckoning with the Indo-European hypothesis in France therefore requires broad attention to all of these mediations: competing colonialisms (British and French), nationalisms (both within European nations and supranational constructions of ‘race’), and complex cultural transfers across national, imperial, and linguistic boundaries over time.

Indo-Europeanism and Francophone Musicology

If William Jones is credited with unleashing philological comparativism and Indo-Europeanism broadly speaking, he also shaped European notions of Indian music directly through his famous study, ‘On the Musical Modes of the Hindus’ (1784, rev. 1792). The significance of this text is well attested in contemporary musicological literature, although Jones’s impact on philology and on musicology have rarely been studied side by side; it will help therefore to recall here a few aspects of Jones’s approach that remained a model for future discourse even as late as Grosset, over a century later.

In music as in language and law, Jones’s agenda involved restoring authentically ‘Hindu’ qualities to a culture ‘contaminated’ by centuries of Muslim presence and political control.Footnote ²¹ Paralleling his textualist attitude toward Sanskrit legal texts as a colonial jurist, Jones viewed musicological manuscripts (the older the better) as authoritative sources of knowledge — ‘the pure fountain of Hindu learning’ — epistemically superior to contemporary practice, the ‘authenticity’ of which he distrusted.Footnote ²² As the title suggests, he conceptualized Indian music principally through its ‘modes’, affording comparisons to other familiar points of reference about early music — including plainchant, itself believed to preserve ‘some valuable remnants of old Grecian musick’ — although he did not go so far as to propose a common fount as he had for language.Footnote ²³ Jones’s partiality to the modal parameter reinforced (or was reinforced by) his predilection for the Rāgavibodha, a classification system of fifty-one rāgas authored by Somanātha in the seventeenth century. Believing it to be much older, Jones considered the Rāgavibodha the ‘most valuable work’ on Indian music, despite its explicit limitation to pitch (and despite the fact that, as he lamented, ‘none of the Pandits […] to whom I have shown it, appear to have known that it was extant’).Footnote ²⁴ Jones thus modelled a textualist, proto-philological study of Indian music, based on reified, idealized pitch structures, interpretable and comparable as an index of music-historical filiations.

Jones’s study enjoyed wide dissemination and remained a touchstone for European knowledge about Indian music. Not least, it was central to the notorious efforts of François-Joseph Fétis (1784–1871) to integrate music history, via comparative philology, into a ‘general ethnological history’ of humanity.Footnote ²⁵ Constructing a music history according to linguistic-turned-‘racial’ categories, Fétis ‘piggybacked a lineage of musical tonalities on the Indo-European stemmata that his contemporaries were sketching out’, as Thomas Christensen describes.Footnote ²⁶ Citing Jones extensively, Fétis described the ‘tonal system of the Aryas of India’ as the source of ‘the musical systems of all peoples of the Aryan race’.Footnote ²⁷ Thence a westward progression — to Greece, then Italy — paralleled the imagined trajectory from Sanskrit to the modern languages of Europe. Fétis’s profile of Indian music was thus fashioned to buttress a priori links to Greek and thereby French musics. Similarities drawn between Indian and European pitch structures signified to Fétis not mere analogies, but evidence of continuity: ‘we observe still the same principle in the plainchant tonality of our churches’.Footnote ²⁸

Following Fétis, hypotheses of racialized ‘Indo-European’ musical essentialism were propagated by a generation of francophone philologists and musicologists seeking to incorporate music within the expanding comparativist framework.Footnote ²⁹ Medievalist Gaston Paris extrapolated Indo-Europeanist logic from language, through poetry, to popular song. Mixing ‘racial’ and linguistic categories, he envisioned a vast arboreal taxonomy: ‘The general design and family tree of our songs should someday be established more or less thus, going always from broadest to narrowest: we will go from humanity as a whole to the white race, to the Aryans, to each group of Aryan people (Slavic, Germanic, Greco-Roman, Celtic, etc.), to each people, to each province, to each canton.’Footnote ³⁰ Pierre Aubry, among the most renowned musicologists of his generation, called upon musicologists to reconstruct ‘proto-Indo-European’ music on the basis of comparing tonalities and rhythms, just as the linguists had attempted with the Ursprache. Footnote ³¹ And Henry Woollett opened his Histoire de la musique (1909) with reference to ‘Vedic India, mysterious India, cradle of the world’, recounting how ‘Indian music, of Aryan origin, as we who are Aryan should not forget, would spread by way of Persia, by Greece, and gradually infiltrate its way toward Europe’.Footnote ³² Woollett’s tract, awarded the prestigious Prix Bordin by the Académie des Beaux-Arts, demonstrates that even once philologists had repositioned Sanskrit along a separate ‘branch’ (rather than the trunk) of the ‘Indo-European’ linguistic ‘tree’, fantasies of India as fount-and-origin persisted.

The Indo-European hypothesis thus remained a steady undertone in discussions of early music in a period when anxieties about national identity raised the stakes of cultural history and the musical past: such questions dominated the discipline of musicology in the decades of its emergence and institutionalization in France, and stimulated a coalescent nationalist and historicist sensibility among composers seeking far and wide to infuse their work with the very ‘sources of Frenchness’.Footnote ³³

Melodic Archaeology/Modal Philology

For all this musicological speculation about the Indo-European hypothesis, the suggestion that French composers might appropriate Indian music as a patrimonial reservoir was yet far from the fore. Rather, composers often imported ostensibly Indian melodies or dances for the sake of ‘local colour’, in keeping with familiar techniques of nineteenth-century orientalist operatic composition and reflecting the wide range of impressions of India in the French imaginary. Such borrowings, which I loosely describe as ‘archaeological’ and which were often labelled in the score, offer an instructive point of contrast for what I describe, with more precise intention, as the ‘philologically’ mediated assimilation of ‘modes’ emergent toward the end of the nineteenth century. Where scholars, following most notably Ralph Locke, have sought to distinguish shades of exoticism by means of an aesthesic hermeneutics — notably, how ‘overt’, ‘submerged’, or genuinely ‘transcultural’ a borrowing is judged to be, based on stylistic or programmatic markersFootnote ³⁴ — I propose to look ‘beneath exoticism’Footnote ³⁵, as David Irving has put it, focusing on the respective mediation of distinct epistemological traditions of archaeology and philology on the compositional process. Attention to these respective mediations elucidates with greater specificity the representational and identitarian stakes of these musical gestures, the impact on musical forms, and the ultimate trajectory of ‘modal’ composition in French modernism. My terms should be taken as ideal-typical, and, as the following examples illustrate, aspects of each type may more messily coexist.

Quasi-archaeological borrowings are showcased in the ‘mélodie hindoue’ and ‘nautch hindou’ of Jules Massenet’s Roi de Lahore (1877) and Nana-Sahib (1883), or the ‘Terâna’ and ‘Rektah’ dances in Léo Delibes’s Lakmé (1883), to name only a few.Footnote ³⁶ Like an acoustic counterpart to archaeologically informed set designs, such borrowings — usually episodic diversions from the narrative (often literally, in ‘divertissement’ sequences) — served to enhance the spectacle of South Asian settings. The archaeological effect was often emphasized with paratextual labels — a title, or later, more often a footnote, demarcating the borrowing from the rest of the score and suggesting fidelity to a source — like an archaeological curio exhibited in a museum case. Charles Lefebvre’s Djelma (1894), set in Mysore, linked a melody to a footnote explaining, ‘the first bars of this phrase imitate an old Hindu song’.Footnote ³⁷ Alphonse Duvernoy’s Bacchus (1902), staging the god’s travels to India, contained two themes marked with asterisk and footnote as ‘thème indien’.Footnote ³⁸ Such authentications continued the following decade with the ‘motif hindou’ labelled in Reynaldo Hahn’s Dieu bleu (1913), and in the ‘Old Hindu song’ of Debussy’s Boîte à joujoux (1913).Footnote ³⁹ The composers’ musical treatments of these ‘borrowed’ melodies vary, sometimes assimilated to tonal harmonizations, elsewhere isolated against a static backdrop (see Figures 1a to 1c).

Figure 1a.

Excerpt from Charles Lefebvre, Djelma, vocal score (Durand & Fils, 1894), p. 122.

Figure 1b.

Excerpt from Alphonse Duvernoy, Bacchus, piano score (Heugel & Cie, 1902), p. 4.

Figure 1c.

Excerpt from Reynaldo Hahn, Dieu bleu, piano score (Heugel & Cie, 1911), p. 10.

In contrast, philologically mediated modalism is characterized at once by the rationalization of music into formal structures — in the context of this article, ‘modes’, viewed by musicologists as analogous to morphological structures of language — and by racialization — the presumed ‘Indo-European’ inheritance of these forms, which motivated the desire to mobilize them in composition. The most prominent advocate for ‘Indo-European modality’ in these terms — though formulated with reference to Greek and Breton music, rather than Indian — was folklorist, historian, composer, and Conservatoire professor of music history Louis-Albert Bourgault-Ducoudray. Combining the aforementioned research of Fétis, Burnouf, and Paris with his own fieldwork, Bourgault-Ducoudray affirmed that common ‘modal’ structures ‘can be found in the primitive music of all the peoples of the Indo-European group, that is, the Aryan race’.Footnote ⁴⁰ But he went a step further, converting pseudo-philological theories of Grecian and folk ‘modality’ into nationalist polemic for the future of French composition: ‘if these venerable modes came from a heritage common among all Aryans, one sees no reason why we would not exploit this domain which is a part of the patrimony of our race, and which is rightly ours.’Footnote ⁴¹ Leading by example, Bourgault-Ducoudray modelled techniques of ‘modal’ composition in works such as his opera Thamara (1891). Combining a Mighty Handful-inspired approach to folklike melodicism with Louis Niedermeyer and Joseph d’Ortigue’s doctrine of ‘modal’ plainchant accompaniment, Bourgault-Ducoudray opted not to quote in the archaeological manner exemplified above, but rather to assimilate what he called their ‘construction’, through melodic and harmonic modalism, in the service of an imminently racialized musical language.

Although Bourgault-Ducoudray scarcely addressed Indian music in his writings, others close to him soon extrapolated his methods to Indian ‘modes’, which had been likened to Greek ‘modes’ since Jones, and tagged as ‘Aryan’ since Fétis.Footnote ⁴² Among the first to do so was Gabriel Pierné, in his incidental music to Izéÿl (1894), a four-act ‘drame indien’ set in the fifth century BCE, written by Armand Silvestre and Eugène Morand for Sarah Bernhardt and staged at her Théâtre de la Renaissance to popular acclaim.Footnote ⁴³ Pierné’s approach in Izéÿl straddles the ‘archaeological’ and ‘philological’ paradigms, showing how elements of each may coexist in practice. Rather than borrowing melodies, Pierné went straight for ‘modes’: in the score of the opening ‘Aubade’, he notes, ‘Mode Nettâ’; the third number, ‘Cortège funèbre’, is labelled, ‘sur le mode Varati transposé’, while the fifth, ‘Stances du Prince’, is marked ‘Mode Bhairavi’. Pierné’s scales correspond to those in Fétis’s Histoire générale (though he disregarded the diacritical markings used by Fétis to suggest divergences from twelve-tone equal temperament); Fétis had copied them from Jones, who had plucked them from the Rāgavibodha (Figures 2a and 2b).

Figure 2a.

Excerpt from Gabriel Pierné, Izéÿl, vocal score (Durand & Fils, [1894]), p. 1.

Figure 2b.

‘Mode nettâ’, in Fétis, Histoire générale de la musique, II, p. 213.

Pierné’s harmonization technique bears Bourgault-Ducoudray’s theoretical imprint, adhering to ‘modal’ pitch collections with only rare exceptions. In the ‘Aubade’, Pierné deviates from ‘Mode Nettâ’ in only one circumstance, adding G♮s to the bass despite the G♯s in the scale. Since these G♮s precede a resolution to the tonic, A, we might read these harmonies as half-diminished V⁶₅ chords with E as the root, approximating a dominant function in the absence of a ‘true’ dominant in the pitch collection. He could as easily have swapped the ‘modal’ B♭ for B♮; but the incursion of G♮ in place of the leading-tone evokes ‘modality’ in a generic, topical sense — whether ancient, medieval, folkloric, or ‘exotic’ — thereby intensifying the section’s departure from modern ‘tonality’. In his recourse to this archaizing effect, Pierné compromises the harmonic integrity to ‘Nettâ’ in the service of a recognizable ‘modal’ trope — reconciling a tension between rigorous adherence to a chosen pitch collection and listeners’ expectations of ancient ‘modality’. This approach recurs in the ‘Stances du Prince’: while the melody strictly adheres to Fétis’s ‘Mode Bhairavi’, Pierné introduces an exceptional F♮ into the harmonic underpinning.Footnote ⁴⁴

Most audiences likely experienced Izéÿl as a straightforward staging of an ‘exotic’ elsewhere, in keeping with Bernhardt’s reputation for playing exoticized roles and reinforced by Pierné’s layering of stereotypical exoticist signifiers — wordless choirs, seven-beat metres, oboe arabesques with augmented seconds, and so forth. But Bourgault-Ducoudray, for one, proudly claimed Pierné’s work as an extension of his own: ‘Pierné,’ he wrote to Burnouf after the premiere, ‘has made a most remarkable use of ancient modes in his music for Izéÿl […] I was right to advocate these new techniques, and those with skill have made use of them.’Footnote ⁴⁵ Note the descriptor, ‘ancient’, by which he aligns Indian ‘modality’ with a ‘classical’ past.

While the ‘modal’ borrowings of Izéÿl reflect to an extent the philological mediation of Fétis’s historiography and Bourgault-Ducoudray’s compositional method, in demarcating these sections of his score, Pierné reproduced the display-case artefactual presentation of the ‘archaeological’ paradigm. In doing so, he persisted in framing ‘Indian modes’ as a musical digression (or perhaps a regression or archaism), not yet the imminent expression of patrimonial identity envisioned by Bourgault-Ducoudray.Footnote ⁴⁶ It took another generation — of both philological scholarship and musical composition — for Indian music to become a viable ‘source of Frenchness’.

(Re)Presenting the Melakartas

One key figure in this process, and thereby in French compositional history, was Joanny Grosset (1862–1931). Today, Grosset’s name is perhaps most familiar to Messiaen specialists, for it was through Grosset’s chapter on Indian music in Albert Lavignac’s Encyclopédie de la musique et dictionnaire du Conservatoire, published in 1913, that Messiaen encountered the ‘deśītālas’ — the compilation of 120 thirteenth-century Indian rhythms famously integral to his compositional technique. Grosset, however, has remained peripheral to this history, and Messiaen’s proclamations of the novelty of his research into Indian rhythm largely obscured the fact that other materials from Grosset’s chapter had already begun resonating in French composition years earlier. In this section, I sketch how Indian music, and particularly the melakarta system, were constructed in Grosset’s chapter — showing how processes of transmission and equivocation between Indian musicians and theorists, British imperialists and ethnographers, and French philologists and composers generated epistemological frictions with compositional consequences.

Grosset was not a musician by training, but a Sanskrit philologist. Under the tutelage of linguist Paul Regnaud at the University of Lyon, Grosset had produced two critical translations of selected chapters from Bharata Muni’s foundational Nāṭyaśāstra (‘Treatise on Drama’, composed roughly two millennia ago).Footnote ⁴⁷ These, plus his encyclopaedia chapter, constitute the entirety of Grosset’s scholarly output — modest when compared to his impact upon French composition. Given the narrow scope of his first two publications, the breadth of his encyclopaedia chapter is impressive, incorporating many Indian sources novel to French (and even European) musicology.

Yet Grosset’s scholarship reinscribes the epistemological (and racial) biases of his philological training, including emphases on text over sound, theory over practice, structure over process, Hindu over Muslim, and history over present — to evoke several binaries both explicit and latent in his chapter. In earlier publications, he had justified his research by arguing that Indian music ‘reaches back to the earliest appreciable manifestations of the Indo-European race to which we belong’.Footnote ⁴⁸ Echoing this premise in his encyclopaedia chapter, he identifies ‘Arya’s taste for music, dance, and spectacles’ while lamenting how ‘the darkness of time veils forevermore the first musical manifestations of this Aryan race’.Footnote ⁴⁹ Grosset exemplifies textualism in the narrowest sense, having had no firsthand experience of performed Indian music. He surveys music’s presence in the classical epic, lyric, dramatic, legal, and religious texts of the nineteenth-century Indological corpus, before introducing specifically musicological śāstra or scientific sources — including the Nāṭyaśāstra, naturally and the Rāgavibodha, already familiar from Jones and Fétis. To the extent that Grosset paid heed to contemporary (especially British) sources of Indian music, he sought to hear traces of ancient traditions that ‘still shine today’, thanks to the nature of the Hindus, ‘eminent preservationists’ who have ‘passed down the torch, half-extinguished, of their fathers’ marvellous civilization’.Footnote ⁵⁰ Where he cited selected contemporary Indian scholars, including Sourindro Mohun Tagore and Rājendralāla Mitra, these authors themselves articulate narratives of a ‘pure, Hindu’ tradition that were to an extent assimilable (even accountable) to European constructions of Aryanism.Footnote ⁵¹

Grosset’s philological perspective aligned with colonialist initiatives when he posited that a suitably skilled European could ‘pursue, through fieldwork, the patient study of the still-surviving debris of the ancient art’.Footnote ⁵² Accordingly, he relied extensively on the work of Charles Russell Day (1860–1900), author of The Music and Musical Instruments of Southern India and the Deccan, adapting much of Day’s work for a French audience for the first time.Footnote ⁵³ Grosset’s recourse to Day is significant as the latter, a decorated British army captain and participant in multiple imperial campaigns, also perpetuated an Indo-Europeanist agenda.Footnote ⁵⁴ As Day claimed,

Rehashing the Jonesian trope of a ‘pure Hindu tradition’ tarnished by ‘Muslim’ (‘Semitic’) infiltration and in need of recovery (i.e., through European colonial intervention), Day justified his particular interest in southern India through the specious contention that ‘Hindu’ (‘Aryan’) culture was preserved more ‘purely’ in the south, which was relatively insulated from Mughal invasions.Footnote ⁵⁶ Grosset, too, adopted this belief: reasoning that ‘southern India suffered less from the commotions which shook the rest of the peninsula, and remained under purely Hindu domination for longer than the North and the Deccan’, he surmised that ‘it is in this region that the pure tradition of Hindu art would be perpetuated, thanks to the uninterrupted study and conservation of the Sanskrit monuments’.Footnote ⁵⁷ There is irony here, given the ostensibly linguistic rudiments of the Indo-European hypothesis, in that southern Indian languages have since the nineteenth century been classified (not without controversy) as ‘Dravidian’ rather than ‘Indo-Aryan’.Footnote ⁵⁸ Yet the logical incoherence fazed neither Day nor Grosset.

Among the most salient novelties of Day’s study for the European reader was a table of the seventy-two heptatonic scales, presented in Western staff notation. These scales represent what had become known as the melakarta system for rāga classification. Here is not the place for a comprehensive introduction to the history and theory of the melakartas; however, a brief overview of their background and construction will help situate later sections of this article and clarify the mediating effects of Day and Grosset’s representations.Footnote ⁵⁹ My aim is not to rectify or reify the melakartas in an ‘original’ form — in any case, their status and utility was subject to vigorous debate in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Indian musicology, and I am no more able today than Day or Grosset a century ago to transparently represent them here. Rather, I hope to provide enough information to set into relief how they were reshaped by contingent contexts and priorities as they changed hands. The following account of the history and development of the melakarta system in the Indian context was not known to (or acknowledged by) the European musicologists, who took the melakartas as a representation of the imminent properties of ‘Indian music’ rather than as a theory designed with contingent intellectual and creative objectives. Yet, as I shall suggest toward the end of this article, incorporating this history will allow us to posit certain shared impulses between Indian and French musicians and theorists across the centuries, which in turn will help productively reformulate the relationship between these two musical cultures.

Basically, the melakarta system elaborates potential arrangements of the seven svaras that divide the octave. Using the Indian nomenclature, the svaras Sa and Pa remain fixed; Ma can occupy one of two positions; and Ri, Ga, Dha, and Ni, can each occupy one of three positions, so long as overlaps are avoided — as schematized by Day in a comparative table (Figure 3). The resulting combinatorics yield seventy-two configurations of the svaras, organized into two groups of thirty-six (as a function of the position of Ma), each further divided into six groups of six (as a function of the positions of Ri and Ga). These scales, which are perhaps better thought of as categories, presumably facilitated fretting and tuning in preparation for a given raga. It should not go unnoticed that, as represented here, the heptatonic Greek modes (both diatonic and chromatic genera), and thus the European major and minor scales, may be located within this complex.

Figure 3.

Table showing the relationship between the twelve semitones of the Western scale and the melakarta system, in Day, The Music and Musical Instruments, p. 31.

The melakartas are widely attributed to the Sanskrit-language Caturdaṇḍīprakāśikā (mid-seventeenth century) of Veṅkaṭamakhin, who envisaged a fuller, more systematic alternative to the earlier grāma-mūrcchana-jātī classification tree than that of Somanātha (whose system Jones so prized).Footnote ⁶⁰ According to Veṅkaṭamakhin, any rāga could be classified into one of the melakarta scales on the basis of pitch content and certain taxonomic principles. Yet for all its abstract logic, Veṅkaṭamakhin’s scheme was so full that it generated what might be described as a significant theoretical ‘supplement’: as Veṅkaṭamakhin himself admitted, rāgas in current practice could be classified using only nineteen of the melakartas, upon which he expounded in his Caturdaṇḍīprakāśikā; as for the surplus fifty-three, representing purely theoretical potential, he merely alluded to the method by which they could be formed, affirming, ‘I have designed it as a honeycomb cabinet to provide a niche for all rāgas past, present and future’.Footnote ⁶¹

In due course, experimentally minded Karnatic musicians, including the celebrated Tyāgarāja, began composing using synthetic rāgas derived from these supplemental melakartas (a feedback cycle which strengthened the melakarta theory itself as a representation of practice).Footnote ⁶² The scheme, widely admired for its elegant completism, gradually prevailed over numerous competing classificatory systems. By the turn of the nineteenth century, Govindācārya used a mnemonic nomenclature (kaṭapayādi) to bestow each melakarta with a moniker easily convertible into its pitch-sequence.Footnote ⁶³ And by the early twentieth century, the melakartas had accrued a privileged status in Karnatic music theory and pedagogy — a development which Amanda Weidman attributes in part to the universalist aura of their exhaustive combinatorial logic, which, if already integral to Veṅkaṭamakhin’s scheme, also appeared to embody modern European ideals of rationalism. But that is not all: according to Weidman, the scheme served musical classicization agendas, fuelled by post-Jonesian discourses: by ‘showing how scales or modes similar to the idea of scale in Western classical music were operative in Karnatic music, it became evidence that the two “systems” of music were “of the same family”’. This quasi-‘natural history’ of rāgas,Footnote ⁶⁴ therefore, drew additional authority from its assimilability to European epistemological models, including comparative philology — by which Veṅkaṭamakhin’s self-consciously constructed taxonomy came to be seen to disclose a deep-seated historical filiation.

Day’s study reflected (and likely further promulgated) the melakartas’ mounting status in Karnatic music theory. Day does not offer the above history regarding the provenance or cultural significance of these scales, or his sources for them, although his use of the scales’ kaṭapayādi names, ‘precisely as given in treatises in the vernacular,’ suggests that his sources were written and relatively contemporary.Footnote ⁶⁵ He illustrates how rāgas operate as melody-types, subject to distinct principles and characteristics (pitch hierarchies, ornamentation, etc.); and provides a ten-page list of what Indian theorists designate as janya, or ‘derived’ (ontologically if ahistorically), rāgas, classified by melakarta and listed with their name, pitch sequence (ascending/ārohaṇa and descending/avarohaṇa), and salient svaras (vādi/saṃvādi).Footnote ⁶⁶ This proliferation of rāgas, Day explains, resembles what one would find in a musician’s ‘scale book’ — lists of pitch classes, abstracted from practical knowledge regarding the realization of the rāga in performance, which is conveyed orally and internalized through experience.Footnote ⁶⁷

When adapting Day’s discussion of the melakartas for his chapter, Grosset duplicated the melakarta table (complete with kaṭapayādi nomenclature) under the heading, ‘Tableau des 72 Échelles Karnâtiques en notation européenne’ (Figure 4).Footnote ⁶⁸ He alluded to the notion that a rāga’s substance extends beyond scale structure, reproducing one of Day’s exact examples. But unlike Day, whose fieldwork in India gave him a fuller perspective of how theory related to practice, Grosset did not (perhaps could not) provide descriptions of how melakartas related to janya rāgas, alluding to a handful by name alone and omitting their characteristics.Footnote ⁶⁹ The centre of gravity — especially as far as notated musical examples go — was thus significantly displaced: Grosset put a proportionately greater emphasis on the theoretical melakarta ‘scales’ as the essential locus of Indian pitch organization — with each of the seventy-two equally weighted — at the expense of more characteristic rāgas, an unsubtle shift reflecting Grosset’s philological preoccupation with ‘structures’ over ‘surfaces’, ‘theory’ over ‘practice’.

Figure 4.

Melakarta table, in Grosset, ‘Inde’, pp. 325–26.

Given its apparent (albeit incidental) incorporation of heptatonic scales from Greek, Roman, and modern European music theory, the melakarta system was conscripted by some to corroborate theories of essential Indo-European musical filiation. Prefacing Day’s monograph, Alfred James Hipkins remarked that the author

Grosset stopped short of explicitly positing a genealogical relationship between Indian and Greek music, but their conceptual proximity is taken for granted in his chapter. Suggestions of filiation lurk behind Grosset’s frequent comparisons between features of Indian and Greek music, and his use of Greek-derived terminology to describe Indian concepts (with frequent reference to Bourgault-Ducoudray). Methodologically, too, Grosset aligned the historiography of Indian music with that of Greek music from the outset, conceiving both as remnants of a ‘classical’ culture, a ‘lost art’.Footnote ⁷¹ Grosset’s attitudes likely approximated those of his erstwhile professor, Regnaud, who declared in his preface to Grosset’s edition of the Nāṭyaśāstra that Indian and Greek theatre shared ‘an original ancestor reaching back to the faraway, primitive period of so-called Indo-European unity’.Footnote ⁷² His framing of the melakartas thus aligned India and Greece, thereby reproducing the Aryanist historiographical model.Footnote ⁷³

But Greece was a model for Grosset in one more decisive respect. Inspired perhaps by his encyclopaedic commission from the Conservatoire, Grosset took a page from Bourgault-Ducoudray’s playbook, advocating that composers exploit ancient Indian music, too, for the nourishment of future art:

Abstraction and Assimilation: Composing with Melakartas from the Opera House to the Organ Loft

In the remainder of the article, I survey the startling range of French composers who responded to Grosset’s rhetorical question by way of the melakartas over the ensuing decades.Footnote ⁷⁵ Grosset’s representation of the melakartas arrived at a propitious moment, given proliferating interest in ‘modes’ among French composers and the increasingly identitarian stakes of modalism in musicological discourses. Bourgault-Ducoudray, having touted Greek modes in the Conservatoire’s music history class in efforts to motivate French composers to embrace their ‘Aryan’ ‘patrimony’, began seeing the fruits of his advocacy in a new generation of acolytes prepared to carry his torch. Retiring from the Conservatoire in 1909, he was succeeded by a true believer in the form of Maurice Emmanuel, a Hellenist, musicologist, and composer who declared in his inaugural lecture his plan to ‘pillage’ Bourgault-Ducoudray’s curriculum: ‘I, too, will take up the cause of ethnic music, of musique “de race”…’.Footnote ⁷⁶ Emmanuel trumpeted Bourgault-Ducoudray’s fight against the ‘tyranny of C Major’ in favour of modality, using a remarkable political metaphor to urge the foundation of a variegated ‘république modale’ as the future of French composition — a sentiment he echoed in his own chapter on (ancient) Greek music in Lavignac’s Encyclopédie, directly following Grosset’s.Footnote ⁷⁷ The same year, Woollett penned his own tribute, suggesting that composers should generalize Bourgault-Ducoudray’s ‘modal’ precepts in order to ‘create new and original music by inventing some unusual scale and writing the melody and harmony exclusively using the notes of that scale’.Footnote ⁷⁸ Modalism, it was said, led to purified and simplified music characterized by clarity, order, and logic. For many, these qualities provided a corrective against Germanic chromaticism viewed as overwrought and decadent. For Woollett, modal ‘purity’ contrasted against the ‘faults’ of ‘minute intervals’ endemic to ‘Semites’.Footnote ⁷⁹ But whatever the source of the problem, Grosset’s testimony to Indian music’s unparalleled ‘modal richness’ offered a timely remedy.Footnote ⁸⁰

Revisiting Roussel’s India(s)

Roussel’s writings illustrate how such cultural anxieties infiltrated composers’ reflections about their work. In 1909, he too desired that French musicians ‘embody in an increasingly affirmative and vigorous manner, the genius of our race’.Footnote ⁸¹ During the ensuing years, Roussel would depict India in Évocations (1910–11) and Padmâvatî (1913–18). Unlike the French musicologists and composers discussed above, Roussel had recently honeymooned in India, keeping a slim notebook to record musical fragments and ideas.Footnote ⁸² His experience of Indian music was thus not limited to published scholarly resources — although, as he wrote to Woollett, he was not taken with the live music he overheard.Footnote ⁸³

Because both Évocations and Padmâvatî respond to India, they are often pooled together in accounts of Roussel’s career. Their respective mediations of Indian music, however, are radically opposed, and taken together they neatly illustrate India’s ambiguous position between faraway land of ‘exotic’ mysticism, and locus of shared ‘Indo-European’ heritage.Footnote ⁸⁴ The choral-symphonic Évocations, as Jann Pasler has shown at length, projected a deliberately generalized ‘exoticism’. Abiding by advice from Vincent d’Indy, his former professor at the Schola Cantorum, Roussel conceived Évocations as testimony to ‘the sensations I felt over there translated into our ordinary musical language’, ‘more European than Hindu’. Rather than representing any specific emplacement or ‘local colour’, the object of Roussel’s ‘evocations’ was deliberately blurry — ‘India, Tibet, Indochina, China, Persia, it doesn’t matter’.Footnote ⁸⁵ The lush result was more Debussyist than anything else.

Padmâvatî represented a major change of course. Incoming Opéra director Jacques Rouché commissioned either a ‘drame lyrique’ or a ‘ballet’ to be premiered at the start of his tenure — although World War One interrupted plans, so the work was only finalized in 1918 and premiered in 1923. Responding to Rouché’s invitation, Roussel recalled the legend of Padmâvatî — the beautiful queen who, following the Mughal invasion of Chittor, chose to die rather than sacrifice herself to their leader, Alaouddin. He sought the collaboration of former Schola classmate Louis Laloy — musicologist, Hellenist, sinologist, and secretary-general at the Opéra. Although Roussel had seen Chittor and even paraphrased Padmâvatî’s story in his travel journal, he and Laloy sourced two literary retellings from the library of the École des Langues Orientales, where Laloy had also studied.Footnote ⁸⁶

In contrast to the symphonic ‘impressionism’ of Évocations, Roussel turned to two formal models for Padmâvatî. The first was the ‘opéra-ballet’ — an emblematically French genre not staged at the Opéra since 1773 — thereby aligning Padmâvatî with the blossoming interest in pre-Revolutionary, Baroque forms (spearheaded partly by Rouché), while casting a competitive glance at the Ballets Russes.Footnote ⁸⁷ Second were formal structures adapted from Indian music theory — specifically, the seventy-two ‘Karnatic scales’ — freshly published between the completion of Évocations and inception of Padmâvatî. This made Roussel likely the first composer to heed Grosset’s chapter, and possibly the first French composer to compose with the melakartas.Footnote ⁸⁸ Following the modalism advocated by Bourgault-Ducoudray and Woollett, Roussel used these scales melodically and harmonically. Perhaps Roussel was drawn to the new resource by Laloy, who had favourably reviewed Grosset’s ‘voluminous treatise on Indian music, with examples, figures, and tables’ right as Padmâvatî was being composed.Footnote ⁸⁹ Perhaps, too, he had been inspired to explore Indian ‘modes’ by friends like Woollett (with whom he met during the composition of Padmâvatî), or Déodat de Séverac, another former classmate (who cited Indian ‘modes’ in his Héliogabale a few years earlier).Footnote ⁹⁰ Roussel’s turn to Indian ‘modes’ reflects a preoccupation with projecting ‘authenticity’ in Padmâvatî which, if not new in French exoticist or classicist composition, contrasts with his deliberately nebulous approach in Évocations. Roussel stressed the stakes of accuracy in the music and libretto in a bizarre remark to Laloy that ‘masses of Hindus could come to France after the war, and it behoves us to pay attention to all these details!’Footnote ⁹¹ Whether we interpret his tone as sincere or arch, Roussel’s actions show his determination that Padmâvatî be received as ‘authentic’.

His attention to detail paid critical dividends, as the ‘Indian modes’ were widely praised by critics and colleagues. In an exceptionally analytical review for Le Temps, Henry Malherbe identified one melakarta by name and distinguished Roussel’s approach from the ‘confusing dissonances’ of the latest compositional fads, writing, ‘pure reason governs every part of this work’.Footnote ⁹² Nadia Boulanger addressed ‘the influence of the Indian scale’ on Padmâvatî, and even referred to its ‘Aryan’ origins, in a 1925 lecture at Rice University.Footnote ⁹³ Much was made of Roussel’s modalism in the 1928 special issue of La Revue musicale dedicated to his music — with Arthur Hoérée echoing the conception of ‘Hindu’ music as ‘the most fecund from a modal point of view’ — and again the following decade, when Paul Landormy analysed Padmâvatî following the composer’s death.Footnote ⁹⁴

This trope of Padmâvatî’s reception reverberates in more recent years as scholars continue to emphasize Roussel’s ‘profound’ engagements with Indian musical forms. Richard Langham Smith lauds the score as ‘deeply rather than superficially inspired by oriental musical techniques’, noting that ‘many of the melodies and their resultant harmonies have their basis in synthetic or oriental modes’. Hervé Lacombe, commenting likewise on the ‘ancient and oriental musical modes’, regards Padmâvatî as ‘without question the end product of exotic opera’s long evolution’. For Jean-Marc Moura, it is ‘a far cry from the simple exotic effects of the turn of the century’, while Jackie Assayag describes Padmâvatî as ‘an authentic musical India, no longer a simple, allusive musical colour’, viewing a ‘paradox’ in the work’s simultaneous debts to the French opéra-ballet. Footnote ⁹⁵ However, I would venture that the real distinction these scholars are seizing upon — described in terms of the frequent opposition in discourses of exoticism between ‘surface’ and ‘depth’, ‘superficial representation’ and ‘profound knowledge’ — is more precisely attributable to the textualism and formalism privileged by Indo-Europeanist philological mediation, whereby the melakartas were reified as fundamental ‘structures’ of an Aryanized ‘Hindu’ music — and thereby viewed as assimilable to a racialized, modalist conception of French music.

And there is further evidence of this mediation in Roussel’s score. For, despite all the attention paid to Padmâvatî’s ‘modality’, what is never noted (at least not explicitly, and perhaps in earlier commentaries it appeared too obvious) is that Roussel’s deployment of the melakartas was targeted. The melodies adhering most closely to the ‘modal’ collections, melodically and harmonically, are arias sung by the opera’s Hindu characters — such as Gora, the brahmin, and Padmâvatî herself — and not Allaoudin or his Mughal forces. Gora’s opening address adheres to the seven pitches of the fifty-first melakarta (with the rare chromatic appoggiatura in the orchestra; Example 1, compare to Figure 4); the brahmin’s dreamlike aria, including accompanying strings and harp, adheres strictly to the pitches of the thirty-third melakarta, transposed on A (Example 2, scale no. 33 in Figure 4); and Padmâvatî’s aria closing the first act is based upon the fifteenth melakarta, dramatized with a transposed and chromatic middle section.Footnote ⁹⁶

Example 1.

Roussel, Padmâvatî, Act I, scene 1, bars 43–81.

Example 2.

Roussel, Padmâvatî, Act I, scene 2, bars 695–703.

Roussel thus deployed ‘modes’ marked by European musicologists as distinctly ‘Hindu’ to create a distinct sonic space for characters aligned with an ostensibly ‘Aryan’ culture, in contrast to more stereotypical ‘exoticism’ and denser chromaticism deployed in connection with the ‘Muslim’ invaders. Roussel’s calculated recourse to melakartas for ‘Hindu’ arias suggests he may have absorbed the hypothesis of an ‘Indo-European’ ‘modal’ genealogy, and sewn into the compositional fabric a sort of musical identification with the Hindu characters and their resistance against threatening ‘others’. And in embedding these ‘modes’ into his ‘opéra-ballet’, Roussel further inscribed the link between ‘Hindu’ and French music which was a mainstay in musicological representations of India.Footnote ⁹⁷ In this reading, Roussel’s use of ‘modes’ represents not so much a departure from stereotypical musical ‘exoticism’ as such (which remains in abundant supply, directed especially toward Alaouddin and his entourage), but rather manifests the compositional fruition of racialized musicological discourses of ‘Indo-European’ patrimony. That the borrowing operates on a ‘structural’ rather than ‘superficial’ stratum is, relatedly, a by-product of the quasi-philological conception of musical families, akin to language families, sharing fundamental elements of their ‘construction’, as Bourgault-Ducoudray had put it. By replacing the Indian melodic impressions of Évocations with a philologically mediated ‘structures’ of ostensibly ‘Indo-European’ music, Roussel reconfigured his own subject position with respect to India — recasting it from a musical ‘other’ to an ‘other’ classic. Thus, in Padmâvatî, ‘opéra oriental’ and ‘opéra-ballet’ are nested like Russian dolls into multiply embedded musical ‘pasts’ in a project of ethnic-nationalist recomposition.Footnote ⁹⁸ In this reading, Padmâvatî manifests Roussel’s 1909 pronouncement on the importance of ‘embodying race’ in compositional practice; he would reaffirm these sentiments in 1926, imploring that ‘each race conserve in its music the ethnic character that gives it its particularity and originality’.Footnote ⁹⁹

As a post-script to this reading of Padmâvatî, it is worth picking up the thread of paratextual labelling to show how Roussel negotiated the ‘archaeological’ and ‘philological’ models of borrowing outlined above: for, in addition to his novel use of the melakartas, Roussel appears to have departed from his predecessors’ ‘archaeological’ practices by not labelling his borrowings in the score. However, upon closer inspection, the question of labels caused Roussel hesitation when it came to three passages: two soliloquies — Nâkamtî’s melody in Act I, scene 3 (reprised orchestrally in the work’s final moments), and Padmâvatî’s ‘modally’ harmonized aria that concludes the first act — and the instrumental theme accompanying the ‘danse des femmes esclaves’. In the published piano-vocal score, these melodies are unmarked. But proofs from Durand, with Roussel’s handwritten corrections, reveal that Roussel had originally labelled these passages, respectively, ‘Chant hindou’, ‘D’après un chant hindou’, and ‘Chant arabe’. These labels, printed in the proofs, were redacted by Roussel and eliminated from publication (Figures 5a and 5b).Footnote ¹⁰⁰

Figure 5a.

Printer’s proof, Roussel, Padmâvatî, vocal score, Act I, scene 3, bars 1–3 (Brussels, Royal Library of Belgium, Mus. MS-1562) (author’s photograph).

Figure 5b.

Published edition, Roussel, Padmâvatî, vocal score, Act I, scene 3, bars 1–3.

Roussel’s initial impulse to label these melodies again exemplifies his concern for projecting ‘authenticity’, and one can only conjecture as to why he recanted. Perhaps Roussel was responding to shifting tastes between 1914 (when the bulk of Padmâvatî was composed) and after the Armistice (when he was correcting proofs). The postwar acceleration of stylistic shifts toward more formalist (neo)classicism and away from ‘exoticist’ representation may have led Roussel to rethink the overtness of his borrowing.Footnote ¹⁰¹ This explanation resonates in the press coverage’s prevailing focus on the work’s generic tribute to the opéra-ballet (including obligatory comparisons to Rameau’s Indes galantes),Footnote ¹⁰² as well as with Roussel’s repudiation of impressionistic representation, ‘external devices’, and ‘picturesque procedures’ after the war.Footnote ¹⁰³

Roussel’s labelling and unlabelling might be read as two illocutionary acts: the labelling, a performance of ‘authenticity’ via paratextual attribution; and the unlabelling, a suppression of pictorialist (quasi-archaeological) quotation in favour of modal construction, conceived not as an external borrowing but as immanent racial inheritance — in other words, a performance of identity.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ This procedure recalls that of Bourgault-Ducoudray, who did not demarcate his Greek borrowings as ‘other’ but instead wove them into his compositional ‘language’ at a self-consciously structural level, a procedure he legitimated through an appeal to their common patrimony. This dual element — the reification of ‘structures’ and their concomitant classification, or racialization, as ‘Indo-European’ — is the hallmark of philological mediation.

In the later 1920s, Roussel pushed this formal assimilation further, defining his ‘modes’ with reference to not Indian but European terminology — e.g., ‘major scale with raised fourth scale degree, and lowered second and sixth scale degrees’.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ And Boulanger — having previously evoked the ‘Aryan’ source of Roussel’s scales — replaced mention of ‘Indian’ modes with a formalist technicity in her more influential 1929 article on Roussel’s theatrical music, describing his ‘modifications of tetrachords, thus altering the scale and forming new harmonies’.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

Emmanuel’s ‘Hindu’ modalism

Roussel again asserted his ‘modal’ prowess in exclusively formalist terms in a letter to Maurice Emmanuel — Bourgault-Ducoudray’s successor as Conservatoire historian and champion of the ‘modal’ cause — in response to Emmanuel’s 1928 manifesto, ‘La Polymodie’, to which we shall return later.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Yet by that time Emmanuel was perfectly aware of Padmâvatî, and had been familiar with the melakartas directly for over a decade. In fact, it was Emmanuel who articulated most systematically and explicitly the Indo-Europeanist case for the scales’ relevance, in a 1919 essay for the Revue des études grecques.

In this article, Emmanuel exposed his theory of the ‘Corps de l’Harmonie’ — the essential pitch structure which he considered a ‘manifestation of the deep instincts of the Aryan race’ — using the melakartas as evidence.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ According to Emmanuel, the ‘Corps de l’Harmonie’, defined by Aristotle, comprised the structural division of the octave into the ‘consonant’ perfect intervals of a fourth and fifth. This structure, Emmanuel continued, ‘still regulates the 72 modal scales of contemporary India. The old musical language has persisted there just as faithfully as their religious rites, of which music indeed appears an integral part’.Footnote ¹⁰⁹

Emmanuel’s representation of the melakartas diverges from his predecessors’: rather than listing all seventy-two scales (as had Grosset, Day, and for that matter, Govindācārya), Emmanuel played comparative philologist, deconstructing scales into basic ‘constitutive tetrachords’ inspired by Greek theory — abstract(ed) structures presumed to link ‘Aryan’ musical cultures, just as verbal roots linked Indo-European languages. He defined six basic tetrachordal types, according to the ‘orientation’ of semitones within them (descending, ascending, neutral) — a classificatory criterion based not on Grosset’s article but on Emmanuel’s own extrapolation from theories of ancient Greek modality. Any two tetrachordal types could then be combined at the interval of perfect fifth, thereby filling the space of an octave within the structure of the ‘Corps de l’Harmonie’ and generating thirty-six unique scales (Figure 6a). The ‘Hindus’, Emmanuel continued, go even further, admitting the possibility of a sharped fourth into the lower tetrachord, thereby doubling the number of unique scales to seventy-two.

Figure 6a.

Emmanuel, ‘Le Corps de l’harmonie d’après Aristote’, p. 185.

Figure 6b.

Emmanuel, ‘Le Corps de l’harmonie d’après Aristote’, p. 187.

Having reconceived the melakartas according to this generative system, Emmanuel took to comparison: ‘all of the Hellenic modal scales, in both the diatonic and chromatic genera, can be found in the table of Hindu modes’.Footnote ¹¹⁰ As proof, he listed the Greek modes, labelling each tetrachordal building block with a digit corresponding to his analysis of their Indian cognates (Figure 6b). As his pièce de résistance, he cited the Delphic Hymn, excavated in 1893 and arranged by Théodore Reinach and Fauré, to show how the ‘Hindu’ scales preserve musical principles ‘practised by the Greeks, over two thousand years ago’.Footnote ¹¹¹ For Emmanuel, therefore, the relationship between the melakartas and modern music is not so much ancestral as familial, preserving something of the ‘racial’ essence of a common ‘proto-Indo-European’ source: ‘the Aryans of India,’ Emmanuel concluded, ‘seem to have made it their job to inventory and develop, to this very day, the forces that lie in the ancient scales’.Footnote ¹¹²

Emmanuel’s quasi-philological reverse-engineering constitutes a turning point in the formalist abstraction of the ‘modes’. Without acknowledging that the melakartas were already a taxonomic abstraction of rāgas, he atomized them further, thereby affording his comparativist agenda. Analysis was not Emmanuel’s ultimate goal, however: in conclusion, he made a familiar appeal to the artistic potential generated by what he called this ‘modal mine of inexhaustible richness’.Footnote ¹¹³ Like Bourgault-Ducoudray and Woollett, he contrasted ‘modality’ with the ‘disorder’ of chromaticism (carefully distinguishing between the salubrious ancient heptachordal chromatic genus and overripe modern chromaticism of twelve semitones), and exhorted today’s musicians to act: ‘the Hindu bard, who still resounds the Harmonies with which Aeschylus and Sophocles shook their spectators, possesses resources […] of which our artists so wrongly deprive themselves.’Footnote ¹¹⁴

Emmanuel led by example the following year in his Sonatine IV sur des modes hindous (1920), executing like Roussel a superposition of ‘classical’ Indian and French forms. Conceptually, Indian ‘modality’ represents a short hop from the ‘folk modality’ of Emmanuel’s first and third sonatinas (1893, 1920). Nevertheless, this sonatina may represent the first deployment of Indian ‘modes’ in French music with no corresponding programmatic content. Emmanuel uses the scales harmonically, shifting kaleidoscopically from one melakarta to another. In the first movement (see Example 3), the opening twenty bars strictly adhere to the seven pitches of Grosset’s the fifty-first melakarta (also used by Roussel), on C; Emmanuel then introduces a modulation (bars 21–23), rotating new pitches in and old ones out until he can state a variant of the opening theme on D. The short development-like section features additional chromatic encroachments until the music is restored to the opening scale, on C, in a coda. Within sections adhering to a single melakarta, Emmanuel deftly manoeuvres between key areas: in the opening passage, for example, he uses A♭/G♯ as a pivot between local tonics on C and E. Thus, Emmanuel organizes a compact sonata form framework around the melakartas by creating a productive tension between the ‘modal’ pitch collections and local tonicizations, fleeting chromaticisms, and modulations.Footnote ¹¹⁵

Example 3.

Emmanuel, Sonatine IV sur des modes hindous, bars 1–26.

Here there is no need for ‘modal’ labels — the melakartas saturate Emmanuel’s score, as his subtitle promises. Instead, Emmanuel offers a short lesson in a preface (Figure 7): ‘The Hindus, who possess seventy-two melodic modes, do not practise anything like our chords. The movements which follow thus make free harmonic use of various scales borrowed from this very rich source.’Footnote ¹¹⁶ He then printed in staff notation the scales he used, defining them not by Indian nomenclature but in comparison to the familiar major, with adjusted scale degrees — a simple concession to his anticipated readers, perhaps, but by the same token, an assimilation of these ‘modes’ to the formal ‘language’ of European tonal practice. At the bottom of the page, Emmanuel dutifully cites Lavignac’s Encyclopédie, alongside Day’s volume.

Figure 7.

Emmanuel, preface to Sonatine IV sur des modes hindous (Durand & Cie, 1923).

Yet, as with Roussel, paratexts are performative; and beneath Emmanuel’s Indian modalism lurked more performance anxiety. Here, Emmanuel’s ambivalence tapped into an identity crisis between his scholarly background and artistic ambitions that beleaguered him throughout his career.Footnote ¹¹⁷ He exhibited these feelings in letters to Charles Koechlin over the 1920s: ‘You can imagine my own horror, and how they overwhelm me with shame, in treating me as a musicologist and professor! […] I am a musician, forced to be a professor, but for whom history is a reservoir of beautiful and living works, not an old drawer full of obsolete objects!’Footnote ¹¹⁸ Two years later: ‘I’ve made it to sixty, and all I have to show for it is this label of “savant” that follows me everywhere; musicologist; scholar; Hellenist etc.’Footnote ¹¹⁹ This frustration motivated Emmanuel’s paratextual utterance: in another candid letter to Koechlin from the mid-1930s, Emmanuel referred to his ‘Sonatina IV in chromatic hypolydisti; but to avoid seeming like an ossified scholar, I dressed it up with the label, ‘Hindu modes’; to be sure, the scale is one of the 72 Hindu (theoretical) modes.’Footnote ¹²⁰ So it transpires that Emmanuel was leveraging ‘Indian modes’ in his own performance of vocation. If his beloved Grecian modes were perceived as fusty, Emmanuel repackaged them as something fresh, playing upon India’s liminality in the French imaginary between ‘past’ and ‘other’. Having previously demonstrated India’s classicism through academic analysis, Emmanuel exploited an exoticist valence to garb his affinity for ancient history in something rather more novel; in other words, he performed exoticism.

The melakartas go to church

The years following Padmâvatî and the Sonatine saw a clear spread of melakarta modalism in French modernist music. Roussel, for one, would implement them again in a smattering of works, of which only ‘Krishna’, from Joueurs de flûte, op. 27 (1924), is programmatically marked as ‘Indian’.Footnote ¹²¹ But the most enthusiastic adoption of the melakartas came from a sphere which has been largely (if unduly) peripheral to narratives of modernist composition: the centuries-old French tradition of organ improvisation. Marcel Dupré (1886–1971) published his Traité d’improvisation à l’orgue in 1925, the year before he was appointed organ professor at the Conservatoire. In the treatise, Dupré proposed using the melakartas as source matter for the elaborate improvisations central to the French Catholic liturgy.Footnote ¹²² The ‘modes’ are discussed in the chapter on ‘Theme’, the starting point for the type of rigorously structured improvisations Dupré taught. Improvisers, he explained, must either select an existing theme, or devise a theme of their own; if the latter, the improviser benefits from familiarity with various ‘modes’ — the ‘sources of melody’.Footnote ¹²³ Dupré classifies the scales in ‘as natural an order as possible, so that they are easy to remember’: beginning with major and minor, he successively incorporates the ancient Greek diatonic modes, plainchant modes, and finally a range of what he called ‘exotic’ modes, under which the melakartas are grouped.Footnote ¹²⁴

Dupré’s classification of the Indian ‘modes’ recasts their significance from reconstituted artefacts of music history to germs of creative potential. Unlike the historiographical tendency (exemplified by Fétis, Woollett, Grosset, Emmanuel, and others) to situate Indian music toward a teleological inception marked as ‘ancient’ and ‘classical’, in Dupré’s volume ‘Hindu’ music — ‘the most interesting and most complete of exotic musics’Footnote ¹²⁵ — arrived toward the end of the ‘modal’ sequence, as an advanced technique of an organist’s training. Dupré prized ‘Hindu modes’ neither for dramatic associations they evoked (as deployed by Pierné, for example), nor for the ‘ethnic’ essence they embodied (as embraced by Roussel and Emmanuel), but rather for their ‘absolute’ musical qualities. Although Dupré categorizes the Indian ‘modes’ as ‘exotic’, his analysis reflects his understanding of them as a combinatorial system built on tetrachordal structures. After this demonstration, Dupré lists various ‘Gypsy’ and ‘Arabian’ ‘modes’ which are, he claims, ‘derived from Hindu modes’, followed by pentatonic (‘incomplete’) ‘modes’; in the terms of Segalen’s binary, his representation of India is more aligned with ‘exotic otherness’ than with ‘classical past’. (His brazen claim of derivation did not go unchallenged, however: Emmanuel, otherwise complimentary of Dupré’s Traité, corrected his colleague by sending him a clipping of ‘Le Corps de l’Harmonie’.Footnote ¹²⁶) But the greater significance of Dupré’s intervention is in encouraging organists, whatever their notions of the scales’ origins, to integrate the melakartas formally in contexts of instrumental music where they would be heard without any Indianist association.

Charles Tournemire (1870–1939) followed with his own organ improvisation treatise in 1936. Like Dupré, Tournemire addressed the melakartas only at the end of the treatise, as an advanced technique in the modern organist’s toolkit. Unlike Dupré, Tournemire did not break the modes down into their generative structures; instead, he (somewhat idiosyncratically) hand-selected twenty-eight of the seventy-two for inclusion (Figure 8).Footnote ¹²⁷ Extending the impulse to harness the melakartas’ creative potential, Tournemire suggested integrating the Indian scales into ‘classical’ organ forms, alluding to how improvisational practices bleed into compositional practices through implicit reference to his own work: ‘Before concluding all these reflections on the Art of Organ improvisation, we shall note here some ancient “scales” upon which an ingenious improviser may rely upon to build at once, as they wish: Chorales, Fantasies, Sonatas, etc.’Footnote ¹²⁸

Figure 8.

Tournemire, manuscript notes for Précis d’exécution de registration et d’improvisation à l’orgue, 1930s (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Ms. 26552) (author’s photograph).

Tournemire’s compositions from the surrounding years demonstrate precisely what he prescribed. He began weaving melakartas into his monumental cycles for organ and piano, such as L’Orgue mystique, opp. 55–57 (1927–32), 12 Préludes-poèmes, op. 58 (1931–32), and 7 Chorals-poèmes, op. 67 (1935), each of which bears explicit Catholic themes unrelated to India.Footnote ¹²⁹ Here, as in Dupré, the ‘modes’ served an artistically progressive agenda, often to enrich the harmonization and thematic development of plainchant borrowings, divorced from geographic emplacement or programme: describing his Préludes-poèmes, Tournemire aligned ‘new sonorities and the use of numerous Hindu modes’, concluding, ‘This is piano music on a grand scale.’Footnote ¹³⁰ Rather than adhering to single scales for extended periods like Emmanuel, Tournemire used them more changeably, as exemplified in the opening of his first prélude-poème (Example 4).

Example 4.

Tournemire, Prélude-poème no. 1, bars 1–7.

By shifting the construal of Indian ‘modes’ in their treatises from essential ‘Indo-European patrimony’ to a progressive alternative to tonality, Dupré and Tournemire (perhaps unwittingly) situated them chronologically closer to where they were ‘invented’ as devices: that is, not at the origin of an ‘Indo-European’ music history threading from ancient India to modern Europe, but rather as elements of a ‘modal’ lexicon which only became reified as such in nineteenth- and twentieth-century France. In other words, they represented ‘Hindu modes’ not as an early stage of musical ‘evolution’, but rather a neoteric element of French musical modernism. By valorizing the melakartas not as immanent ‘racial’ heritage but for their formal potential, they detached the products of a philologically mediated music historiography from the agenda of filiations and origins, reconfiguring those products for avant-garde, ‘purely musical’ ends. Yet the very conditions affording this rupture emerged from quasi-philological analysis itself, by which music was reverse-engineered into putatively generative ‘structures’. The abstraction and assimilation of the melakartas are thus outcomes of philology’s successful mediation: rather than melodies, borrowed verbatim in the manner of a set-piece, ‘modes’, decontextualized, disassembled, and reconstituted through stages of philological processing, infiltrate from within, embodying existing forms and structures.

If the Catholic liturgy seems an unlikely landing site for the melakartas, it helps to recall that the French organ tradition was central to the emergence of modalist discourses in the nineteenth century. Niedermeyer and d’Ortigue’s method of harmonizing plainchant using only the notes of the chant mode was the inspiration for Bourgault-Ducoudray’s ‘modal’ folksong harmonizations in the 1870s, and resonates in Dupré’s advice that students might experiment with the ‘assimilation of a number of these modes […] and then try to apply their natural harmony to them afterward, using only the notes of the mode.’Footnote ¹³¹ (Recall, too, Fétis’s conjecture of a common principle linking Indian ‘modes’ with ‘the plainchant tonality of our churches’.Footnote ¹³²) One could argue that upon entering the organ loft, the melakartas’ assimilation to French modalism came full circle.

‘Modal’ infinitudes — and limits

In his 1928 article ‘La Polymodie’, Maurice Emmanuel articulated his vision for music of infinite ‘modal’ variety — a sort of manifesto for the ‘république modale’ he had evoked nearly two decades earlier. Here, Emmanuel (notwithstanding his classical erudition) pits himself against two characteristics of the emergent ‘neoclassicism’. First, in coining the term ‘polymodie’, he set up a foil to ‘invasive polytonality’, unsubtly targeting Darius Milhaud who had touted (in the same journal five years prior) polytonality’s potential to enrich musical expression.Footnote ¹³³ For Emmanuel, polytonality only multiplied (literally) the entrenched ‘tyranny’ of the major scale. (The terminological similarity is potentially misleading, for Emmanuel defined ‘polymodie’ not as the superposition of multiple ‘modes’, but rather the free use of varied scales in concentrated succession, so that the ‘characteristics of the mode are perceived and savoured.’Footnote ¹³⁴) Second, Emmanuel repudiated ‘archaism’ and ‘pastiche’ — eyeing the ‘Retour à Bach’ — instead comparing the appeal of ‘polymodie’ to how ‘a painter may use the colours of their palette’.Footnote ¹³⁵ The Indo-Europeanist essentialism of ‘Le Corps de l’Harmonie’ is attenuated in ‘La Polymodie’ in favour of a broader global perspective, as Emmanuel referenced the ‘protodiatonic’, ‘pentaphonic scales’ of East Asia, indigenous North and South America, and the British Isles.Footnote ¹³⁶ With this gesture, Emmanuel tapped into another tenacious discourse of modalist historiography, which construed pentatonicism (as testified by European travellers in China and Scotland since the eighteenth century) as an early ‘precursor’ to heptatonic modality.Footnote ¹³⁷ Nevertheless, the melakartas remained pivotal in Emmanuel’s vision of ‘modal’ fecundity in modern French music. Now, he not only recapitulated the familiar construction of the seventy-two scales, but added seventy-two more of his own: first, by freezing the fourth scale-degree and diminishing the fifth (making thirty-six); and second, by augmenting the fourth and diminishing the fifth simultaneously so that they coincide on the same pitch (making thirty-six hexatonic scales) — thereby incorporating various ‘symmetrical’ scales, including the wholetone scale, into this generative system (Example 5).Footnote ¹³⁸

Example 5.

Table of scales, adapted from Emmanuel, ‘La Polymodie’, pp. 203–04.

One could be forgiven for objecting that Emmanuel’s advocacy for the free use of 144 distinct ‘modes’ seems a roundabout way to approach chromaticism in all but name. Emmanuel forestalls this objection by distinguishing between a dodecaphonic chromaticism — a supersaturation of the shopworn major scale (concomitant with the prolongation of tonal structures) unworthy of the Greek term — and a ‘chromaticism’ comprising the ad hoc use of heptachordal ‘modes’ structured around the framework of $ \hat{1} $ – $ \hat{4} $ – $ \hat{5} $ , that is, the ‘Corps de l’Harmonie’ derived from comparison of the melakartas with Greek modes.Footnote ¹³⁹

Emmanuel thus extended musical ‘modality’ doubly: to encompass a vast range of scale-patterns born of the generative combinatorics of the melakartas and their derivatives, and to accommodate the free interpolation of these scale-patterns among and alongside one another. This radically expanded modalism was plumbed throughout the 1920s and 1930s by Charles Koechlin (fellow acolyte of Bourgault-Ducoudray); Jean Langlais (student of Dupré and Tournemire); Jehan Alain (student of Dupré and Emmanuel); Marcelle Soulage (student of Emmanuel and Boulanger); and later on, André Jolivet (proud owner of a Lavignac encyclopaedia);Footnote ¹⁴⁰ to name only a few. Not all these composers mention the melakartas in their writings; yet their broad and fluid conception of ‘modality’ — illustrated with tongue in cheek by Alain’s prosaically titled miniature, ‘Sur le mode: Ré, Mi♭, Fa, Sol♭, La♭, Si♭♭, Do’ (Example 6) — manifests this broadened modalist discourse. The melakartas’ dissolution into formalist techniques and discourses shows the thoroughness of their adaptation and assimilation into practices of French modernism.

Example 6.

Alain, ‘Sur le mode Ré, Mi♭, Fa, Sol♭, La♭, Si♭♭, Do’, JA 42.

As if to illustrate just how generalized the idea of ‘Hindu modes’ had become, the melakartas found their most vocal promoter in a composer who, as far as I can discern, never in fact employed them in his compositions: Olivier Messiaen. The history of the melakartas offers insight into the synthetic ‘modes of limited transposition’ that Messiaen devised and (following d’Ortigue, Bourgault-Ducoudray, Emmanuel, and others) deployed both melodically and harmonically. This claim requires clarification, however, because from an analytical perspective, Messiaen’s modes are distinct from the melakartas in pitch content and structure. They are not heptatonic, for one; more precisely, instead of mobile scale degrees around a fixed pillar of $ \hat{1} $ – $ \hat{4} $ – $ \hat{5} $ , Messiaen’s modes consist of symmetrical rotations of intervallic patterns. Accordingly, musicologists have customarily viewed the ‘modes of limited transposition’ as extrapolations of the whole-tone and octatonic scales, which represent the first two modes of Messiaen’s collection. The long history of these two symmetrical scale-types in French and Russian composition has received considerable attention, and provides a clear genealogy of Messiaen’s practice which was embraced by Messiaen himself.Footnote ¹⁴¹ If these precedents are incontestable, however, I would suggest that the melakartas played a role in motivating Messiaen to elaborate a systematic, comprehensive, and generative ‘modal’ system. Their impact here came not in the form of individual heptachordal modal borrowings, but via the theoretical edifice of an exhaustive combinatorial scheme, by which the quasi-philological ‘structural’ analysis of modes was adapted into a generative procedure of modal synthesis. (After all, whether by way of his organ professor, Dupré, or his history professor, Emmanuel, Messiaen likely first encountered the melakartas not as readymade objects, but as combinatorial tetrachords from which the potential modes could be realized.) The completist approach Messiaen brought to the theorization of his own modes cannot but bring to mind that of the melakartas: the distillation of the whole-tone and octatonic scales to a structural principle, in order to develop an entire modal vocabulary on the basis of that principle, recalls Emmanuel’s invention of novel modes derived from his own reverse-engineered analysis of the melakartas.Footnote ¹⁴² And, like Emmanuel’s synthetic modes — and Veṅkaṭamakhin’s melakartas for that matter — Messiaen’s modes were devised as theory, only partially reflecting practice and generating a significant ‘supplement’.Footnote ¹⁴³

Messiaen’s preserved sketches offer scant evidence of precisely how he honed his modes while at the Conservatoire — a remarkable achievement, given how fluently he deployed them in student works like Préludes (1928–29). However, if the developmental links between the melakartas and Messiaen’s modal system remain open to interpretation, what is clear is that throughout the 1930s, Messiaen propagated the epithet of ‘Hindu modes’ with respect to others’ music and even his own. This is especially evident in his music criticism between 1936 and 1939: ten of Messiaen’s thirty-eight journalistic pieces collated by Stephen Broad reference Indian music in some way (without suggesting that he ever heard any), and he commended ‘Hindu modes’ in the music of Roussel, Tournemire, Langlais, Georges Migot, and Ivan Wyschnegradsky. It is not always clear that what Messiaen interprets as ‘Hindu’ was intended as such by the composer, although this very ambiguity reflects the melakartas’ assimilation to generalized ‘modalité libre’. Most dubiously, Messiaen ascribed ‘modal spices of Greek or Indian origin’ to his own composition teacher, Dukas, in the ‘Chanson des cinq filles d’Orlamonde’ from Ariane et Barbe-Bleue (1906) (in fact a folklike theme based on Dukas’s manipulation of plainchant).Footnote ¹⁴⁴ By hearing the passage as he does, Messiaen perpetuated, perhaps unwittingly, a lineage of hearing Dukas’s opera (and especially the ‘Orlamonde’ theme) as essentially ‘Aryan’.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ Elsewhere, Messiaen leverages Indian music against ‘lazy’ Parisian audiences: ‘if they heard pure plainchant, or an authentic Hindu rāga, would they hiss?’ In another article, he taunted, ‘Is our contemporary music, incomparable in the domains of counterpoint, timbres and instrumentations, to lag behind the rhythms and modes of the ancient songs of Greece or India?’Footnote ¹⁴⁶ Thus the frequent ‘Hindu modes’ in Messiaen’s journalism were not only descriptive of mounting predilections, but also an attempt to manufacture tastes for ‘modality’ within his milieu.

Furthermore, despite the note-for-note incommensurability between Messiaen’s modes and the melakartas, critics habitually mentioned ‘Hindu modes’ in reference to Messiaen’s own compositions, especially in the years before the ‘modes of limited transposition’ were widely published. In a 1938 review of Messiaen’s Poèmes pour Mi, Paul Bertrand described the work’s ‘great stylistic freedom: no bar lines, a modal language oscillating between plainchant and Hindu music.’Footnote ¹⁴⁷ Later that year, Messiaen’s colleague Daniel-Lesur wrote positively of Messiaen’s theological inspirations ‘curiously allied with a musical language based on Hindu scales.’Footnote ¹⁴⁸ In a glowing 1941 review of the Paris premiere of the Quatuor pour la fin du Temps, Serge Moreux described the work’s ‘melodic and metrical language which is both original and organized, born of meditations on ancient Greek metre and Hindu modality.’Footnote ¹⁴⁹ Even in 1960, Jacques Chailley referred somewhat oxymoronically to ‘Messiaen’s Hindu scales’.Footnote ¹⁵⁰

Messiaen, a savvy self-promoter, endorsed such associations early on, perhaps perceiving (as Emmanuel had) the positive connotations ‘Hindu modes’ continued to enjoy. In a programme note accompanying the premiere of his organ cycle, La Nativité du Seigneur (1936), Messiaen explained that the ‘form’ of the cornet solo in ‘Le Verbe’ — which adheres to an octatonic collection (Messiaen’s mode 2²) — was ‘related to Hindu rāgas, to sequences and graduals of plain-chant, and to ornamented chorales of J. S. Bach’.Footnote ¹⁵¹ When preparing his preface for the published score, Messiaen contemplated underscoring the originality of his modes — ‘Say perhaps in preface: these modes [of limited transposition] are unrelated to the great modal systems already known (Greek, plain-chant, China, India)’ — before crossing it all out in his own bout of paratextual anxiety, thereby allowing the association with India to stand.Footnote ¹⁵² This association served Messiaen well insofar as it remained positive in press criticism: for instance, the choice adjective ‘organized’ in Moreux’s review of the Quatuor — recalling Malherbe’s review of Padmâvatî — portrays Indian ‘modes’ in contradistinction to an archetypically unbridled ‘exoticism’, echoing Apollonian notions of classical ‘order’ long cultivated by French musicians and broadly promulgated in modalist discourse.Footnote ¹⁵³

In time, Messiaen would also incorporate the melakartas into his pedagogical curriculum, as reflected by their inclusion at multiple junctures in his Traité de rythme, de couleur, et d’ornithologie. Footnote ¹⁵⁴ In Volume 1, he began his chapter on ‘Hindu Rhythms’ with the melakartas, placing them anachronistically before the deśītālas.Footnote ¹⁵⁵ And in Volume 7, he charted his own quasi-natural history of scales, misleadingly (Eurocentrically) placing the melakartas along a teleology between pentatonic ‘Chinese modes’ and ancient Greek modes, at the opposite end from his own modal system (Table 1). By resituating the melakartas near the conceptual root of all manner of modal, tonal, and atonal history, however, he concealed the much shorter circuit — not a natural history on an evolutionary scale but a recent history of human interactions, imperial networks, and epistemological frictions — by which Indian śāstra shaped French modernism in the twentieth century.

Table 1

Modal Teleology according to Messiaen, Traité de rythme, DE couleur et d’ornithologie, VII, chapter 1, ‘Modes’

Chinese Modes [pentatonic]

Hindu Modes [including the melakartas]

Greek Modes and Plainchant Modes

Major Tonality [including analysis of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony]

The Dodecaphonic Series

Modes of Limited Transposition [including Debussy and the whole–tone scale]

Conclusion: An Indo-European Modality?

The case of Messiaen brings us, chronologically, to the early 1940s — by which point another trajectory of Indo-Europeanism had taken its most extreme turn: a death spiral from linguistic theory to racist ideology to murderous reality, nourished by social Darwinism and shepherded by the demagogues of the Nazi party to fascistic and ultimately genocidal ends. By this point, Aryanism had made another, far more visible, impact on French musical life, in the form of the explicitly antisemitic cultural agendas in Occupied Paris and Vichy, and manifested by the activities of, for example, the Groupe Collaboration.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ (Even here, however, India remained a thematic point of reference: consider Alfred Bachelet’s Sûryâ — a bombastic setting of Leconte de Lisle’s ‘Vedic hymn’ — which fed transparently into the Vichy regime’s Aryanist propaganda at its 1942 premiere.Footnote ¹⁵⁷) Yet if such activities may be dispatched as flagrant chauvinism, Indo-Europeanist philology’s embeddedness in the discourse and logic of modalism during the interwar period poses a trickier conundrum for musicological parsing: at what point (if any) may synthetic musical scales shed the ‘baggage’ of ideologies that contributed to or motivated their construction?Footnote ¹⁵⁸

In their magisterial introduction to Western Music and Its Others, Georgina Born and David Hesmondhalgh ask:

Gesturing toward an answer, the authors suggest:

If musical forms accrue meaning through convention, they also lend themselves to interpretive flexibility and reinvention. Certainly Indian ‘modality’, and the melakartas in particular, have harboured a superabundance of ‘discursive projections’ in French musi(cologi)cal contexts — whether as ‘local colour’ for theatrical settings; artefacts of an imagined ‘Aryan’ patrimony; or a systematic solution to the ‘problems’ of chromaticism through generative ‘modal’ synthesis tied into discourses of musical ‘Frenchness’. Yet the passivity in Born and Hesmondhalgh’s formulation (‘music hides …’) risks masking the agents and efforts behind ‘naturalization and aestheticization’. In the case of the melakartas in French music, these occurred through active, long-term processes of formalist abstraction and comparativist assimilation fuelled at points by colonialist and nationalist agendas — in other words, through philological mediation.Footnote ¹⁶⁰

Rather than seeking to resolve the issue of when assimilation or appropriation has taken place — philosophical and ethical questions that extend beyond the scope of this article — a more productive question with which to conclude this historical investigation might be: are there other, potentially reparative, histories that the case of the melakartas and the ‘république modale’ might accommodate? At the risk of overburdening the melakartas further, I wish to proffer one further discursive projection — or perhaps remediation. We have seen that contexts of comparative philology drove the impulse to align Indian, Greek, Roman, and French ‘modal’ systems (to the exclusion of many others) along an Indo-Europeanist narrative — thereby contributing to the outsized reception of the melakarta system in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century French constructions of a specifically ‘Hindu’ music. Yet it would be facile to conclude that the rationalized abstraction of theoretical pitch systems from contexts of musical performance — and, for that matter, the abstraction and reification of verbal roots from living language that represented the epistemological breakthrough of comparative philology itself — were wholly European impositions upon immutable Indian musicological and linguistic traditions. Recent historiographers of philology have shown that the breakthroughs of nineteenth-century comparative grammar — in particular the idealization and anatomization of language that facilitated the axes of comparative analysis — were crucially indebted to Indian linguistic methods. As Thomas Trautmann has shown, it was William Jones’s exposure to the scholarship of Pāṇini — who, two millennia prior to Jones’s lifetime, codified an internalist analysis of Sanskrit grammar, phonology, and morphology practically unrivalled in sophistication by any European linguistic counterpart before the twentieth century — combined, as Gildas Salmon adds, with Jones’s colonial mandate to implement ‘Hindu law’ and his own misguided efforts to assimilate Hindu culture to a Biblical framework, that afforded his formulation of an ‘Indo-European’ hypothesis.Footnote ¹⁶¹ Salmon seizes the opportunity, therefore, to reappropriate the term ‘Indo-European’, recasting the hyphen so as not to imply a fantasized unity of languages, cultures, or ‘races’, but rather a recent and relational ‘genealogy’ of nineteenth-century philological thought owing to a coalescence of Indian and European linguistic insights, an ‘Indo-European co-production’.Footnote ¹⁶² This move — a fundamental distribution of intellectual debt and agency — does nothing to exculpate the perpetration of colonial or epistemic violence under the auspices of which this knowledge exchange occurred, nor does it mitigate how ‘Indo-European philology’ was weaponized in Europe to reinforce, by means of linguistic ‘proof’, longstanding anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim prejudice. On the contrary, re-embedding philology in the culture(s) of its conception helps to recuperate colonial erasures, and thereby dismantle myths of universalizing rationalism as the unique province of post-Enlightenment European science.Footnote ¹⁶³

Could we draw inspiration from Salmon’s reformulation in thinking through ‘Indo-European’ modality in twentieth-century French music? One could not too unfairly claim on the basis of this study that the appropriation of ‘Hindu modes’ in interwar France, which has little to do with the pitch organization of Indian music in practice as we may so obviously observe today, was a by-product of a rationalist-imperialist imposition of European music-theoretical frameworks (say, the idea of a heptachordal diatonic pitch-collection oriented around a tonic and dominant, or the preoccupation with pitch structure as the salient parameter of cross-cultural musical comparison), grafted onto a racist fantasy of common ‘Indo-European’ cultural or ‘ethnic’ patrimony. From this perspective, scholars like Day, Grosset, and Emmanuel, trailed by the composers who engaged with their theories, wrenched the melakartas from their musical contexts, aligning them to a procrustean taxonomy in order to beg the question of their relation to ‘Greco-Roman modality’ and ultimately modern European tonality.

But perhaps, in an era when the coherence of ‘Western music’ is itself being dismantled in light of longstanding transnational (including colonial) networks and flows,Footnote ¹⁶⁴ it would be strategically productive to suggest another layer of complexity to an otherwise familiar narrative of musical transmission, interpreting it as more than yet another case of ‘intercultural’ representation or pastiche, by acknowledging how Indian music theorists participated in their own representation in ways that were suppressed both at the time and in subsequent European musical historiography.Footnote ¹⁶⁵ This would include Indian theoretical contributions to discourses of rationalist abstraction: after all, it would be just as wrong to ascribe the abstraction of pitch organization from performance solely to the artifice of European theorists, for example, as it would be to ascribe the idealization of Sanskrit solely to European philologists: the parametrization of music in terms of pitch organization, alongside rhythm, instrumentation, gesture, and ornament, for example, is a longstanding characteristic of musical śāstra.

We might go a step further, drawing again the parallel to comparative philology’s history: Jones, Bopp, and their philologist successors extrapolated Pāṇini’s linguistic-analytical breakthroughs — developed through emic analysis of Sanskrit, at once describing and defining a single, idealized language — to generate an axis of interlinguistic comparison that could operate beyond Sanskrit. Similarly, Day, Grosset, and above all Emmanuel endeavoured (albeit with perhaps less competency or rigour than Jones and Bopp) to extrapolate music-analytical principles from the melakarta system — developed through emic analysis of Karnatic music — to facilitate comparison between a range of musical practices beyond that of Southern India (albeit a predetermined range, since the ‘Indo-European’ category was already established). And it was this quasi-philological comparison of Greek scales with the melakartas that drove Emmanuel to generate, legitimate, and potentiate his own generative system of modes. Like Veṅkaṭamakhin’s system, the attractiveness of Emmanuel’s (and indeed Messiaen’s) ‘modes’ lay not in their accuracy as representations of existing practice, but rather in their conceptual comprehensiveness. And like their recent counterparts in South India, French modernist composers were inspired by the fecundity of musical potential generated by their ‘supplement’: completists in both spheres — including Mahā Vaidyanātha Śivan (1844–93), Kotīsvara Iyer (1870–1936), and Jacques Charpentier (1933–2017) — made a point of basing compositions upon all 72 melakartas.

To claim straightforwardly that French musicians appropriated ‘Hindu modes’ reinscribes a quixotic fiction of frictionless transmission that overlooks colonial violences and racialized discourses, perpetuating the illusion that ‘Hindu modes’ were stable objects while also erasing Indian musicians’ participation in their own representation. By expanding interpretive attention beyond musical works toward musicological epistemologies, as I have attempted to do in this article, these mediations are laid bare. But as a result of this process, it also becomes possible to imagine certain shared theoretical, and perhaps even practical, musical concerns between South Indian proponents of the melakarta system and French modalists: by reconceiving the melakartas in both their Karnatic and French forms not as individual heptatonic scales, but as a musicological and epistemological practice, we find a common rationalistic idealism, a systematic abstraction and exhaustively generative approach to ‘modal’ synthesis, which could and did inform and enrich Indian and French compositional experimentalism in the twentieth century. In this sense — following Salmon’s palimpsestic usage in the spirit of a more equitably relational historiography — perhaps we may speak of a transnational Indo-European modality as a force of French musical modernism.