Sitar Quotes

Manhood stands tall and high, and becomes madness; The self takes leave of being and becomes ecstasy. When iron sated with blood embraces love, It turns into a bewildered sitar string. When time robs man of love and the loved one, He sees the beloved's glory and his own. How man sprouts when he sits down in dust! (Ghani Khan)
Hitherto he has found in Western music, in Bach above all, everything he needs. Now he encounters something that is not in Bach, though there are intimations of it: a joyous yielding of the reasoning, comprehending mind to the dance of the fingers. He hunts through record shops, and in one of them finds an LP of a sitar player named Ustad Vilayat Khan, with his brother - a younger brother, to judge from the picture - on a veena, and an unnamed tabla player. He does not have a gramophone of this own, but he is able to listen to the first ten minutes in the shop. It is all there: the hovering exploration of tone-sequences, the quivering emotion, the ecstatic rushes. He cannot believe his good fortune. A new continent and all for a mere nine shillings! He takes the record back to his room, packs it away between sleeves of cardboard till the day he will able to listen to it again. View quote
J. M. Coetzee
Along with the steady diet sitar, sarod, and tabla, several new instruments and players came to my attention. The first of these was Ustad Bismillah Khan, master of the sonorous double-reed instrument known as shehnai. This beautiful wind instrument, with finger holes and a bell-shaped opening at the bottom, sounded to me like a hybrid of soprano saxophone and oboe, and Bismillah Khan's tone very much influenced what Coltrane and Terry Riley would do with the soprano sax. Primarily used at weddings, the shehnai had been rejected as a classical instrument until Bismillah Khan elevated it to a higher status among listeners. His unique fingertips and sublime breath control produced the necessary range of sounds for raga making shehnai one of the more popular instruments in North India. View quote
Bismillah Khan
... my mother will settle on the rug and unclip the bellows, pulling and pushing them with a mild aquatic motion with her left hand, the fingers of the right hand flowering upon the keys, the wedding-bangle suspended around her wrist. Each time the bellows are pushed, the round holes on the back open and close like eyes. Without the body music is not possible; it provides the hollow space for resonance as does the curved wooden box of the violin or the round urn of the sitar. At the moment of singing, breath tips in the swelling diaphragm as water does in a pitcher. The voice-box itself is a microscopic harp, its cords tautening and relaxing with each inflection. View quote
Amit Chaudhuri