Rāga

A Raga (IAST: rāga), Raag or Ragam, literally means "coloring, tingeing, dyeing". The term also refers to a concept close to melodic mode in Indian classical music.Raga is a remarkable and central feature of classical Indian music tradition, but has no direct translation to concepts in the classical European music tradition. Each raga is an array of melodic structures with musical motifs, considered in the Indian tradition to have the ability to "color the mind" and affect the emotions of the audience.

A raga consists of at least five notes, and each raga provides the musician with a musical framework. The specific notes within a raga can be reordered and improvised by the musician, but a specific raga is either ascending or descending. Each raga has an emotional significance and symbolic associations such as with season, time and mood. The raga is considered a means in Indian musical tradition to evoke certain feelings in an audience. Hundreds of raga are recognized in the classical Indian tradition, of which about 30 are common. Each raga, state Dorothea E. Hast and others, has its "own unique melodic personality".

There are two main classical Indian music traditions, North Indian (Hindustani) and South Indian (Carnatic), and the concept of raga is shared by both.Raga are also found in Sikh traditions such as in Guru Granth Sahib, the primary scripture of Sikhism. Similarly it is a part of the qawwali tradition found in Sufi Islamic communities of South Asia. Some popular Indian film songs and ghazals use rāgas in their compositions.

The Sanskrit word raga has Indo-European roots, as *reg- which connotes "to dye". It is found in Greek, Persian, Khwarezmian and other languages, in variants such as "raxt", "rang", "rakt" and others. The words "red" and "rado" are also related.

Rāga (Sanskrit: राग), states Monier Monier-Williams, means "the act of colouring or dyeing", or simply a "colour, hue, tint, dye". The term also connotes an emotional state referring to a "feeling, affection, desire, interest, joy or delight", particularly related to passion, love, or sympathy for a subject or something. In the context of ancient Indian music, the term refers to a harmonious note, melody, formula, building block of music available to a musician to construct a state of experience in the audience.

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