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Hindustani ragas on fixed keys that cannot glide between notes
Hindustani ragas on the piano, a keyboard that cannot glide between notes, played since the 2000s by a small niche of pianists such as Utsav Lal and Sonali Ray.
European keyboards reached India through colonial Calcutta. Ian Woodfield traces a Calcutta piano trade in the late eighteenth century, when London dealers treated India as a market for European instruments. The earliest known keyboard setting of Hindustani song is William Hamilton Bird's The Oriental Miscellany of 1789, a set of airs adapted for harpsichord. Some came from Sophia Plowden, who collected songs at courtly gatherings in Lucknow.
By the early twentieth century the piano stood in elite Bengali homes, where Jyotirindranath Tagore played it, for Western and light music above all. Raga playing stayed rare. Outlook India (2017) names the film composer Vanraj Bhatia, who played ragas on the piano when young, and Kantibhai Sonchhatra, who spent six decades exploring Hindustani music on it.
The same article dates a small revival to the 2000s. Utsav Lal has released raga albums since 2008, and his biography records him as the first to present the piano at the Harivallabh Sangeet Sammelan in Jalandhar, in 2012. Outlook also names the Carnatic pianist Anil Srinivasan.
William Hamilton Bird publishes The Oriental Miscellany in Calcutta, Hindustani airs adapted for the harpsichord and harmonised for European taste. It is the earliest documented setting of Hindustani melody for a European keyboard.
A documentary director recalls a 1975 Delhi recital by Abhijit Patranobis, who played the piano in an Indian classical manner. Such attempts stayed isolated before the 2000s.
Utsav Lal releases his debut, Piano Moods of Indian Ragas, on Times Music. Further raga albums follow, including Indian Classical Music on the Piano (2018) with Nitin Mitta on tabla.
In 2015 Lal records Raga Todi and Raga Bageshri on Geoff Smith's Fluid Piano. The album The Fluid Piano appears in July 2016; Smith and Lal present it as the first album made on the instrument.
A piano key sounds one fixed pitch, which the player cannot bend or slide while it rings. Christopher Barlow, who built the Fluid Piano prototype, explains why such fixed pitches fit Indian scales poorly. A pianist can retune strings before a concert, not during it: Utsav Lal has said he retunes a few notes in advance, such as the gandhar (third degree) he wants for Raga Yaman.
The closest parallel is the harmonium. Its critics said it could not glide and that its tempered tuning was wrong for Indian music, and All India Radio banned it from 1940 to 1971. Yet the scholar Matt Rahaim notes that almost every major twentieth-century khayal singer performed with one.
The Fluid Piano is a microtonal keyboard conceived and patented by the British composer and dulcimer player Geoff Smith. Christopher Barlow, a maker of early keyboards, built the prototype on Smith's commission, and it was public by November 2009. Each note has its own slider in place of the usual wrestplank bridge. A slider shifts its note by up to a semitone sharp or flat, so a pianist can preset any scale and change notes mid-performance. Strings can also be bent by finger.
Barlow describes the prototype as closer to a tangent piano than a modern grand: a wooden frame, two strings per note, just over five octaves and less power. Smith's site offers it handcrafted to order. In 2020 Lal said a single one existed, making it more a research subject than a working instrument, though it reaches the shrutis a raga needs with ease.
The American composer Michael Harrison, a disciple of the singer Pran Nath, played a harmonic piano, a grand that sounds 24 notes to the octave, and described his work as just intonation, a tuning built on pure harmonic proportions.
Follow this structured journey to master this discipline
Start with secure keyboard technique: even tone and controlled volume in every register. Train the ear alongside it. Sing the notes of a raga and find them on the keys, and listen for where the piano's fixed pitches sit against your voice. Utsav Lal's private teaching pairs advanced piano technique with ear training for Indian classical music.
Learn to recognise ragas with a Hindustani teacher before you play them: listen for the phrases that mark each one and the notes it dwells on, and sing them back. Lal's own teaching lists raga delineation and Indian rhythmic concepts, and his playing draws on dhrupad, the tradition of his main guru.
Lal describes his aim on the standard piano as creating the illusion of meend, the glide between notes, and Outlook India calls flowing from note to note a basic requirement of Indian music. Reviewers disagree on how far he succeeds. Study how singers and string players shape their glides, then decide how your phrasing on fixed keys can point towards them.
Hindustani instrumental performance opens with alap, an unmetered exposition of the raga. Jod follows, where a steady pulse enters, then jhala, a fast rhythmic close. A fixed composition (gat or bandish) comes next with tabla, set in a taal, a repeating rhythmic cycle such as Teental of 16 beats. Lal's 2025 piano concert followed this order.
Raga pianists perform solo, with tabla and in duet. Lal has recorded with tabla player Nitin Mitta and was billed in a vocal and piano jugalbandi (duet) with the singer Anurag Harsh at Carnegie Hall in 2015. A recital can close lighter: Sonali Ray was billed to play Raga Bhimpalasi in Teental, then a dhun, a melody drawn from folk or devotional song.
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