Violin

In gayaki ang playing, the violinist joins notes into a continuous line, often through meend, a smooth glide between notes that can touch other notes of the raga on the way. The reasons most often given for the violin's fit with vocal music are its wide range and fretless fingerboard, which let the player inflect pitch freely.

Kala Ramnath has described relearning her fingerings phrase by phrase to match her vocal guru's phrases, working to hide each finger change. One study of her playing reports that she often takes a slow glide on a single finger, then flattens the top joint so the next finger can take over mid-slide and the hand lands where the phrase needs it.

The same study reports that earlier Hindustani violinists more often played as accompanists or in gatkari style, with separately placed fingers. In 2014 a doctoral study at the University of Arizona described published writing on this technique as almost absent beyond a few short interviews.

In gayaki ang playing the bow often follows the words of a bandish, a composed khayal song with text. The study of Kala Ramnath's playing cited above reports that she maps bow changes to the syllables of the composition, so the melody carries through each change of direction, and that she can sing the pieces she plays. In interview she describes working to make a change of bow direction inaudible in mid-phrase.

Improvised passages take their own bowing. The same study describes sargam tans, fast runs on the note names, played with a separate stroke for each note. Boltan, a run on the words of the composition, comes through in the rhythm of the bow. For tarana, a song form sung on vocables, she uses spiccato, a bouncing stroke. The study presents these as one artist's solutions.

Gatkari, the stroke-based style, keeps a place in the University of Rajasthan's violin degree. Its second-year students define types of gatkari bowing and prepare fast khayal compositions or gats.

Hindustani violin tuning starts from Sa, the tonic, which has no fixed pitch. Each performer sets Sa against a drone and tunes the open strings in relation to it, so the tuning moves when Sa moves.

Indian violin tuning has a Karnatak background. Baluswamy Dikshitar is credited with adapting the violin for Karnatak music near Madras around 1800, tuning it in alternating fifths and fourths: Pa-Sa-Pa-Sa from the highest string, with Pa the fifth above Sa. A thesis on Hindustani violin treats his changes as the basis of Indian technique, and flags the credit to one man as a tradition passed from account to account. That history does not show how Hindustani violinists set up their instruments today.

The sources behind this page set no single Hindustani tuning or pitch. Kala Ramnath has described fitting viola strings and tuning A-D-A-D, lower than many Indian violinists tune, to suit solo concerts of two to three hours.