The Raga Guide: Survey of 74 Hindustani Ragas

My goodness! What a comprehensive guide to ragas...and it's only really an introduction, since there are thousands of ragas. After a brief introduction to the form and its elements (12 pages), each raga is noted on two facing pages, and set out in western notation, annotated by srgmpdns as well. Four CDs are within protective plastic sleeves glued inside the front and rear covers, and each contain well over an hour of music. I copied them right to iTunes for reference on my laptop and iPhone. I would have appreciated their playing the ascent and descent notes and the melodic outline first, before launching into a brief performance--it's really that "by ear" reference I was hoping for. I don't read music. The ascent-descent, melodic outline and performance are notated with line and staff and srgmpdns methods. For the beginner, a simple recitation of the scale would have been appreciated. The book itself is printed on glossy, heavy weight stock, the kind you'd get in a coffee table photography book, and bound into a paperback book in a fashion that resists opening the book to lie flat. When using it flat, so it stays open while you have a sitar or guitar in your lap, the pages loosen and begin to fall out on the first use. This is an annoyance, to be sure, but not fatal to the purchase, because of the quality of the paper. The pages come out quite easily and cleanly and the book, pages, cover and all can be brought to an office supply store (or your company's printing or repro dept. for spiral binding. I brought the pulled out and separated pages and covers (without CDs) to Staples and for about $4.26 I had it spiral bound, the way it should have been from the beginning. So: an annoyance, but not so bad...besides, where else are you going to get this music laid out for you in such a fashion, except during a lifetime of study? You'll still need a lifetime to understand this complex and rich music, but the journey will be a guided one. Consider it a Fodor's Guide to the raga form.

This set is an overview of classical Hindustani Music of the Raga genere. The book gives one a great tutorial of ragas in general and then each specific piece corresponding to the 4 attached CDs. Also the book contains the libretto for vocal numbers in Hindi and translation of the same in English. The Hindi portion is of great help if one wishes to follow the vocal numbers closely.The artists are top notch. Folks familiar with this music will recognize Buddahdev, Hariprasad, Chausaria, and Shruti. The recoding quality is very good. I just can't get over the marvelous intonations of Shruti Sadoliker.The music is just plain beautiful with a timeless quality and "clean", viz., you get genuine instrumentation and vocals not a corrupt work using modern instruments. Each piece needs to be savoured and enjoyed for sheer beauty and the logic of the movements.One caveat. The packaging leaves lot to be desired as other reviewers have pointed out. But considering the price and what you get this is a tremendous bargain. If you wish to get a starting reference point into the beautiful world of Hindustani Ragas get this set pronto!Superb music. A must have.

I have grown up listening to Indian Classical music, and am learning to play the Harmonium. This book is a good distillation of knowledge about Indian Classical music. Following are the positive points that I thought make this book very good :1. Organized and structured - Ragas are organized Alphabetically and have indexes to map them to the CDs.2. Performances included in the CDs are very good3. Notations are provided for the performances on the CD. It could be made more useful if they included the lyrics for vocals below the notation. That would give more insight to the connection of notes to words.4. Information about each Raga is crisp yet detailed enough for a beginner.Overall good book to have in your collection as a supplement to your Guru's teachings.Cheers,Gourang

I bought this originally because I had bought other raga recordings and I wanted to know what the various raga types meant. (If you want the book, you have to order the CD set and not the MP3s, but if you just want to listen, the MP3s are fine.)But it's also really nice to listen to. I listen on shuffle play; the organization of the CDs is in alphabetical order, and it made me expect that no one would ever use this except as a reference. I think they should have grouped the ragas by time of day instead. (I would knock off part of one of the stars if I could, because of that.) This does the musicians a disservice, because the performances are beautifully done, and are not just academic demos.

I got into Indian classical music by way of Anoushka Shankar's cross-over music. After deciding that I liked this music, I bought this to get some theoretical underpinnings, for more complete music appreciation. I don't like many of the tracks, but that is my personal taste: I have not developed a liking for the vocal style, only the instrumental one. However, the explanations are helpful and accessible. It also helped me to discover a few favorite ragas I went out to look for on YouTube.

This is exactly what I was looking for. It is an explanation about Ragas and a list of Ragas to search for. And it arrives ahead of schedule, all the way from the UK.

This is a very useful tool for both, the scholar and the amateur. The author has managed to gather a lot of information in this nicely presented book and the recordings are beautiful. Not heavy or partial, as I've seen other raga books which favor one gharana or another. I personally find the recordings short, but this is understandable, what I usually do is listen to other recordings so as to get more of the nuances of each raga.