Why can’t Westerners sing Indian classical music?
We can all hear that mostly Westerners can’t but I asked Shankar Ramani, who sings in the Karnatic style, and who happens to be one of the best Indian singers currently living in the USA. He said: Westerners learn and perform their music through discrete notes and not as curvy phrases or modulations. In Indian music, notes are very important but when it comes to combining them, the curvy phrase or modulation within the tune concerned is focused on rather than constructing the phrase mentally through a combination of the notes that represent them. Therefore, one can say that Indian classical music is largely analog in nature or a continuous stream of notes of high resolution, whereas Western music is very often a skillful or deft rendition of a combination of notes. So when Westerners learn and sing Indian music they seem them more as straight lines constructed from the notes, whereas the Indian Classical musician (after the initial learning stage) learns how to render the phrase or tun
