ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author describes three main ingredients in what her believes would be a synoptic 'classical Indian view' of musical experience. First, the ritual importance and power of music to preserve order and avert disaster, a notion which clearly figured in Vedic ritual and is, the author believes, one of the underlying ideas in the traditional concept of the occult powers of music. Secondly, the aesthetic model of the drama, rasa as extended to other art forms; the experience of art in this model leads to a supra-mundane flight of realization and enlightenment, where the entity, the raga especially, is really seen and apprehended for what it is. Thirdly, the physiological model found in some of the music-theoretical treatises, with music as a bodily representation of a spiritual necessity. From the listener's point of view, Indian music offers special possibilities for which the author suspects it may be hard to find parallels elsewhere.
