Raga is a Sanskrit word that has umpteen shades of meaning – from love, affection, desire and infatuation to entertainment, pursuit, disposition, poetry and music. This itself points to the complex nature of musical structure. In form, it does have a fixed number of permitted and prohibited notes following each other in pre-defined order. In practice, a musical Raga is like a fractal that despite a well-defined aspect is neither limiting nor limited. The artiste is free to float, riding atop the buoyant pattern. One finds a close parallal in theater where different actors in separate presentations portray a Hamlet or a Romeo in styles individual and unique, yet none of them ever twists the tale.
As ragas were transmitted orally from teacher to student, some ragas can vary greatly across regions, traditions and styles. There have been efforts to codify and standardize raga performance in theory from their first mention in Matanga's Brhaddesi (~10th c.) Some people approach raga performance from the Vedic philosophy of sound; others from a Sufi perspective; still others approach raga primarily as an aesthetic entity; others approach it as a kind of combinatorics.
Indian classical music is always set in raga, but all raga music is not necessarily classical. Songs range from being clearly in one raga or another to being in a sort of generalized scale. Many popular Indian film songs resemble ragas closely.
Raag is the modern hindi pronunciation used by hindustani musicians; Raagam is the south indian form used by carnatic music musicians.
Pandit Bhimsen Joshi - Raag Marwa - Part 1:
Part 2:
