The archive
Instruments
Start with the sound. Each page explains how the instrument is made to speak, what it does in the music, and who to listen to — every musician linked here is one whose page we hold.
14 instruments
Plucked strings
Long-necked, fretted or fretless instruments whose sympathetic strings keep ringing under the melody. They carry most of the solo instrumental repertoire.
Sitar
A long-necked plucked lute, the best known solo instrument of Hindustani music.
36 musicians in the archive
Surbahar
A larger, deeper-voiced relative of the sitar, used for slow alap.
13 musicians in the archive
Sarod
A fretless plucked instrument with a bright, weighty metallic voice.
7 musicians in the archive
Rudra veena
The deep-toned stick zither of dhrupad, long treated as the most austere instrument in Hindustani music.
6 musicians in the archive
Bowed strings
Held against the body and bowed, these come closest to the inflections of the singing voice.
Struck strings
Strings struck with light mallets, giving a shimmering, fast-decaying tone.
Wind
Breath instruments, where the phrasing is bounded by the player's own lungs.
Percussion
The time-keeping instruments that carry tala, and a solo repertoire of their own.
Drone
Unmeasured, unhurried: the fixed reference pitch every other sound is tuned against.
Voice and vocal forms
Not instruments, but the sung genres the instrumental tradition takes its phrasing from. Listed here because the archive documents their practitioners the same way.