Nasir Moinuddin Dagar

Moinuddin Dagar was born in Alwar, Rajasthan, the eldest son of Nasiruddin Khan of the Dagar lineage. He was initiated into dhrupad by his father, whose training was strict and rigorous, and was seventeen when his father died in 1936. He supported his mother and five younger siblings by working as a teacher while receiving further training in Jaipur from his uncle Riyazuddin Khan; he also learnt from his uncle Ziauddin Khan.

He left Udaipur after his training and moved to Bombay in 1947, where he and Aminuddin began performing. The brothers had first sung on radio in 1942, and through the 1940s rose as the Senior Dagar Brothers, reviving the duet, or jugalbandi, as a harmonious partnership rather than a contest between two singers. In 1955 they founded the Bharatiya Sangeet Vidyalay in Benares, then moved to Delhi to teach at the Bharatiya Kala Kendra, where Moinuddin headed the music department for many years. In 1966 the brothers moved to Bombay and founded the Bharat Sangeet Vidya Bhavan.

Their European tours of the 1960s, under the UNESCO banner at the invitation of the musicologist Alain Danielou, took them to Berlin, Venice and Paris, with the November 1964 Paris concert recorded and released by UNESCO. Moinuddin suffered a heart attack while touring Europe, and complications from it led to his death in Bombay on 24 May 1966. The Times of India called his death in middle age a severe blow to the dhrupad tradition. In 1975 Aminuddin founded the Ustad Nasir Moinuddin Dagar Dhrupad Sangeet Ashram in Calcutta in his memory.

Those who had heard their father said Moinuddin's singing came closest to his. His style was the more flamboyant of the two, marked by sudden turns in the melodic improvisation and by a command of the three kinds of head resonance — nasika, anunasika and nirranunasika — on the upper notes. His rapid ghamak patterns in the faster part of the alap drew the accusation that he had taken something from khayal; he answered that the patterns were syllabic, and so not the aakar taans of khayal at all. Contemporary sources give his birth year as 1919, while the Oxford Encyclopaedia of the Music of India gives 12 May 1921.

His style was marked by a certain flamboyance, with sudden unexpected turns in his melodic improvisation. He had a mastery of the three kinds of head resonance — nasika, anunasika and nirranunasika — which he used with flair on the higher notes such as ni and sa. His use of rapid ghamak patterns in the faster part of the alap drew the accusation that he had adopted elements of khayal, which he answered by pointing out that the patterns were syllabic and unlike the aakar taans of khayal. In performance he took the higher-pitched part, dazzling listeners with ornamentation in the upper octave while his brother drew the audience into the lower register.