DESCRIPTION:
- Tabla: Bharat Kamat. Harmonium: Sudhir Nayak.

Shuddha Kalyan (evening raag) is a popular, though difficult, raga of the Kalyan parent scale. The raga is pentatonic in the ascent and heptatonic in the descent.
Ustad Vilayat Khan, the senior most of the instrumentalists surveyed, remains remarkably close to the near-pentatonic experience of the raga throughout the concert. In the low-density melodic movements, he hardly ever executes the Ma/Ni swaras on the frets, always using the meend [string deflection] technique to approximate the vocalist’s subtlety. In the high-density movements, the Ustad sparingly uses the Ni fret supported with a plectrum stroke, but almost never the Ma fret. The dilution of the raga’s near-pentatonic character in Vilayat Khan’s Shuddha Kalyan, if any, [Example: S’NDPGRS] does not go beyond a near-hexatonic experience.
According to Indian classical music tradition, ragas can be experienced in all their splendour only when played at a designated time. It is believed that there is a connection between the dominant mood that a raga invokes and the bodily and psychological changes that occur within us as the day progresses and time zones change. Of course this has to do with the evolution of music over centuries when musicians and their listeners lived in proximity to the natural world, its sights, sounds and rhythms.

Taking a cue from these associations, the NCPA has organised Chaturprahar, a concert that divides the day into three-hour sections known as prahars or time zones. The focus is on the 12 hours from dusk to dawn, a time associated with an exquisite set of ragas that reflect subtle shifts in our emotional responses at different times.