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The various types of notation long used in Asian societies (Kaufmann, 1967) have hardly been used for reading while performing, but have functioned as references and perhaps, even more as aids to scholarly discussion of music (Hickmann, 1970, pp. 45–47). Along with Western music, mainly in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, came the idea of learning music visually rather than aurally. In Iran and India musicians critical of notation realized that it was more than a mechanical convenience, and that fundamental changes in the music system would result from its use.

While the Western musician learns the basic system through piano and theory classes, the Indian is likely to learn it by exposure to vocal music, even if he turns out an instrumentalist. At the knee of the teacher he studies a long series of exercises that exhibit the characteristics of raga and tala, melody and rhythm, and juxtapose the two in various combinations. These exercises and some simple introductory pieces constitute or include fundamental units such as rhythmic and melodic motifs that are later used in learned compositions and, more important, in the improvisation which forms much of the core of musical performance.

Ustad Allauddin Khan, father of modern development of North Indian classical music, is said to have mastered eighty instruments. Another musician was said to have practiced daily for sixteen hours without interruption. Of course there are also many legends about the ability of master musicians to affect the course of nature and history through their control over ragas. Stories about the power of music are almost universal, and familiar from the figures of Orpheus and Tamino, but in India the powers of the great teacher seem to be particularly stressed.