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''Sarangi'' music is vocal music. It is quite impossible to find a ''sarangi'' player who does not know the words of many classical songs. The words are usually mentally present during performance, and performance almost always adheres to the conventions of vocal performance including the organisational structure, the types of elaboration, the tempo, the relationship between sound and silence, and the presentation of '' Khyal '' and '' Thumri '' compositions. The vocal quality of sarangi is in a quite separate category from, for instance, the so-called ''gayaki-ang'' of Sitar which attempts to imitate the nuances of ''khyal'' while overall conforming to the structures and usually keeping to the gat compositions of instrumental music. Most ''sarangi'' players learn to sing before they begin to play. In the words of Sir Yehudi Menuhin: "The sarangi remains not only the authentic and original Indian bowed stringed instrument but the one which... expresses the very soul of Indian feeling and thought." Carved from a single block of wood, the ''sarangi'' has a box-like shape, usually around two feet long and around half a foot wide. The lower resonance chamber is hollowed out and covered with parchment and a decorated strip of leather at the waist which supports the elephant-shaped bridge. The bridge in turn supports the huge pressure of approximately 40 strings. Three of the strings – the comparitively thick, tight and short ones – are bowed with a heavy horsehair bow and "stopped" not with the finger-tips but with the nails, cuticles and surrounding flesh (talcum powder is applied to the fingers as a lubricant). The remaining strings are resonance strings or ''tarabs'' (see: Sympathetic Strings ), numbering up to around 35, divided into 4 different "choirs". On the lowest level are a diatonic row of 9 tarabs and a chromatic row of 15 tarabs, each encompassing a full octave plus 1–3 extra notes above or below. Between these lower tarabs and the main playing strings lie two more sets of longer tarabs, which pass over a small flat ivory bridge at the top of the instrument. These are tuned to the important tones (''svaras'') of the raga. A properly tuned sarangi will hum and buzz like a bee-hive, with tones played on any of the main strings eliciting echo-like resonances. Famously difficult to play and tune, the sarangi has traditionally been used primarily for accompanying singers (shadowing the vocalist's improvisations), but in recent times it has become recognised as a solo instrument used for full Raga development – in part thanks to the work of Ram Narayan . Other current celebrated performers include Sultan Khan and Sabri Khan; eminent maestros of the past have included Ustad Bundu Khan, Ustad Md. Sagiruddin Khan and Pandit Gopal Mishra. The repertoire of sarangiyas is traditionally very closely related to vocal music. Nevertheless, a concert with a solo ''sarangi'' as the main item will probably include a full-scale raga presentation with an extensive alapa (the unmeasured improvisatory development of the raga) in increasing intensity (alapa-jhor-jhala) and several compostions in increasing tempi. As such, it is on a par with other instrumental styles such as for sitar, sarod, bansuri. This full-fledged raga development has its roots in the Dhrupad style of raga presentation. The ''sarangi'' is also a traditional stringed musical instrument of Nepal , commonly played by the downtrodden Gaine ethnic group. Noted sarangi players of Nepal are the late Jhalak Man Gandarbha and Tirtha Bahadur Gandarbha . SEE ALSO EXTERNAL LINKS
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