How to Use raga in a Sentence

raga

noun
  • Tamil south whose heady origins can be traced to the incense-and-raga days of the 1960s.
    — Tunku Varadarajan, WSJ, 23 July 2021
  • That, combined with a melody completely rooted in raga, is very compelling.
    — Vrinda Jagota, Pitchfork, 24 Oct. 2023
  • Each raga has specific religious meanings in the Sikh scripture.
    — Yannick Peterhans, USA TODAY, 8 Aug. 2023
  • Each chapter represents three hours of day or night following the Indian raga time cycle.
    — Arts Editor, Los Angeles Times, 27 Mar. 2026
  • There’s a meditative quality to the songs, which mix elements including raga, Americana and jazz.
    — Aaron Carnes, sacbee, 13 Apr. 2018
  • The work’s glacial pace, indebted to the drones of Indian raga, inspired Riley to experiment with stasis and repetition.
    — William Robin, New Yorker, 26 Aug. 2025
  • His playing drew on country, jazz, blues, surf-rock and raga; his compositions almost always set up a contrapuntal dialogue of guitars with distinct tones, colluding or contending.
    — Jon Pareles, New York Times, 29 Jan. 2023
  • The title track is an infectiously groovy, eighteen-minute improvisation for electric keyboards, in which quicksilver tendrils of melody appear and recede, shimmering in the style of Indian raga.
    — William Robin, New Yorker, 26 Aug. 2025
  • Listening can feel like stumbling through a landscape that is both brutal and stunning, comprising raga drone and haunted violin screeches as well as beautifully woozy stoner rock and idyllic birdsong, all colliding into unexpected forms.
    — David Glickman, Pitchfork, 14 Jan. 2026
  • While there’s no missing elements of maqam, free jazz, Turkish melody, Indian raga and more, the 80-minute suite’s achievement is building an epic journey that makes each ingredient far less meaningful than the sweeping whole.
    — Peter Margasak, Chicago Reader, 1 Feb. 2018
  • The 11-minute score, inspired by classic Indian music, begins like a raga finding its tones and shortly explodes like an orchestral supernova in a wash of microtones before returning to its quiet origins.
    — Mark Swed, Los Angeles Times, 12 Aug. 2022
  • The afternoon concert captured here—the first time anyone had performed these two ragas in Paris at the appropriate time of day—makes an effective showcase for his microtonal precision, ingenious phrasing, and penetrating timbre.
    — Peter Margasak, Chicago Reader, 10 Jan. 2018

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'raga.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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