Friends, we have travelled through North India and explored the magic of North Indian music touching the three pillars: melody through ragas, rhythm through talas, and drone through tanpura tuning.
We now enter a new dimension of music, the music of South India, known as Carnatic music. Carnatic music was founded by Purandara Dasa in the fifteenth century. Through time, many musicians and devotees studied this type of music with improvements in teaching and performing. In the eighteenth century, Venkata Mukhi Swami developed a system of classifying ragas called the melakarta system. In addition, the biggest component of the Carnatic sangit paddhati were Thiyagaraja, Samasastri, and Muthuswami Diksitar. They theorized the music as to what we see in its present form. The "trinity" as well as disciples before and after have written many compositions in ragams and thalams. Carnatic music today is becoming one amazing and complex field.
The first aspect to study is are the notes. Like in North India, there are seven main swars.
Sadjamam (Sa), Risabham (Ri), Gandharam (Ga), Madhyamam (Ma), Panchamam (Pa), Dhaivatam (Dha), Nishadam (Ni). Read "Sa Re Ga Ma Pa Dha Ni: The 7 Notes" thread for derivation of the names.
Like North Indian music, they have altered forms as vikrta swars. Their approach is a bit different. Even nomenclature of the swars are different.
Before we hit the difference, let us examine some postulates.
1) Sa and Pa are achal swars (not moveable)
2) Except for Sa, Pa, and ma, all swars have a flattened form.
3) Ma has a sharpened form.
This is all the similarities we shared in Hindustani classical. The sargam SO FAR will look like this using Hindustani notation.
S r R g G m M P d D n N S'
In Carnatic, Re and Dha can have a super sharpened form. Thus, Re and Dha have three forms. In this order, we can have (using Hindustani terms for now):
Sa
Komal Re
Shuddha Re
"Tivra" Re
Of course, there is no such thing as Tivra Re. But analytically, the sharper form of shuddha re is really komal ga. Look back at the sargam above.
Same goes with Dha. "komal dha, shuddha dha, 'tivra' dha" "Tivra dha" = komal ni.
Ga and Ni are allow three forms too. The shuddha ga, komal ga, and ati-komal ga.
Starting from ma, lets look backwards. Using Hindustani terminology...
shuddha ma
shuddha ga
komal ga
"ati-komal" ga
There is no such thing as a "note" "ati-komal ga". But analytically, the ati-komal note would be "shuddha re." Refer to sargam if there are any questions. This is true for Ni too. From high Sa, in the backward direction there is Shuddha Ni, komal ni, and "ati-komal" ni. Ati-komal ni is really shuddha dha.
RECAP: S and P are achal. The note m has two forms. R, G, D, and N have three forms. R and D have super-sharp forms and G and N have super flat forms.
Since four of the notes have three forms, we have to use a different way of naming these notes. Besides uppercase and lowercase, there is not a third way to record these notes.
Hence, we use numbers. In parenthesis is the HINDUSTANI name.
S
R1 = (komal re)
R2 = G1 = (shuddha re) ('ati-komal' ga)
R3 = G2 = ('tivra re') (komal ga)
G3 = (suddha ga)
M1 = (suddha ma)
M2 = (tivra ma)
P
D1 = (komal dha)
D2 = N1 = (suddha dha) (ati komal ni)
D3 = N2 = (tivra dha) (komal ni)
N3 = suddha ni.
S'
Hence our sargam is complete with SIXTEEN notes. I will stop here, as I am going to include very complex material in the next posting I do. đ
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