Applying Karnatic Rhythmical Techniques to Western Music

Rafael Reina

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317180128
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Etnomusicología

Most classical musicians, whether in orchestral or ensemble situations, will have to face a piece by composers such as Ligeti, Messiaen, Varèse or Xenakis, while improvisers face music influenced by Dave Holland, Steve Coleman, Aka Moon, Weather Report, Irakere or elements from the Balkans, India, Africa or Cuba. Rafael Reina argues that today's music demands a new approach to rhythmical training, a training that will provide musicians with the necessary tools to face, with accuracy, more varied and complex rhythmical concepts, while keeping the emotional content. Reina uses the architecture of the South Indian Karnatic rhythmical system to enhance and radically change the teaching of rhythmical solfege at a higher education level and demonstrates how this learning can influence the creation and interpretation of complex contemporary classical and jazz music. The book is designed for classical and jazz performers as well as creators, be they composers or improvisers, and is a clear and complete guide that will enable future solfege teachers and students to use these techniques and their methodology to greatly improve their rhythmical skills. An accompanying website of audio examples helps to explain each technique.

For examples of composed and improvised pieces by students who have studied this book, as well as concerts by highly acclaimed karnatic musicians, please copy this link to your browser: http://www.contemporary-music-through-non-western-techniques.com/pages/1587-video-recordings

Part I Description of Karnatic Concepts and Techniques

A: Foundations

The following seven chapters expound the main concepts, the primary building blocks from which every other technique, principle or concept – whether pedagogical or creative – is derived or drawn. Together these concepts constitute the essential pedagogical tools that every karnatic musician has to master before facing any ulterior technique or concept.

At the same time, each concept can already be used creatively, since a separation between pedagogical techniques and creative techniques is unimaginable to a karnatic musician; they are simply two sides of the same coin.

Chapter 1 The Tala System

DOI: 10.4324/9781315567402-1

Tala is the metric container, the framework wherein all the rhythmical concepts and techniques that will be explained in this book are utilised, and the common reference point for all music layers employed in karnatic music.

Simply put, tala can be translated as metre. The main (and far-reaching) difference with western metre is that karnatic talas are constructed following specific and strict rules, and that the inner construction derived from these rules really do have a decisive effect on many musical decisions as to where phrases or techniques should start or finish.

The main role of the tala is to provide regularity to all performers so that the continuous illusion of tempo and metre changes that the many techniques provide has a constant common denominator throughout a piece of music.¹ Indeed, except for a form called talamalika and operas or dance programmes, the tala and tempo in karnatic music never changes in a piece. This allows the proliferation of a multitude of techniques that work against the beat or tempo, many times in different layers. Therefore, karnatic musicians prefer this regularity and common reference that the tala provides rather than changing metres and tempos during a composition or improvisation.

1 See the ‘Concept of Cycle’ later in the chapter for a deeper explanation of the concept of ‘regularity’.

There are several types of tala in karnatic music, each with its own set of construction rules:

Suladi	Chapu	Shadanga	Shoshadanga
Janaka	Dhruvarupaka

The most common construction used for the last six centuries in South India is suladi, and shadanga is the one employed quite often by innovative musicians. Chapu talas are taken from folk music (they will be described at the end of this chapter). Shoshadanga, janaka and dhruvarupaka are ‘branches’ of shadanga and will be discussed in Chapter 22 on tala prastara.

Suladi Talas

The construction of suladi talas responds to combinations of three angas. A ready-made English translation for the word anga does not exist, ‘construction blocks of different size’ being the closest one can get to its actual meaning. The conventions pertaining to every anga are as follows:

• Anudrutam: 1 beat long. It can be used once or not at all. It has to be preceded or followed by a drutam, and it can never be the first or last anga of a tala.
• Drutam: 2 beats long. It can be used once, twice or not at all. In order to use it, at least one laghu has to be used in the construction of the tala.
• Laghu: This can be 3, 4, 5, 7 or 9 beats long. It can be used once, twice or three times. Once a number of beats has been chosen for a laghu, this number has to remain for every laghu of the tala (this is called jati laghu). Therefore, a laghu of 4 beats cannot coexist with a laghu of 3, 5, 7 or 9 beats. Each jati laghu has a specific name:

# Beats per laghu	Jati laghu name
Three	Tisra jati
Four	Chatusra jati
Five	Khanda jati
Seven	Misra jati
Nine	Sankirna jati

From these explanations it can be deduced that, hypothetically, the shortest tala would be 3 beats long (using only one laghu of 3 beats) and the longest would utilise 3 laghus of 9 beats each, 2 drutams and 1 anudrutam. This would produce a tala of 32 beats. For instance, a tala of 7 beats could be constructed in the following ways:²

L3 D D

L4 A D

L5 D

L7

2 From now on, the following abbreviations will be used: Laghu: L, Drutam: D, Anudrutam: A These abbreviations differ from those used in South Indian books which, personally, I find it too cumbersome.

However, it could not be constructed following these patterns:

L3 A L3, because there is no drutam to precede or follow the anudrutam;

L5 A A, because there are 2 anudrutams (1 is the maximum allowed), and one of them is the last anga;

D A D D, because there are 3 drutams (2 is the maximum) and no laghu;

L4 L3, because there are two different jati laghus.

However, just by following the rules scrupulously hundreds of talas could mathematically be constructed by combining these three angas. Yet, this is not the case in karnatic music.

Categories

In the sixteenth century a composer and performer named Purandaradasa (1484–1564) organised into concrete systems talas and ragas that at the time existed in rather confused ways and varied, sometimes radically, almost from village to village.

During his time the shadanga talas were the ones used commonly but, according to various sources, developments took place in such a way that made these talas unmanageable.³ Purandaradasa decided to unify the extreme differences into one system that could be known to all musicians, and invented seven categories or combinations out of the myriad possibilities that the theory explained above co...