Ripples on the brain

I attended the second session of the Music Forum last Sunday. (The details of the first session can be found here). The topic for the day was “Identifying the raaga”. The session was held in Raga Sudha Hall in Luz again and Dr. Sunder, Mannakoil Balaji and Smt. R. Vedavalli were the speakers for the day.

The following were the takeaways for me from the session.

1. A raaga should be associated with the lakshana or the unique character associated with the it. Raagas were, for example, associated with specific moods etc. Even a century ago, raagas were taught by making the students learn a lot of krithis in the same raaga and then asking them try singing alaapanas as they understood it. Some arbitrary corrections were made (like “you cannot shake at this position”, “you cannot continue in this swara for a long time” etc.), but there was no set structure in black and white.

2. Aarohanam and avarohanam can, at best, only be a representation of the raagas and cannot define the raaga structure. They were not even used to teach the raaga a century ago. That is, in fact, the reason why though a film song might traverse a particular sequence of swaras that conform to a raaga, it may not be considered to be in that raaga as it may miss out on the raaga lakshana (by not employing the signature gamakas at specific swaras).

3. Musicians should sing the signature swara phrases at the beginning of the alaapanai itself so that audience can identify the raaga right away. Smt.R.Vedavalli demonstrated how raagas with difference in just one swara can be distinguished even when the artiste doesn’t traverse the said swara by identifying the characteristic gamakams in the other swaras or characteristic swara phrases. She used some raaga pairs (I don’t exactly remember which ones; were they shankarabaranam and kalyani, todi and shankarabaranam, purvikalyani and pantuvaraali?) to substantiate her point.

4. The katapayathi scheme of classification of melakartha raagas were a recent innovation. A lot of raagas existed even before the scheme came in vogue and the names of these raagas tweaked to conform to this scheme (In this scheme, the melam number and hence the swaras of the raaga can be identified using the name itself). Hence kalyani became mechakalyani and todi became hanumanthodi.

5. Dr. Sunder mentioned 3 ways in which rasikas can approach identification of raagas: (i) From known to unknown, (ii) from unknown to known?? and (iii) from the aarohanam and avarohanam. I don’t exactly remember if these were the 3 ways (I didn’t take any notes during the session, so some details may be wrong because of my screwed memory).
From known to unknown: Listen to a lot of krithis in a particular raaga and then see if you can identify the raaga when you hear an alaapanai. After all an alaapanai should consist of phrases of different krithis of a raaga
From unknown to known: Listen to the alaapanai of a raaga for 45 minutes continuously and let your ears get used to the prayogams (usage), pravagams (traversals) and gamakams (characteristic shake at specific swaras).
From aarohanams/avarohanams: Don’t remember what he said here.

6. Balaji gave the theoritical details of the Shankarabaranam raaga, giving its melam number 29 (in the scheme, the raaga is called Dheerashankarabaranam), its aarohanam/avarohanam, famous krithis in the raaga and the janya raagas formed out of this melakartha.

My impressions of the session:

The objective of music forum is to “demystify Carnatic music”. Though the first session was a step ahead towards this objective, I don’t think the same can be said about this session. There were a lot of places when I felt completely lost and couldn’t follow the discussion that was on.

1. I think the introduction for the session by Dr.Sunder wasn’t crisp and tight. It was loose and this allowed a lady to put some useless questions on shruthi bedam. The subsequent discussions completely put me (and I suppose laymen like me) off.

2. I think the forum should decide on its target audience. If they want complete novices and laymen, they should avoid somethings during the session. Like Smt. Vedavalli singing an alaapanai and asking the audience to identify the raaga at the beginning itself. After she received the response from a section of the audience , she claimed the audience knew enough while people like me were in the dark. I feel the session cannot be so much interactive if novices are present since the discussion invariably proceeds in a tangential direction.

3. Though the concept of raaga is abstract (in spite of giving it some structure) and there cannot be a single way to learn it, the speakers should not try to make it more abstract. I don’t need to attend a session to know that I have to listen to a lot of music to distinguish and identify the raagas. The speakers should come up with a way to help audience identify the raagas. They can probably list some important raagas in which 70-80% of the krithis are sung in concerts and display the characteristic swara phrases in the raagas. Though an attempt was made towards this, I don’t think it was successful.

4. Lastly, a lot is being said about audience leaving in between in a concert and this affecting the concentration of the singers. In my opinion, each person has several reasons to leave the concert in between. A typical concert goes on till 9:30pm-10pm and most people cannot obviously sit through the entire period. Also, some concerts begin very late, thanks to elaborate felicitation functions and speeches preceeding them. All live performances (concert, plays etc.) have the problem of audience leaving midway. I think the artistes should take it as a given and proceed with their concert.