Carnatic Music: The Structured Art of the South

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Carnatic music is the classical tradition of southern India, centred on Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana and Kerala. It shares its ancient theoretical inheritance with Hindustani music of the north, and the two use the same seven note names and the same core idea of raga and tala. They nonetheless sound entirely unalike, and the reasons are worth setting out precisely, because they are not simply matters of taste.

The first difference is that Carnatic music is overwhelmingly a vocal tradition, even when performed on instruments. Almost all instrumental playing is understood as an imitation of singing, and instrumentalists learn the texts of the songs they play. The second is that the repertoire matters far more. A Carnatic concert is built around composed pieces with authors, titles and devotional texts, and improvisation, while extensive and highly prized, is organised around those compositions rather than replacing them. The third and most audible difference is gamaka: in Carnatic practice notes are not held steady and then decorated but are intrinsically inflected, oscillating, sliding, approached obliquely. A Carnatic note is a shape rather than a point, and a scale played on a keyboard conveys almost nothing about the raga it belongs to.

Purandara Dasa, the Trinity and the melakarta grid

Purandara Dasa, a Kannada devotional poet and composer of roughly the fifteenth to sixteenth century, is honoured as the father of the tradition, chiefly for organising its pedagogy. The graded exercises that every beginner still starts with, the sarali varisai and the introductory geetams, are attributed to him, as is the decision to teach them in the raga Mayamalavagowla, chosen because its symmetrical intervals train the voice efficiently.

The tradition's central repertoire comes from three composers born within a few years of one another in the Kaveri delta around Tiruvarur, active in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and known collectively as the Trinity. Tyagaraja composed primarily in Telugu, mostly in devotion to Rama, and left an enormous body of songs of great melodic directness; his five Pancharatna kritis are sung in unison by hundreds of musicians each January at the annual commemoration at Thiruvaiyaru. Muthuswami Dikshitar composed in Sanskrit, in a slow, weighty, elaborately constructed style, often in groups of songs addressed to the deities of particular temples. Syama Sastri, the least prolific of the three, is admired for rhythmic sophistication and for songs to the goddess. Earlier and later figures matter too, among them Annamacharya in Telugu, Swathi Thirunal in Kerala and the Tamil composers whose work anchors the tradition's Tamil-language repertoire.

Carnatic theory is more systematically organised than its northern counterpart. The melakarta scheme, developed from the work of the seventeenth-century theorist Venkatamakhin, generates seventy-two parent scales by permuting the variable notes exhaustively, with each scale containing all seven degrees in ascent and descent. The seventy-two are named according to a mnemonic scheme in which the first syllables of the name encode the scale's serial number, so a trained musician can derive the notes from the name alone. Every other raga, and there are hundreds in use, is classified as a janya or derived raga of one of the seventy-two. The system is elegant, comprehensive and, as its critics observe, partly theoretical: many melakarta scales exist mainly to complete the grid and are rarely performed.

Rhythm is equally systematised. Seven tala families, each available in five jatis or subdivisions, yield thirty-five talas, and applying five gatis multiplies them further. In practice a handful dominate: Adi tala with eight beats, Rupaka, and the asymmetrical Misra Chapu of seven and Khanda Chapu of five. Audiences keep tala visibly with a codified set of hand movements, beats, finger counts and waves, and the sight of a hall counting along is one of the tradition's distinctive features.

The concert, and its instruments

The modern concert format, the kacheri, was largely codified in the early twentieth century, with the singer Ariyakudi Ramanuja Iyengar generally credited with fixing its shape for a ticketed, time-limited audience. A concert opens with a varnam, a compact piece that establishes the singer's control, then proceeds through kritis of increasing weight. Improvisation takes several defined forms: alapana, an unmetred exploration of the raga; niraval, in which a single line of text is repeated and melodically re-imagined within the tala; and kalpanaswara, improvised passages sung in solfege syllables returning precisely to a fixed point in the composition. The centrepiece of a long concert is the ragam tanam pallavi, an extended structure in which the musicians build a single line into a display of melodic and rhythmic ingenuity. Percussionists then take a solo, the tani avartanam, before the concert closes with lighter devotional pieces.

The instruments include the Saraswati veena, a large plucked lute long made in Thanjavur; the mridangam, a double-headed barrel drum that is the principal percussion; the ghatam, a tuned clay pot; the kanjira frame drum; the morsing, a metal jaw harp; and the nadaswaram, a long double-reed shawm played with the tavil drum at temples and weddings, an outdoor tradition with its own hereditary lineages. The most striking instrument is the violin, adopted from European contact around the turn of the nineteenth century and so completely absorbed that it is now the standard melodic accompaniment, played seated on the floor with the scroll braced against the ankle to free the left hand for the sliding gamakas the music requires.

Season, sabha and argument

The tradition's calendar peaks in Chennai in December and January, when the Music Academy and dozens of other sabhas stage hundreds of concerts in what is usually described as one of the largest classical music festivals anywhere. Its social history is contested and openly debated. Hereditary performing women of the devadasi communities, who carried much of the repertoire, were displaced by early twentieth-century reform movements, and the modern concert tradition became heavily associated with Brahmin performers and audiences. Musicians including the singer and writer T. M. Krishna have argued publicly that this history shapes who gets heard today, and the argument continues within the tradition rather than outside it.

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