A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to present a Carnatic vocal concert at the Christian Ecumenical Centre, Whitefield, Bangalore. The audience consisted almost only of visiting American students. I prepared a note on the evening's programme for them. I thought some of you may find it interesting.

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Welcome to this evening’s Carnatic classical music programme!

There are two broad styles of Indian classical music. There is ‘Hindustani’ or north Indian classical music and then there is ‘Carnatic’ or south Indian classical music. In each of these styles, we could have a vocal music concert featuring a vocal artiste accompanied by two or three instruments. Or we could feature a main instrumentalist accompanied by the accompanying instruments.

We are happy to present a Carnatic vocal music performance today. The duration of a full-fledged Carnatic music concert is usually three hours. We will try and show you its salient features in one hour.

On the stage you will see the vocal musician at the centre. To his left is a violinist and to his right is an artiste playing the ‘mridangam’. Behind the vocal musician, at an angle, is an artiste playing a ‘morsing’.

The violin is of course well known to you. It is curious that a Western instrument like the violin has become an indispensable part of Carnatic music. The mridangam is the main Carnatic percussion instrument. The mridangam may or may not be accompanied by a secondary percussion instrument. The secondary percussion instrument could be the morsing, which you see today, or a ‘ghatam’ or a ‘khanjiram’.

There is another ancient, elegant instrument called the ‘tambura’ which is used to sound the pitch at which the music is performed. Today, if you peer carefully at the stage, you will see a small white box which is the digital avatar of the tambura.

Let us surprise you with a factoid. We’ve never rehearsed before. In fact, some of the artistes you see are meeting each other for the first time in their lives. And yet, here we are! This is possible because of the very nature of Carnatic music.

Carnatic music rests on a tripod of melody (‘raaga’), rhythm (‘taala’) and lyrics (‘saahitya’). It is an amazing blend of rigour and freedom, structure and innovation, of the memorized and the extempore. You will listen to several songs (‘kritis’) today. Each song has lyrics that are set to a raaga and a taala. The songs are compositions of various composers, the most significant of whom lived as near contemporaries in the 18^th century in the present day Indian state of Tamil Nadu. The songs are composed in Sanskrit and also in the South Indian languages of Telugu, Tamil, Kannada and Malayalam.

A Carnatic musician learns kritis by memorizing them. Considering the antiquity of the art form, written notation is a relatively new thing, coming widely into vogue only in the last few decades. It is still considered bad form to use written notation in a concert.

There are hundreds of raagas. For the sake of convenience, they are classified into 72 ‘parent’ raagas with seven notes ascending and seven notes descending. Each note is called a ‘swara’. These parent raagas spawn innumerable other raagas by subtracting or rearranging the seven notes. How to distinguish between one raaga and another is a matter of aural training and practise.

You will see the vocal musician keeping count with his palm and fingers. That is the taala. The taala is perhaps the most complicated feature of Carnatic music. Different taalas have different counts. The number of units packed into one cycle of a taala varies with a variation in the tempo. So a taala containing four units at a particular speed can also be exponentially packed with 8, 16 and 32 units. Or even more. But bear in mind that fundamentally, the time intervals between one count and another within the chosen tempo must be evenly spaced.

Conventionally, you are expected to sing a song in the same way in which your teacher taught you. So, songs do not give the musician much freedom to showcase his or her innovation, talent or training. This a musician may do by just taking up the raaga to which the kriti is set and elaborating on it. Or he may take up a line in the song and sing it in several ways, always taking care not to violate the taala. Or he may sing individual groups of notes, without the lyrics, again taking care not to breach the taala. You will see examples of each of these today. Remember that they are extempore, not rehearsed as such but practised over a period of time so that the pieces fit on any given day.

It is conventional for the main artiste to give the violinist an opportunity to showcase his talents. You will see and hear bits of violin solo during the concert. Those periods also serve as resting points for the main artiste.

Finally, there is a very popular feature of Carnatic music which is the percussion solo. The mridangam artiste plays a solo stretch of pure rhythm. If there is a secondary percussion instrument, it results in a lively dialogue between the mridangam and that secondary instrument, culminating in a home stretch where both seamlessly join together to create a pulsating effect. At the end of their performance, the main artiste picks up the song from where he left off and concludes it.

You can watch close-up videos of Carnatic music instruments and concerts on the internet. You can also learn more by visiting any of several Carnatic music websites. In any case, feel free to email karthik.sa@gmail.com with any questions you may have.

Thank you!