A Southern Music. The Karnatik Story
T.M. Krishna
Harper Collins. First published 2013.
The word is commonly spelled 'Carnatic'. The way Krishna spells it evokes the state of Karnataka, though this genre of music is usually associated with Tamilnadu - chiefly Chennai and Thanjavur. The title includes the indefinite article 'a', implying this is one form (or genre, a more fashionable term) of music in the southern part of the sub-continent. And though, Carnatic (or Karnatik) music is also practiced and sung in Andhra, Karnataka and Kerala, and though many great composers and musicians are natives of these states, its current HQ is Tamilnadu, more particularly Chennai, and even more specifically, Mylapore. Krishna tries to situate this musical ethos in a wider geography - physical, cultural and social. His efforts are well-meaning and laudable, but suffer from being solitary and unsupported by the larger community, both within the club of Carnatic music lovers, and outside it. Carnatic music, as indeed much of 'high' culture in South India, is associated particularly strongly with the brahmin castes - Iyer and Iyengar. With music, especially, a few of the other traditionally 'upper' castes also associated - for example, the 'isai vellala'. There is strong ownership by these castes of everything associated with the music. And, to put it brutally, others are not welcome. Krishna is not only well aware of this caste bias, but works to break it, and make the music more 'open', not only in this book, but by his other activities as well. Whether he has made any significant difference is, however, doubtful.
Krishna addresses these concerns in a couple of essays out of the twenty-seven that make up the book. These occur in the central section of the book, given mainly to explorations of such contextual topics. The first and the third sections directly address the music - the first is a detailed exposition of its grammar, the last is an exploration of the history. For Krishna, music is art, specifically a performance art, even more specifically, a live performance art. And where he considers other forms, such as recorded music, he is dismissive of them.
In the first chapter he discusses the musical experience. The essay is thoughtful, talking about music as essentially a human experience, that constructs human emotions from strings of sounds. Music is then a subjective creation of human beings. 'Music in Nature', he says, 'is not Nature's music'. Elsewhere, 'the idea the bird sings is ours, not the bird's'. [However. A recent paper in PNAS, Songbirds use spectral shape, not pitch, for sound pattern recognition doi: 10.1073/pnas.1515380113, says that songbirds process sounds in a way that is very similar to humans.] Krishna then proceeds to categorize music by its function, by the kind of emotions it is intended to evoke, and by the situations in which such music would be required or appropriate. Thus we have film music, folk music, religious music, ritual music (military bands, e.g.) and so on. Carnatic music, in its purest form, according to Krishna, evokes abstract emotions that cannot be verbalized. In the rest of the book he uses this idea of abstraction as a kind of touchstone of what is best, and keeps coming back to it whenever he wants to say that one way of 'doing' music is preferable to another. As art music, the greatest aspect of Carnatic music is improvisation, the spontaneous and instantaneous creativity of the musician during the performance, a loose translation of the Sanskrit word 'manodharma'. Some features of the music display it more than the others, and some periods of a rendering or a concert are more intensely creative. These are of course, mainly, the abstract portions, and are considered the best parts of the composition. The more concrete features, like the lyrics, are considered less important.
The next couple of chapters are technical explications of the svara, their relationship to frequency, timbre, tone, pitch and other quasi-scientific ideas. Krishna spends a great deal of time and effort on explaining gamaka, an especially distinguishing characteristic of Carnatic music, or Indian music in general. Western music does not have gamaka. He then talks about raga, tala, laya, spending more time on the latter two ideas. These sections require concentrated reading, perhaps along with aural examples to illustrate differences. I confess that I was unable to comprehend this fully, and I am still, for example, unclear as to what a raga is, and how one tala is different from another. Nevertheless, I believe repeated reading of these sections, along with discussions with other interested individuals, may lead to a stronger understanding. Maybe not. Maybe this is genetically determined. Krishna goes on the describe different compositions and the different portions of compositions. He states some simple formulas. Thus there are three structural forms that can occur during one 'song', namely pallavi, anupallavi and charanam. The last of these can occur multiple times. Different compositional forms - Gita, Varna, Svarajati, Kriti (or Kirtana), Pada, Javali and Thillana - are constructed of different arrangements of these basic elements. On another dimension, each composition can be divided into the defined elements - the specific raga, tala, laya and sahitya - and the creative aspects not rigidly defined previously, comprising those sections of the compositions that allow the free expression of the musical performer's manodharma - alapana, niraval, kalpanasvara, tana.
In the following chapters Krishna deals with the musician - chiefly the vocalist - and the accompanists on the violin, the tambura and the percussion instruments. He talks about the role of each, and how all of them are lead by the vocalist to interact and create the total musical experience. He leads off into a discussion of the kutcheri or the concert. The modern-day concert is usually structured into 120 or 150 minutes, and consists of many 'light' pieces, in which the lyrics are clearly enunciated and are important, together with one or two long pieces, in which manodharma is given free rein - the lyrics are unimportant, and the meaning of the music is abstract. This first section of the book ends with chapters about the audience, voice training and musical styles or bani.
The second section is titled 'The Context', and is a group of essays, each one of which could stand alone. In these Krishna discusses the relationship between song and dance; the relationship between Carnatic and Hindustani music, where he particularly addressed the sneering criticisms North Indian music connoisseurs have about Carnatic music; Fusion music (he doesn't think much of it); film music, or Carnatic music in films - he throws appreciative and respectful nods to Ilayaraja and A.R. Rahman, but is unable to fully fit their music into his framework; lyrics, the lyricists, and the relative importance the great composers gave (or give) to the words as against the tunes; music and religion - 'My faith', he says, 'is not religion. It lies in the aesthetic of art music, in my trust that art music is a living being....' and more such words that sound well, but which I cannot understand as meaning much. Krishna does not treat the deep, strong and perhaps existential links between Carnatic music and Brahminical Hindu religion. Here and in other chapters, he talks about temple music, and music played at religious festivals. He does not however go beyond this to try and understand why Carnatic music has so little to do with other religions, or indeed, with secular events. Other art music forms - jazz for example - are a-religious. Most Western classical music is secular. But not Carnatic music. I can think that staunch Muslims and Christians would find it extremely uncomfortable to partake of Carnatic music, whether as musicians or as audience.
Then there are two bold and brave chapters. The first deals with gender inequality in music. The Carnatic music eco-system is thickly populated with excellent female artistes, more so perhaps than other such closed systems - business, or education, for example. But, as Krishna points out, not only are the women musicians treated patronizingly at best and as 'children of a lesser God' at worst, but are very seldom allowed any agency in the organisation of music. All the bosses are men.
Brahmin men. For, as Krishna discusses in the next essay, and as I remarked above, the Carnatic music scene is overwhelmingly populated by the people from these 'upper' castes, at all levels - organizers, musicians and audience. Perhaps the only way people from other castes participate are in the service categories, as cleaners, ushers, and perhaps sound and stage technicians. Krishna tackles this fact head on. He considers, and dismisses, various arguments why this is not an anomaly, unconnected to any feeling of social superiority among the connoisseurs. He argues fiercely for the current guardians of the music to try and 'annihilate caste' in the appreciation and performance of Carnatic music. To his credit, he has started the Urur-Alcott Kuppam music festival, where for the last few years, in the month of margazhi each year, he and small band of well-meaning musicians set up a stage in a fishing village that exists cheek-by-jowl with the upper-middle class locality of Besant Nagar, and perform Carnatic music. As of now these efforts have borne little by way of any transformation of attitudes. It is very difficult to see how Carnatic music can be detached from all its rich cultural context, that includes religion, caste (especially!) and class, and be made more universally loved. Were that to happen, concerts at the Music Academy would attract as much attention from the people would live in the kuppams as those who live in leafy residential areas.
In this middle section, Krishna also addresses two other dimensions - musicians and music lovers who live abroad, particularly in the US; and the relationship of technology to the music.
The final third of the book is given over to history, first the history of the concept of raga, the origins of which he traces to roughly the 7th century CE. He refers copiously to classical texts about music, almost all of them in Sanskrit. He does not seem to be very interested in exploring Tamil origins. I have heard, for example, of Abraham Pandithar, who, according to Wikipedia, systematized many of the currently used musical concepts - but there is no mention of him in this book. In the next few chapters Krishna likewise traces the history of other musical concepts such as tala; the compositional forms such as gita, varna, and so on; the manodharma aspects alapana, niraval, etc.; and the history of the form of the kutcheri. The book ends with a brief epilogue, and an extensive bibliography.
T.M. Krishna has written a truly wonderful book. Some portions of it served me as a kind of introductory textbook of Carnatic music appreciation. Others were thought-provoking exegeses into the cultural contexts, many of which had struck me even in my earlier acquaintances with this musical art form. Krishna insists all through the book that the soul of the music is the manodharma, the abstraction and the spontaneous creativity, demonstrated particularly in the alapana, niraval and so on. I find it hard to separate the music from the religious aspects of it. In talking about the history, Krishna does not give much importance to the Bhakthi cults that considered art and music a pathway to God, specifically Hindu Gods, like Rama and Krishna. A large majority of the present-day audiences of Carnatic music would however consider this association of the music with Hindu religion its raison d'etre.
Krishna addresses these concerns in a couple of essays out of the twenty-seven that make up the book. These occur in the central section of the book, given mainly to explorations of such contextual topics. The first and the third sections directly address the music - the first is a detailed exposition of its grammar, the last is an exploration of the history. For Krishna, music is art, specifically a performance art, even more specifically, a live performance art. And where he considers other forms, such as recorded music, he is dismissive of them.
In the first chapter he discusses the musical experience. The essay is thoughtful, talking about music as essentially a human experience, that constructs human emotions from strings of sounds. Music is then a subjective creation of human beings. 'Music in Nature', he says, 'is not Nature's music'. Elsewhere, 'the idea the bird sings is ours, not the bird's'. [However. A recent paper in PNAS, Songbirds use spectral shape, not pitch, for sound pattern recognition doi: 10.1073/pnas.1515380113, says that songbirds process sounds in a way that is very similar to humans.] Krishna then proceeds to categorize music by its function, by the kind of emotions it is intended to evoke, and by the situations in which such music would be required or appropriate. Thus we have film music, folk music, religious music, ritual music (military bands, e.g.) and so on. Carnatic music, in its purest form, according to Krishna, evokes abstract emotions that cannot be verbalized. In the rest of the book he uses this idea of abstraction as a kind of touchstone of what is best, and keeps coming back to it whenever he wants to say that one way of 'doing' music is preferable to another. As art music, the greatest aspect of Carnatic music is improvisation, the spontaneous and instantaneous creativity of the musician during the performance, a loose translation of the Sanskrit word 'manodharma'. Some features of the music display it more than the others, and some periods of a rendering or a concert are more intensely creative. These are of course, mainly, the abstract portions, and are considered the best parts of the composition. The more concrete features, like the lyrics, are considered less important.
The next couple of chapters are technical explications of the svara, their relationship to frequency, timbre, tone, pitch and other quasi-scientific ideas. Krishna spends a great deal of time and effort on explaining gamaka, an especially distinguishing characteristic of Carnatic music, or Indian music in general. Western music does not have gamaka. He then talks about raga, tala, laya, spending more time on the latter two ideas. These sections require concentrated reading, perhaps along with aural examples to illustrate differences. I confess that I was unable to comprehend this fully, and I am still, for example, unclear as to what a raga is, and how one tala is different from another. Nevertheless, I believe repeated reading of these sections, along with discussions with other interested individuals, may lead to a stronger understanding. Maybe not. Maybe this is genetically determined. Krishna goes on the describe different compositions and the different portions of compositions. He states some simple formulas. Thus there are three structural forms that can occur during one 'song', namely pallavi, anupallavi and charanam. The last of these can occur multiple times. Different compositional forms - Gita, Varna, Svarajati, Kriti (or Kirtana), Pada, Javali and Thillana - are constructed of different arrangements of these basic elements. On another dimension, each composition can be divided into the defined elements - the specific raga, tala, laya and sahitya - and the creative aspects not rigidly defined previously, comprising those sections of the compositions that allow the free expression of the musical performer's manodharma - alapana, niraval, kalpanasvara, tana.
In the following chapters Krishna deals with the musician - chiefly the vocalist - and the accompanists on the violin, the tambura and the percussion instruments. He talks about the role of each, and how all of them are lead by the vocalist to interact and create the total musical experience. He leads off into a discussion of the kutcheri or the concert. The modern-day concert is usually structured into 120 or 150 minutes, and consists of many 'light' pieces, in which the lyrics are clearly enunciated and are important, together with one or two long pieces, in which manodharma is given free rein - the lyrics are unimportant, and the meaning of the music is abstract. This first section of the book ends with chapters about the audience, voice training and musical styles or bani.
The second section is titled 'The Context', and is a group of essays, each one of which could stand alone. In these Krishna discusses the relationship between song and dance; the relationship between Carnatic and Hindustani music, where he particularly addressed the sneering criticisms North Indian music connoisseurs have about Carnatic music; Fusion music (he doesn't think much of it); film music, or Carnatic music in films - he throws appreciative and respectful nods to Ilayaraja and A.R. Rahman, but is unable to fully fit their music into his framework; lyrics, the lyricists, and the relative importance the great composers gave (or give) to the words as against the tunes; music and religion - 'My faith', he says, 'is not religion. It lies in the aesthetic of art music, in my trust that art music is a living being....' and more such words that sound well, but which I cannot understand as meaning much. Krishna does not treat the deep, strong and perhaps existential links between Carnatic music and Brahminical Hindu religion. Here and in other chapters, he talks about temple music, and music played at religious festivals. He does not however go beyond this to try and understand why Carnatic music has so little to do with other religions, or indeed, with secular events. Other art music forms - jazz for example - are a-religious. Most Western classical music is secular. But not Carnatic music. I can think that staunch Muslims and Christians would find it extremely uncomfortable to partake of Carnatic music, whether as musicians or as audience.
Then there are two bold and brave chapters. The first deals with gender inequality in music. The Carnatic music eco-system is thickly populated with excellent female artistes, more so perhaps than other such closed systems - business, or education, for example. But, as Krishna points out, not only are the women musicians treated patronizingly at best and as 'children of a lesser God' at worst, but are very seldom allowed any agency in the organisation of music. All the bosses are men.
Brahmin men. For, as Krishna discusses in the next essay, and as I remarked above, the Carnatic music scene is overwhelmingly populated by the people from these 'upper' castes, at all levels - organizers, musicians and audience. Perhaps the only way people from other castes participate are in the service categories, as cleaners, ushers, and perhaps sound and stage technicians. Krishna tackles this fact head on. He considers, and dismisses, various arguments why this is not an anomaly, unconnected to any feeling of social superiority among the connoisseurs. He argues fiercely for the current guardians of the music to try and 'annihilate caste' in the appreciation and performance of Carnatic music. To his credit, he has started the Urur-Alcott Kuppam music festival, where for the last few years, in the month of margazhi each year, he and small band of well-meaning musicians set up a stage in a fishing village that exists cheek-by-jowl with the upper-middle class locality of Besant Nagar, and perform Carnatic music. As of now these efforts have borne little by way of any transformation of attitudes. It is very difficult to see how Carnatic music can be detached from all its rich cultural context, that includes religion, caste (especially!) and class, and be made more universally loved. Were that to happen, concerts at the Music Academy would attract as much attention from the people would live in the kuppams as those who live in leafy residential areas.
In this middle section, Krishna also addresses two other dimensions - musicians and music lovers who live abroad, particularly in the US; and the relationship of technology to the music.
The final third of the book is given over to history, first the history of the concept of raga, the origins of which he traces to roughly the 7th century CE. He refers copiously to classical texts about music, almost all of them in Sanskrit. He does not seem to be very interested in exploring Tamil origins. I have heard, for example, of Abraham Pandithar, who, according to Wikipedia, systematized many of the currently used musical concepts - but there is no mention of him in this book. In the next few chapters Krishna likewise traces the history of other musical concepts such as tala; the compositional forms such as gita, varna, and so on; the manodharma aspects alapana, niraval, etc.; and the history of the form of the kutcheri. The book ends with a brief epilogue, and an extensive bibliography.
T.M. Krishna has written a truly wonderful book. Some portions of it served me as a kind of introductory textbook of Carnatic music appreciation. Others were thought-provoking exegeses into the cultural contexts, many of which had struck me even in my earlier acquaintances with this musical art form. Krishna insists all through the book that the soul of the music is the manodharma, the abstraction and the spontaneous creativity, demonstrated particularly in the alapana, niraval and so on. I find it hard to separate the music from the religious aspects of it. In talking about the history, Krishna does not give much importance to the Bhakthi cults that considered art and music a pathway to God, specifically Hindu Gods, like Rama and Krishna. A large majority of the present-day audiences of Carnatic music would however consider this association of the music with Hindu religion its raison d'etre.
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