Module 1: Orientation · Lesson 1

What is Carnatic music?

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The short answer

​Carnatic music is the classical music of South India. It is mostly sung, even when it is played on an instrument: instrumentalists try to imitate the way a voice shapes a phrase, a style often called Gayaki . Its songs are in several South Indian languages and Sanskrit, and many of them are prayers.

If you have never heard it, one way to picture it is this: a tradition that is tune-first (it is built on single-line melodies , not on chords), has a rich rulebook for each melody, and leaves room for the performer to make up new music on the spot inside those rules.

Two ideas that run through everything

Almost everything on this site comes back to two ideas.

Raga is the melodic side. A raga is not just a scale. It is a set of notes together with rules about how to move between them, which notes to linger on, and which ornaments to use. You can think of it as the grammar and personality of a melody: the same few notes can sound completely different in two different ragas.

Tala is the rhythmic side. A tala is a repeating cycle of beats, like a clock that counts the same pattern again and again. A song is set in one tala, and the percussionists and singer both keep track of where they are in the cycle.

Raga answers “which notes, and how?” and tala answers “which beats, and how many?”

Composed music and improvised music

Carnatic concerts mix two kinds of music:

• Composed music (kalpita sangita ): songs whose tune and words were written by a composer and are handed down.
• Improvised music (Manodharma ): passages the performer invents during the concert, within the rules of the raga and tala.

Neither one is the “real” Carnatic music. The composed songs give the performer a shared language with the audience, and the improvisation is where the performer shows their understanding of the raga.

A usual line-up

A typical concert has a main performer (very often a singer), a violinist who follows the melody, a drummer on the Mridangam , and a Tambura sounding a steady background note called the Drone . You will meet each of these later in the instruments module.