Saturday, January 19, 2008

Carnatic Vs Hindustani music styles

We have two kinds of music styles in India Carnatic, mostly practiced by people of south Indian origin and Hindustai,mostly practiced by people of North India.

Both the styles are monophonic, follow a melodic line and employ a drone (tanpura) with the help of one or two notes against the melody. Both the styles use definite scales to define a raga but the Carnatic Style employs Shrutis or semitones to create a Raga and thus have many more Ragas than the Hindustani style. Carnatic ragas differ from Hindustani ragas. The names of ragas are also different. However, there are some ragas which have the same scale as Hindustani ragas but have different names; such as Hindolam and Malkauns, Shankarabharanam and Bilawal. There is a third category of ragas like Hamsadhwani, Charukeshi, Kalavati etc. which are essentially Carnatic Ragas. They share the same name, the same scale (same set of notes) but can be rendered in the two distinctively different Carnatic and Hindustani styles. Unlike Hindustani music, Carnatic music does not adhere to Time or Samay concepts and instead of Thaats, Carnatic music follows the Melakarta concept. Thaat is a system by which different sets of complete scale of seven notes, in ascending order, are formulated to categorize the maximum number of ragas under it. Thaat or Mela is known as the Parental scale. There are ten Thaats under which most of the Hindustani ragas can be catagorised. These Thaats have the names of ragas and they are Bilawal, Khamaj, Poorvi, Kafi, Bhairavi, Kalyan, Bhairav, Marwa, Asavari and Todi.

I have uploaded two more songs in my Acidplanet website as under:

bhO sambo Siva Sambo SvayambhO - Dayananda Saraswati composition
Vellai Thaamarai - Subramaniya Bharatiyar composition


http://web.splashcast.net/players/?p=VWSV8386MC

3 comments:

Unknown said...

Hello V K Raman - this post of yours was useful for a novice such as me trying to find out the similarities and differences between Hindustani and Carnatic styles of music.

However could you expand more on this subject? For example, what is the Carnatic parallel to the Khayal style in Hindustani? Or the Dhrut or Bandish? These are just examples. I would love to know more in detail about both the styles.

Thanks,

Balachandhran.S

SmartLife said...

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Anonymous said...

Parallel to Khayal probably would be Padams/javalis in carnatic which explore emotional content and usually are a dialogue between the hero and heroine or heroine and her friend.