from there.7 This seems arduous at first, but one soon discovers that, as we add newer material before that which we have already learned, we are moving into increasingly familiar territory. Momentum increases, time seems to collapse, and suddenly we have finished the piece. An added benefit of working this way is that the piece is committed to memory without any direct effort to memorize it. When one of my groups performs a difficult tani of fifteen minutes or longer entirely without written notes, the credit goes to this way of learning. You will find detailed instructions for this process throughout the material in the following chapters.
Practice with Your Eyes Open and Looking at a Trusted Tāḷa Keeper
We are told that Indian music ensembles from the earliest times sat so that they could maintain eye contact with one another.8 If you are sitting with your eyes closed, or staring at the ceiling, your concentration is divided and you are separating yourself from the ensemble. Let your eyes rest, as relaxed as possible, on the hands of someone whose tāḷa you trust. Don’t worry about your own tāḷa; it will be drawn into the correct gestures. I learned this from the great flautist T. Viswanathan, whom I frequently accompanied in his later years. He said, “Open your eyes; then you will be able to take indications.” And the indications could be very subtle: a slight turn of the head, the twitch of an eyebrow, a small change in the tempo. One is drawn into the entirety of the performance and out of one’s (usually unhelpful) inner dialogue.
THE STRUCTURE OF THIS BOOK
In chapter 2, I have included a brief outline of the Karṇāṭak tāḷa system, including the thirty-five tāḷa scheme, the capu tāḷas, and tāḷas derived from the Tiruppugaṟ, a collection of isorhythmic songs by the sixteenth-century composer Arunagirinadar. This is not exhaustive information; I have included enough to get you through the present volume with some understanding.
Chapter 3 details the notation conventions I use to represent rhythmic patterns. It also includes brief definitions of the principal design elements, mōrā, kōrvai, and koraippu, that occur in these pages.
Chapter 4 is a personal account of the evolution of three mṛdaṅgam compositions that Palani Subramania Pillai taught to T. Ranganathan, who discovered ways to re-invent them that his teacher had not seen. Ranga taught both the original versions and his logical extensions of them to me, and I in turn found further applications of them that he had not seen. I share these developments in order to demonstrate the continuity of a style and its growth from one generation to the next. The three compositions I discuss in this chapter appear later in the book in the three tani āvartanams.
Chapter 5: Solkaṭṭu Manual, chapter 5, details exercises in four of the five versions, or jātis, of ēka tāḷa: tiśra (three beats), khaṇḍa (five beats), miśra (seven beats), and sankīrṇa (nine beats). In this book, chapter 5 adapts the same exercises for use in developing control in different pulse rates within each beat, known as gati in Sanskrit and naḍai in Tamil.
Chapters 6, 7, and 8: Each of the next three chapters presents an extended composition for group or individual performance in a different tāḷa. Each features mōrās, kōrvais, a koraippu, and an ending section. I present them here in konnakkol; they could also be played on any of the Karṇāṭak percussion instruments.
In part 2, I have provided video examples from chapter 4 and important material from chapters 6, 7, and 8, along with full performances of all three tanis by groups of my students, and two performances by ensembles in Iran and Germany.
In part 3, the notation includes all the compositions detailed in chapters 6, 7, and 8.
PRONUNCIATION9
The pronunciation and diacritical marks in this book apply equally to foreign (Sanskrit and Tamil) terms and to the solkaṭṭu syllables themselves. They are drawn from the International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration.10
· Vowels may be short, a (opera, cinema), e (pet), i (tip), o (porch), u (put) or long, ā (blah), ē (say), ī (tee), ō (blow), ū (tool).
· Consonants t and d are dental, pronounced with the tongue flat against the top teeth. Solkaṭṭu examples using these sounds include ta, di, din, tām, tom, and tōm.
· Consonants with dots underneath, ḍ, ṭ, ḷ, ṇ, are retroflex, pronounced with the tip of the tongue curled against the roof of the mouth, as if a liquid “r” preceded them: bird, curt, snarling, corn. Solkaṭṭu examples using these sounds include ki ṭa and jo ṇu.
· Consonant ś sounds like flash; s sounds like dust, not music.
· Consonant r is like the single Spanish r, in which the tongue bounces once off the roof of the mouth, not like the liquid American row. Solkaṭṭu examples using this sound include ri, as in ta ri ki ṭa.
· Consonants j and g sound like jog.
· Consonant c sounds like church.
Accents in Sanskrit and Tamil words are functions of long and short syllables. If all the vowels in a word are short, the syllables are pronounced with equal weight, for example, sol-kaṭ-ṭu, not SOL-kaṭ-ṭu or sol-KA-ṭu. A long vowel in a word generates an accent, for example, TĀ-ḷa, san-KĪR-ṇa. Most of the non-English words in this text can be sounded out using this scheme. One exception is the Sanskrit caturaśra, which most Tamil-speaking Karṇāṭak musicians pronounce as cha-TOOSH-ra or cha-TOOS-ra. After the first occurrence of this word, in chapter 1 on the history of tāḷa, I have used the modern pronunciation and spelling, catusra.
The first use of a Sanskrit or Tamil word is italicized. Depending on the context, these words may appear in a glossary at the end of the chapter in question or may be defined along with the first use.
GLOSSARY
gati (gutty): The Sanskrit term for the internal structure of a beat as measured in pulses. See chapter 2 for a fuller explanation. Synonymous with naḍai.
koraippu
