Iacobus Leodiensis [Iacobus de Montibus, Iacobus de Oudenaerde]

(v) Hindustani and Karnatak rāgas.

Despite differences in repertory, theoretical concepts, performing practice, tonal production and general style, there are many kinds of relationship between individual rāgas in Hindustani and Karnatak music. Comparisons are usually made between rāgas with common scale-types – Karnatak Todī with Hindustani Bhairavī, Karnatak Bhairavī with Hindustani Āsāvarī (Jaunpurī) – rather than between rāgas with common names – Karnatak and Hindustani Todī, Karnatak and Hindustani Bhairavī. Certainly scale and name sometimes go together, as in the case of Hindustani Kalyān and Karnatak Kalyānī. A statistical study of these two is included in Chaitanya Deva's ‘Rāga rūpa’ (1967). Rāgas with the same name in both systems usually use different scale-types. However, although less obvious relationships between such rāgas can almost always be found, they differ from case to case and raise questions about parallel and divergent historical evolution.

Borrowings between the two musics have also taken place since they reached their modern forms. Muttusvāmi Dīksitar spent five years in Banāras, and a few of his kīrtanam compositions are set in Hindustani rāgas, although they are mostly sung in the Karnatak style. Later in the 19th century several rāgas used in thumrī, notably Hindustani Bhairavī, Kāfī and Khamāj, were taken up for ‘light’ music in south India and are sung in a conscious imitation of Hindustani musical style.

In the 20th century there was some borrowing in the other direction. Most of the importations from Karnatak music into Hindustani music were of rāgas characterized by scalar configurations not otherwise known in the Hindustani tradition, such as the popular pentatonic rāga Hamsadhvani (c d e g b c'), or the melakarta scale no.57, Simhendramadhyama (c d e f g a b c'). See also Mode, §V, 3.

India, Subcontinent of, §III: Theory and practice of classical music.

3. Melodic elaboration.

(i) Ornamentation.

(ii) Improvisation.

India, Subcontinent of, §III, 3: Theory and practice of classical music., Melodic elaboration.

(i) Ornamentation.

The word gamaka, used as a generic term, is usually rendered ‘ornament’, but the implication that something merely decorative has been added to something more basic is in part misleading. Gamaka, particularly in south India, is a general category covering all aspects of a svara in context, other than its theoretical pitch-position in the general scale. In Hindustani music the word uccār (‘pronunciation’) is very often used in the same sense. Either term designates aspects of attack, prolongation and release. The word gamaka is also used in a narrower and more specific sense to refer to a shake (see below).

The term alamkāra (lit. ‘that which makes sufficient’) means ‘ornament’ in all senses (jewellery, literary device etc.), but in music it has the specific meaning of a decorative motif that can be repeated sequentially up and down the scale, and hence a type of exercise. Alamkāra in this sense is an ingredient in the formation of tān in khayāl (see §5(iii)(b) below).

(a) Gamaka in the treatises.

The Nātyaśāstra does not distinguish between alamkāra and gamaka in the above senses but treats the latter as a case of the former. In the Sangīta-ratnākara (13th century) they have become fully distinct, with alamkāra defined as a sequence of svara, gamaka as ‘the shaking of a svara that is pleasing to the listener’ (chapter 3, pp.87–97). Śārngadeva classifies gamaka according to the speed of the shake (six varieties from fast to slow, plus one of variable speed), voice quality (three varieties), number of pitches the shake is applied to (one or many) and application in ascent or descent. A final ‘mixed’ category makes 15 varieties of gamaka in total. Other kinds of melodic embellishment, falling into neither the alamkāra nor the gamaka categories, are included in a now obsolete category sthāya, under which the Sangīta-ratnākara lists 96 terms referring to all aspects and styles of the production of sound in music.

Among the 16th- and 17th-century treatises, both the Sangīta-pārijāta (Ahobala Pandịta) and Rāga-vibodha (Somanātha) offer new gamaka systems. Like their scalar constructions, their descriptions of ornaments are based on the fretted vīnā, but the brief passage describing 19 instrumental gamaka in the Sangīta-pārijāta is of little interest compared with the extraordinary and original work of Somanātha in 1609. The fifth chapter of his Rāga-vibodha is meant to present the closest possible written equivalents for the pictorial representations of rāgas so fashionable in his time (see §II, 3(iii) above). To evoke the devatā-rūpa (‘icon form’), Somanātha had only to write a descriptive verse. To match the nāda-rūpa (‘sound form’), however, he had to write a notation that could really evoke musical sounds. From the endless varieties of gamaka and sthāya he selected 20, for which he devised notational symbols he called sanketa (‘agreement’ or ‘intimation’), to be appended to the svara letters; three more symbols indicated upper octave, lower octave and conclusions. He described the techniques for producing these vādana-bheda (‘playing varieties’) on the vīnā, and with their help the lengthy specimens of rāga configurations that he gave can be read.

(b) Gamaka in Karnatak music.

The Sangīta-ratnākara ’s 15 gamaka were vocal. Modern south Indian gamaka, conversely, are conceived instrumentally, like those of the Sangīta-pārijāta and Rāga-vibodha. Vocal gamaka are as far as possible described and illustrated in terms of the plucked and fretted vīnā as instrument of reference. In the Thanjavur vīnā tradition of Muttusvāmi Dīksitar, ‘ten kinds of gamaka ’ are mentioned, and two published treatises from around 1800 confirm the ten: the Sangīta-sāra-sangrahamu and Vīnā-laksana. In the Sangīta-sampradāya-pradarśinī (1904) Subbarāma Dīksitar ingeniously incorporated the ten gamaka of this south Indian oral tradition into the 15 of the Sangīta-ratnākara and superimposed on them both a threefold classification of his own. Ex.10(i)–(iii) illustrates eight of the ten, written with symbols derived from Subbarāma Dīksitar’s own and transcribed in an approximation of their sound.

Dīksitar’s three main categories were based on means of production or musical function, or both. For consistency, his classification is slightly modified in ex.10. The first category comprises shakes called kampita, produced by holding the playing wire behind the fret and deflecting it out of line across the fret. The musical function of this class is prolongation. In Karnatak music six of the 12 svarasthāna may never be sustained without being shaken, and of the remaining six all but the invariant tonic and 5th (sa and pa) are shaken in many contexts.

The characteristic of the second category is stress; all of its members involve fingering on the frets. The third class is the slides, the principal member of which is jāru. Dīksitar included two articulation ornaments in his third class, neither of which, however, is normally produced by sliding. The orika is made by deflection, and odigimpu may be fingered or deflected. These last two gamaka (ex.10(ii)(d) and (e)), and the various forms of kampita (ex.10(i)(a)), are what give Karnatak music the quality of being always in motion even at the very slowest tempo. When gamaka is used as a specific rather than a generic term, it means kampita.