Iacobus Leodiensis [Iacobus de Montibus, Iacobus de Oudenaerde]

(iii) Tāla in Karnatak music.

In modern Karnatak music there are, in effect, two systems of tāla. What might be called the formal system is of considerable antiquity and forms the basis of the early stages of formal music instruction said to have been laid down by the Kanada devotional singer Purandara Dās (1480–1564). In concert performing practice, tālas appertaining only to the formal system are represented in a few restricted and largely rather learned contexts. The informal system may be seen as a simplification and reformulation of elements of the formal system. It is the basis of the great bulk of the current repertory, including Ksetrayya's padam and Tyāgarāja's kīrtanam.

(a) The formal system.

The formal system is shown in Table 10. It comprises the seven sūlādi tālas, each of which is defined by a clap-pattern comprising one or more segments (anga), expressed with the values anudruta (one beat), druta (two beats) and laghu. The laghu is a variable quantity, comprising three beats (tisra), four beats (caturaśra), five beats (khanda), seven beats (miśra) or nine beats (sankīrna). In counting time each segment is marked by an audible clap (tattu) on the first beat. The remaining beats of a laghu are counted by touching fingers to thumb or palm, while the second beat of a druta is indicated by a silent gesture with palm upturned (vīccu).

Each sūlādi tāla has five variants, distinguished by the value of the laghu. However, in each case there is one principal variant (boxed in Table 10), which may be denoted by the simple tāla name without any further qualification. Four of these principal varieties are caturaśra, with one representative each of the tisra, khanda and miśra types. The remaining variants are rarities, with the exception of caturaśra Triputa, known as ‘Ādi tāla’ (‘first tāla’), which plays an extremely important role in the ‘informal’ system.

Other tāla varieties of the formal system are represented only in special circumstances. Ata tāla (in its principal khanda variety) has one very prominent role in the Karnatak tradition: it is one of two tālas used for the tāna varnam (see §5(iv) below), the other being Ādi. Ex.7 in Jhampā tāla belongs to a set composed by Muttusvāmi Dīksitar on the shrines of the nine planets in the Thiruvarur temple. The first seven of this set are on the planets that correspond with the seven days of the week and are set successively in each of the seven sūlādi tālas (ex.7 is for the planet Mercury, corresponding to Wednesday). Certain compositions in khanda Jhampā tāla (5 + 1 + 2) and khanda Triputa tāla (5 + 2 + 2) are widely known, and pallavi are often rendered in rare varieties of the sūlādi tālas.

(b) The informal system.

What is here called the ‘informal’ tāla system comprises selected tālas of the ‘formal’ system plus two fast tālas called Cāpu. Table 11 shows how these together provide a system of binary, ternary, quintuple and septuple metres in slow and fast forms. The Cāpu tālas (khanda Cāpu, five beats, and miśra Cāpu, seven beats) function as fast varieties of Jhampā and Triputa respectively; khanda Cāpu is colloquially called ara Jhampā (‘half Jhampā’). They are not analysed in terms of laghu, druta and anudruta units as are the sūlādi tālas, but they are clapped as follows: khanda Cāpu 2 + 1 + 2, miśra Cāpu (3) + 2 + 2 with a wave rather than a clap on the first beat. The binary tāla Ādi is the most important and most frequently used tāla of Karnatak music (exx.6 and 8 are both in slow Ādi tāla).

It is a fundamental principle of tāla that while the pattern of irregularly spaced audible claps marks the rotation of the cycle, it does not necessarily indicate the rhythmic organization of musical events within the time-span so measured. Not only is there an almost infinite variety of possible rhythmic configurations within any tāla cycle, but a tāla may even be characterized by an internal rhythm different from that implied by the clap-pattern. Thus the Karnatak Jhampā tāla, in its most common miśra variety, is structured by claps as 7 + 1 + 2, but the characteristic rhythm of melodies in this tāla is (2 + 3) + (2 + 3), as seen in ex.7. Similar internal rhythms operate to a greater or lesser extent in many other tālas of both the Karnatak and Hindustani systems.

For two of the asymmetric tālas the syllabic quantities in compositions normally fit the pulse and the beats of the tālas. The quintal patterning of ex.7 in the slow Jhampā tāla is pointed out above. Ex.9 shows similar conformities for long–short syllable distributions in the fast triple Rūpaka tāla. Note in Vēnugānalōluni that the metrical position of the first syllable (etuppu) comes after the first beat, and that this conventional delay endows ‘back to the beginning’ returns, such as the kalpana svara in ex.13, with a much greater forward momentum into the composition than they would have if it began on the first beat itself, following the syllabic quantities literally.

Similar rhythmic improvements afforded to a composition by deferral in the slow quadratic Ādi tāla are discussed in §5(iv) below, with reference to ‘Gītārthamu’ (ex.8). The rhythms of this piece, and many like it, such as ex.6, are essentially based on long–short syllabic quantity, like pieces in Rūpaka or Jhampā tāla, albeit with more scope for transformations. But Ādi tāla compositions on the whole show a much greater variety of rhythmic treatment within the basically square quadratic framework than do many pieces in any of the asymmetrical tālas.

The most common pattern for fast Ādi tāla compositions is illustrated in Table 12a. Unlike those in other fast tālas, this rhythm is not tightly tied to syllabic quantity. The basic rhythm is of half-beats grouped 2 + 3 + 3. This basic rhythm is shown on the centre line of Table 12a and is taken twice in one cycle. The etuppu (initial time-point) is the second half of the second beat of the tāla and the arudi (point of arrival) the fifth beat, at the first druta. In terms of the rhythm there is a strong downbeat on the arudi preceded by an anacrusis of five half-beats. The anacrusis itself concludes with a fixed long plus short (time value and syllabic quantity), which in turn is set up with one, two or three syllables fitted into two pulses. The second 2 + 3 + 3 is structured in the same way, but with less weight at the point of arrival and as a whole. All the variants indicated in Table 12a occur, and in many combinations. The musical rhythm, in short, exists prior to the composition of the text. Apart from the long–short conclusion of the upbeat phrase, syllabic quantity as such is not important; the text is conformable to free combinations of the prosody of popular Telugu poetry. There are hundreds of compositions of Karnatak music in this variety of Ādi tāla, and it is one of the most widely known and best-loved of all south Indian musical types. It is called Deśādi tāla.

Just as characteristic of south Indian music is the faster variety of the ‘mixed’ tāla of 3 + 4, whose most common rhythmic combinations are shown in Table 12b. This miśra Cāpu tāla is not quite as sprightly as the Deśādi of Table 12a, but rather more lyrical and flowing. As may be seen in Table 12b there is a somewhat greater flexibility in the rhythmic patterning than there is in Deśādi; within each separate vertical segment undivided horizontally, any alternative shown is possible. Beyond this, there are two different possibilities as to arudi (point of arrival). An arudi may come firmly and be sustained at the downbeat of the third āvartanam, as shown in the bottom part of the table, so that the second phrase has less weight than the first; however, as shown in the top part of the table, there may be no real point of arrival at all. The music can fit easily and comfortably into an evenly balanced two-phrase format without driving towards one rhythmic goal more than another. This graceful tāla accounts for well over half Ksetrayya's padam compositions and for some of Tyāgarāja's best-known kīrtanam compositions.

India, Subcontinent of, §III, 4: Theory and practice of classical music., Rhythm and tāla.