Carnatic Classical

Carnatic music is the classical tradition of South India, organized around the twin pillars of raga (melodic mode, with hundreds in active use) and tala (rhythmic cycle, with around 35 standard patterns). A typical concert lasts two to three hours and features a lead vocalist supported by violin (held vertically against the chest), mridangam (double-headed barrel drum), ghatam (clay pot), kanjira (frame drum) and a drone tanpura. The repertoire is built around kritis — devotional songs in Sanskrit, Telugu, Tamil or Kannada — by a small canon of composers, especially the 'Trinity' of Tyagaraja, Muthuswami Dikshitar and Syama Sastri (all early 19th century). Improvisation runs continuously through the music, with notated melody supplying only a skeleton.

The Carnatic tradition diverged from its North Indian sister, Hindustani music, around the 16th century, retaining a more conservative system of ragas and a closer tie to Hindu devotional poetry. The Trinity composers, all active in Tiruvarur and Thanjavur in the late 1700s and early 1800s, produced the bulk of the modern repertoire. The 20th century saw the rise of the public chamber-concert format under figures such as Ariyakudi Ramanuja Iyengar, the global career of M.S. Subbulakshmi (the first musician awarded India's Bharat Ratna), and a string of brilliant instrumentalists — Lalgudi Jayaraman on violin, Mandolin U. Srinivas, T. M. Krishna. The Margazhi festival in Chennai every December is the genre's annual focal point, with hundreds of concerts in a single month.

Most pieces open with an alapana — a free-rhythm exploration of the raga, sometimes five to thirty minutes long — before the tala enters and the kriti proper begins. The mridangam player articulates rhythm through a memorized syllable language (tha-ka-di-mi, ta-ka-ta-ki-ta) that doubles as both teaching tool and improvised commentary. Listen for the antiphonal duels between vocalist and violinist, and for the kalpana swaras — improvised solfège passages — that punctuate the closing of a piece.

For a single track, M. S. Subbulakshmi's 'Bhaja Govindam' (1971) is the canonical entry. For an album, her 'Live at Carnegie Hall' (1977) or T. M. Krishna's 'Live in Concert' both work; Bombay Jayashri's 'Listening to Life' is an accessible modern recital.

Tyagaraja (1767-1847) is traditionally said to have composed 24,000 kritis in his lifetime; only around 700 survive in notation. The annual Tyagaraja Aradhana, held on the anniversary of his death in his home village of Thiruvaiyaru, gathers thousands of musicians who sing his Pancharatna Kritis ('Five Gem Compositions') in unison.