Structural Levels in South Indian Music

I. Introduction[1] In the present study, I propose a theory of structural levels in Karnatak music, the classical music of South India. In the characteristic patterns of melodic ornamentation and phrase construction that contribute to the identity of a raga, as well as in formal approaches to composition and improvisation, Karnatak musical practice involves sophisticated elaborations of simple voice-leading strands that themselves elaborate a normative background structure. This conceptual framework has significant precedent both in Indian musical scholarship and in anecdotal accounts by practitioners; with the support of close analysis of well-known compositions and performers, my theory synthesizes and expands these strands of thought, contending that widely accepted structural level-based accounts of improvisational practice also extend to theoretical systems, raga structure, and compositional practice.[2] For readers new to Karnatak music, click here to read a brief introduction to the history, instruments, and essentials of South Indian music. I follow this section with a concise summary of my theory of structural levels in Karnatak music, accompanied by a critical discussion of the article's methodology and attendant theoretical backdrop. The remainder of the article is dedicated to supporting analysis, working successively from details of the musical surface to the basic tonal structure undergirding compositional and improvisational practice.II. Structural Levels in Karnatak Music; Cultural and Methodological Concerns[3] In this article, I use the term "structural levels" more or less consistently with its application in twentieth-century Western music theory: the notion that we can conceptualize a given piece of music as a complex of hierarchically-related strata, in which foreground levels can be parsed as elaborations (or "implications") of deeper, background levels (Berry 1980, 20). For the purposes of this study, I focus exclusively on structural levels as they manifest within the domain of pitch. Of course, the very idea of pitch undergoing operations through a musical form requires the transpiration of time to make sense; I only mean to say that I will leave considerations of structural levels as they apply to tala to later studies.(1)Example 1. Structural levels in Karnatak musicExample 2. The "basic structure"Example 3. Common variants of the basic structure[4] I propose that the pitch language of Karnatak music divides into four interrelated but distinct structural levels, which I refer to using the familiar terms "foreground," "middleground," and "background" (Example 1). Occupying the musical foreground--the immediate aural experience of the listener--is gamaka, the characteristic ornamentation attendant with every raga. In the middleground we find the svara, or scale degree.(2) At a more distant middleground layer, these svaras are grouped into prayogas, characteristic phrases particular to a given raga. Finally, in the background, these prayogas outline a simple voice-leading structure spanning a composition or improvisation, which I refer to throughout this article as the "basic structure."[5] The basic structure, shown in Example 2, consists of: (a) prolongation of madhya sa, the lowest tonic note within standard vocal range; (b) an upward ascent (often through pa, the fifth) to a prolongation of tara sa, the upper tonic an octave higher; (c) descent to madhya sa. The basic structure can be thought of as an elaborative expansion of sa, and as I will demonstrate in my examples below, it is recursive within various sub-sections of a composition, as well as between structural levels. It moreover shares notable homologies with different elements of Karnatak theory and practice: the --tones of the continuous drone, as well as the standard ascent-descent (arohana-avarohana) representation of raga scales in scholarly treatises. …