The origins of Indian classical music (marga), the classical music of India, can be found from the oldest of scriptures, part of the Hindu tradition, the Vedas. Samaveda, one of the four vedas describes music at length.
The two main streams of Indian classical music are Hindustani music, from North India, and Carnatic music from South India.
Hindustani music
Hindustani music is predominantly more than its south Indian counterpart. The prime themes of Hindustani music are Rasa Lila (Hindu devotionals) of Krishna and Nature in all its splendour. Bhimsen Joshi, Ravi Shankar, Hariprasad Chaurasia and Zakir Hussain are the arts' most popular living performers. Carnatic music is similar to Hindustani music in that it …show more content…
There are a lot of songs emphasising love and other social issues.
As with all Indian music, the two main components of Carnatic music are raga, a melodic pattern and tala, a rhythmic pattern. (One might want to read these pages before proceeding.)
Carnatic music, whose foundation lies as far back as 2000 BC, began as a spiritual ritual of early Hinduism. It grew, along with Hindustani music, out of the Sama Veda tradition, until the Islamic invasions of North India in the late 12th century and early 13th century. From the 13th century onwards, there was a divergence in the forms of Indian music — the northern style being influenced by Arabic music (yet there are both Hindu and Muslim songs in Hindustani music.)
Carnatic music is named after the Southern region of the Indian subcontinent named by western colonists as Carnatic. This name was used to refer to the region between the Eastern Ghats and the Coromandel Coast encompassing much of what is called today as South India. Thus the term carnatic music was used to denote South Indian music.
|Tala - Rythmical groupings of beats …show more content…
Tala is independent of the music it accompanies: it has its own |
|divisions. It moves in bars, and each beat in it is divided into the smallest fraction. |
|Rythm has three aspects: Tala, Laya and Matra. Tala is a complete cycle of Metrical phrasecomposed of a fixed number of beats. There are over |
|a 100 Talas, but only 30 Talas are known and only about 10-12 are used. |
|The Laya is the tempo, which keeps uniformity of time span and it has 3 divisions -- Vilambit, Madhya and Drut. |
|The Matra is the smallest unit of the tala. |
|Tala is the most important aspect of classical music, and it can be considered to be the very basis or pulse of music. To appreciate the |
|structure of simple and complicated divisions, the improvisations of Tala and its theory, one should listen to an accomplished solo drummer. A|
|classical drum player requires at 8-10 years of methodical training and another 4-5 years of hard practice.