The Grammar of Carnatic Music (Dec 11, book release, Chennai

vainika · Post by **vainika** » 02 Dec 2007, 23:34

Dr. KG Vijayakrishnan, linguistics professor from CIEFL, Hyderabad, and vainika of the Veena Dhanam school, has just published a book analysing Carnatic music from a linguistics perspective. Details of the upcoming launch and a note on the book are given below.

You are cordially invited to the launch of the book
"The Grammar of Carnatic Music"
by Prof. K.G.Vijayakrishnan
(Phonology and Phonetics series: Mouton de Gruyter, Germany)
Date: 11th December 2007
Time: 6:30 pm
Venue: Tatvaloka Auditorium, Eldam's Road, Chennai

Special Guests
Shrimati Padma Varadan
Shrimati Aruna Sairam
Shri Sanjay Subrahmanyan

Chief Guest
Shri N. Murali, Managing Director, The Hindu

Guest of Honour
Pujyasri â€˜Mathioliâ€™ R. Saraswathy
Founder/President Nandalala Seva Samithi Trust

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About â€œThe Grammar of Carnatic Musicâ€

cmlover · Post by **cmlover** » 03 Dec 2007, 07:12

How can I get a copy?

mohan · Post by **mohan** » 03 Dec 2007, 07:17

Perhaps you can contact the author. His contact details are at http://www.kutcheribuzz.com/ebrochures/ ... akrishnan/

Also see the publisher's site at http://www.degruyter.de/cont/imp/mouton ... 10183139-1

cmlover · Post by **cmlover** » 03 Dec 2007, 08:48

Thanks! Will give it a try after the official release.

vasanthakokilam · Post by **vasanthakokilam** » 03 Dec 2007, 11:44

Wow, sounds excellent. My ( and our ) cuppa tea...

arunk · Post by **arunk** » 03 Dec 2007, 21:57

cool. I will try my best to attend as I will be in town. But a price of $165 - a bit steep no

?

vainika · Post by **vainika** » 04 Dec 2007, 01:24

arunk wrote:cool. I will try my best to attend as I will be in town. But a price of $165 - a bit steep no ?

Yes very steep, and that appears to be the case with all those European monographs. This has kept me from buying quite a few books on music such as those by Emmie te Nijenhuis.

vasanthakokilam · Post by **vasanthakokilam** » 04 Dec 2007, 01:39

I just got an email from my local library that the book I asked for, 'Singing the classical, voicing the modern', has come in. I had very little hopes for it and it was a pleasant surprise. May be I should push my luck with this book as well.

I did not know who 'Emmie te Nijenhuis' was. I just looked up. Quite interesting. "She specialized in Sanskrit texts on Indian music.1988 she founded Sarasvati Bhavan, a private research institute promoting Indian music in Europe and focusing on traditional South Indian performance practice. http://www.sarasvatibhavan.com ". I will see if my library will oblige my requests for her books as well. Thanks Vainika for the reference.

vainika · Post by **vainika** » 04 Dec 2007, 01:53

Yes, do try to get her Sacred Songs of India, on the Kamalamba Navavarana kritis of MD.

Here's an article by her online, tracing the history of notation used in Carnatic music: http://www.iias.nl/oideion/journal/issu ... dex-a.html and her own attempts at modifying staff notation to represent gamakas.

ragam-talam · Post by **ragam-talam** » 05 Jul 2009, 04:46

A preview version of the book "The Grammar of Carnatic Music" is available here:
http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=PeFA ... t&resnum=2
You can read quite a few pages of the book at this site. Not sure how long it will be available there though!

On a quick read, it seems to be a scholarly work. If someone can read thru the details and post their impressions here, that would be very useful.

From the book's jacket cover:

This book argues that Carnatic music as it is practiced today can be traced to the musical practices of early/mid eighteenth century. Earlier varieties or 'incarnations' of Indian music elaborately described in many musical treatises are only of historical relevance today as the music described is quite different from current practices. It is argued that earlier varieties may not have survived because they failed to meet the three crucial requirements for a language-like organism to survive i.e., a robust community of practitioners/listeners which the author calls the Carnatic Music Fraternity, a sizeable body of musical texts and a felt communicative need. In fact, the central thesis of the book is that Carnatic music, like language, survived and evolved from early/mid eighteenth century when these three requirements were met for the first time in the history of Indian music.

An interesting extract on Sahana ragam:

Sahaanaa IV
*['sa ri gu ma]
ÃƒÂ¢Ã…â€œÃ¢â‚¬Å“[sa ri 'gu ri ri,]
ÃƒÂ¢Ã…â€œÃ¢â‚¬Å“['sa ri sa ni sa,]
ÃƒÂ¢Ã…â€œÃ¢â‚¬Å“['sa, gu ri sa ni]
ÃƒÂ¢Ã…â€œÃ¢â‚¬Å“['sa, ma gu ri sa]

The generalization is that a musical phrase initiated by the note 'sa' cannot include the linear sequence 'ri gu ma'. This is a case of a raagam-specific constraint which prohibits a musical phrase to begin with 'sa' and end in 'ma' *[sa ri gu ma..] for the raagam Sahaanaa. No student of Carnatic music is ever taught this negative constraint explicitly (to the best of my knowledge) and yet every 'good' performer knows this and therefore avoids the offending phrase in his/her rendering of this raagam. ... Of course, the reason for avoiding this sequence is *AMBSEQ as the sequence in question would point to another raagam, namely Harikaamboodi or a Scalar raagam like Ravichandrikaa.
- page 161

In addition to quite detailed analyses of music-related topics, the book also talks in some detail about language, especially Tamil. Extracts:

34. The commonly encountered observation about people with different language backgrounds not being able to produce certain sounds of certain languages being attributed to genetic traits, in fact, has nothing to do with the anatomy of the oral tract of distinct linguistic communities. It is purely a matter of language habit. Take the case of the supposedly difficult Tamil sound 'zh' of the Tamil word 'pazham' 'fruit'. In fact, the American English pronunciation of the 'r' in 'car' is fairly similar to the sound in Tamil. But the context in which the sound occurs in American English is very different from the context in which it occurs in Tamil and that is the reason for the difficulty for Americans. It has nothing to do with the supposedly 'superior' lingual anatomy of the Tamils.
- page 313 (Notes)

Again:

44. Of course, across generations of Tamil speakers, since aspirates have never been pronounced anywhere, Tamilians would have assumed the input representation of a word like /bhakti/ to be actually /bakti/. ... The inviolability of ASPIRATION renders the feature aspiration totally invisible in the grammar of modern Tamil.
- page 315 (Notes)

And this!

46. Unless otherwise specified, by Tamil I mean contemporary, colloquial Tamil, specially my own dialect - the Brahmin dialect spoken in Chennai.
- page 315 (Notes)

VK RAMAN · Post by **VK RAMAN** » 05 Jul 2009, 06:28

ragamtalam: You did cover the essence of some parts of the book. Thank you.

keerthi · Post by **keerthi** » 05 Jul 2009, 09:19

sounds terribly interesting.. the crystallisation of carnatic music as we know it now, from the fluid dEsya modes, prabandhas and gItis of long ago, is an act of grammar in the making..

It is always fascinating to have an explicit grammar for any mode of expression; art, music or language.. More often than not, the wise grammarian isn't trying to prescribe a set of rules that should or ought to be done.. instead he/she tries to articulate the general principles that seem to define the nature of the mode-of-expression and thereby gives experession to the inherent logic and syntax of the art/music/language..

ragam-talam · Post by **ragam-talam** » 09 Jul 2009, 03:21

What is interesting about this book is how the linguistic grammar concept has been superimposed on Carnatic music. And the outcome is, based on what I have read, fascinating.

E.g. read page 147-9 of the book (cited above) where he talks about 'Meaning in Carnatic music'.

arunk · Post by **arunk** » 09 Jul 2009, 03:28

thanks for the link r-t. Need to read up. I loved the last para on 9 and 10 (in Intro) in connection to some recent discussions

- they match my sentiments on those subjects to the tee.

Arun