Appreciating Laya

Tālam & Layam related topics
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venkatakailasam
Posts: 4170
Joined: 07 Feb 2010, 19:16

Appreciating Laya

Post by venkatakailasam »

LEC DEM by Ghatam Karthick on Appreciating Laya ..

Organised by Parivadini Music Art Culture...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1Pr0Slkfbg

very well explained..

thenpaanan
Posts: 635
Joined: 04 Feb 2010, 19:45

Re: Appreciating Laya

Post by thenpaanan »

venkatakailasam wrote:LEC DEM by Ghatam Karthick on Appreciating Laya ..

Organised by Parivadini Music Art Culture...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1Pr0Slkfbg

very well explained..

Wow! What a presentation! This is very timely as well because of some comments on "internal" laya of carnatic compositions in another thread on this forum. Karthick addresses this aspect from a percussionist's point of view. As he says in the beginning of the presentation, musical concepts are generally very abstract, but he makes it all very accessible. He makes some very insightful comments. For example, he articulates very nicely something he calls "elastic rhythm" alluding to the fact that our music presentations are not really metronomic (some think it is or has to be metronomic) but allow minute amounts of stretching and pulling of the beat for aesthetic reasons.

Recommended viewing.

-Thenpaanan

vasanthakokilam
Posts: 10956
Joined: 03 Feb 2010, 00:01

Re: Appreciating Laya

Post by vasanthakokilam »

Agreed. Quite an enjoyable presentation. If at all anyone can draw good crowds and hold them with this kind of material, that is Karthick. He should do more of this as he himself said he would like to do. As Thenpaanan says it is quite a coincidence that we just recently discussed very similar matters in another thread ( it is an off topic discussion in the TMK, Seattle thread which we will move to its own thread but for now it is here http://www.rasikas.org/forums/viewtopic. ... 7&start=25 ).

The juxtaposition of the right and not-so-right ways playing for the same song came through very well. And Karthick's explanation on why Tabla sounds attractive to lay listeners right away is interesting and some thing to think about. The frequency range of tabla is octave higher and one octave lower than mridangam thus providing a wide range of sounds and it is made possible by the bigger circumference of the heads.

It is still an uphill task to make the rasikas-in-the-middle-of-the-curve understand and relate to rhythmic side of things as much as they do on the melodic side. Karthick actually started taking that track initially ( with the Mohanam, Mohanakalyani example ) and he can develop that further in subsequent demos. a) What is it on the layam side that lay rasikas can recognize and enjoy b) how does one go about learning to recognize them. One such example is Koraippu which Karthick also mentions. I can see that he is thinking about this challenge of communication. He need to come up with a few more things and repeat it many times so people know what they should look. I think the starting candidates for that are 1) 'group of 3' things - thIrmAnam, kOrvai etc which are easy to learn to recognize 2) the nAdai especially thrisram and Khandam which I think can be learned to recognize after some repeated exposure.

But then one can ask why should the rasikas even learn to recognize any of that.

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