In the beginning, existed silence. All was unmanifested potential.
Then, there was an idea. To create sound.
Therefore unsteady sounds (noises) appeared.
Then, the unsteady sound became steady and unwavering. That was the beginning of shruti. This sound had no concrete form or label, but steady. This was the start of pitch.
Then, sound and silence alternated. This was the beginning of 'laya' (rest) or rhythm.
When sound and silence alternated in patterns, time could be measured, and you could count. Basic math entered rhythm.
Then it turned out that sound could vary in pitch. And so came simple melody and rather basic fluid phrases.
Then it was found that the natural pitches formed a consonance in various intervals. And harmony and the beginnings of swarasthana happened. Sound became frozen into solid frequencies. The first rAgas appeared. The first chords appeared.
Humans tried to produce these sounds with the basic sounds of their voice, and laid the foundation for what would evolve into alApana. This is where speech and music essentially begin to split - with speech arising out of sound that ignores pitch, but gets shaped into forms by the human apparatus, and music is the aspect arising out of pitched sound. The foundations of both music and language is the same. The two begin to diverge into 2 separate existences, as language focuses more on the syllabic sounds that the human being is capable of making, and eventually express his mind through words, while music decides to focus on the acoustic nature of the sound. Eventually, speech and music split at a fundamental level and sound becomes two.
Then someone decided to apply a set syllables to these sounds, and swara was born. The language of rhythm also arose in parallel.
Speech becomes language that gives form to thoughts, ideas and emotions and communication. Eventually language becomes lyric. Lyric returns to music - as both are two different manifestations of the sound principle.
Swaras could be combined in various ways and patterns, and the first gamaka phrases were born. At this point, basic math entered melody.
Soon someone found that they could use their body to count, and tAla appeared.
Then the region between the swaras began to be explored. Soon they found that they could create individual entities by controlling the movements of the frequency between two fixed regions - the modern gamaka appeared.
In this process, melody for a minute, took a step back into more formless territory, the notes melted into unique and fluid phrases, and discovered a new potential that it hadn't realized yet, the potential to create individual identities in sound. The modern rAga appeared.
Regarding the element of bhAva, this was brought in by the user of music and lyric, the human being.
It was when the lyric returned to music that music took a very significant turn - it went beyond a (nearly) free sound form, and became "enclosed" in another category of form altogether. The descent of music into form was complete. The lyric in turn allowed melody and rhythm to adapt in new ways to express the lyrical form into which it had entered and the lyric in turn used music to express itself in many different ways. The contribution of the lyric to provide a scaffold on which musical structures could be built cannot be underestimated - it is folly to deny this. Lyrics are hugely important in many ways.
In this process, music ceased to remain as a mere display of sound - it became a partner of language and all its purposes. One sound essentially became two and then the two combined together to create lyrical compositions.
The trouble is, as soon as you have form, there are going to be differences. Music created distinct entities with sheer sound and silence enough, on its own it did enough to create many different forms and systems of music, but lyric took those differences to the next level of sound altogether - it gave music a far deeper identification with form and differences and all things human than what it's capable of on its own.
So far, you'd not think it's a bad thing despite this. The problem happens thanks to the very entity that fashioned music into form - the human being.
The human being wrongly believes that absolute unity is found in the realm of twoness (and form) - no matter how pleasing it sounds to his inner urge to experience oneness and inclusivity again, he is making a most fundamental mistake that is out of touch with the very nature of existence itself. Forms can only truly experience oneness when they melt down back into a formless (or sufficiently formless) state. To have form, there must be a boundary, which means an experience of separation and limitation must necessarily exist.
This means that humans are in error if they think that all forms can coexist perfectly in the same space and time at once. But when has that EVER worked?
There is a quantum mechanical 'exclusion principle' analogue that is going to create pressure, and that pressure will make you degenerate after a point.
Therefore the human has a few solutions in mind - either try to accommodate as many forms as his own limited form will allow, or to dissolve the forms and structures from a significantly crystallized point part way till the point where the forms become soluble enough to one's personal satisfaction, which eventually creates a new form or more down the road -- this causes some people to go back to the tuning fork and its steady sound. Or, if they're too tired, they give up, quit the game, go all the way back into the formless and primordial where it started from. There cannot be a verbal argument between two silences right? Because there is no such thing as 'two silences'.
One way to go back at least part of the way is to remove the grossest, densest aspect of music's entrenchment in form - the lyric. The impact in many ways is like removing the physical body - a significant chunk of identification with form is wiped out, albeit at the cost of an entire dimension. However, as instrumental music based on vocal music shows, the musical structure created with the lyrical form remains even when the lyric has been removed. The alternative is to go for purely instrumental music that is not based on lyrical structures.
Yet another step is to reduce the fluid and more subtle structures created by the gamaka phrases, and reduce music back to plain notes.
All these are efforts to dissolve form a little bit to help relieve the pressure and try to feel a bit more oneness in more formless states of sound.
A very bad way of doing this is to actively annihilate any other form in favour of one's own. This is the result of the urge to expand and feel oneness trying to futilely achieve it within the limits of form, combined with an unhealthy oversized ego. An equally insidious, but passive way is to concede one's own form as inferior and allow another form to take over and be annihilated. Both of these are the ego's attempts to bring its ideas of oneness into its ideas of twoness, and neither way works as intended.
A less controversial way is to have all forms melt a bit and impose themselves on each other here and there, and try to find solubility at some level.
In Carnatic music, there is a dimension at every level from silence to lyric. Some people will like one more than the other as per their tastes. It will be good if the underlying nature of the game is understood without it getting ugly, but this is impossible when the mind is totally identified with whichever form it likes as all that is. The debate is truly ended only by silence, where there are no forms to make noise and differences.
The only issue with silence however, is that it doesn't manifest anything. The world's biggest zero happens to be the world's biggest oneness!
Without twoness, oneness is a latent zero. Without oneness, twoness is horribly limited. Only one who knows the oneness can enjoy the twoness beyond limits and only one who knows the twoness can bring oneness to life. And that is the secret of creation.
So the summary, you can like the lyric, someone else might want music without it, but both of you can't coexist in the same place at the same time. You can though when everyone's asleep and silent, and there are no more debates. Or if both of you have truly become enlightened.
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