I looked everywhere and to my surprise there was no thread on gaurimanOhari. This rAgA is the 23rd sampUrna mElakarta, in the 4th chakra of the 72 sampUrna mElakarta system(vEda chakra - after the 4 vEdas)defined so :
Aro : S R2 G2 M1 P D2 N3 S
Ava : S N3 D2 P M1 G2 R2 S
The 23rd rAgAnga rAga in the asampUrna school is gauri vElAvali - and it's quite different in phrases. As is the norm for my rAga sojurns, Dikshitar's system of rAgAs has its own thread.
Now I have talked a lot about the phrases of ragas in gauri and ghaNTA(ravam) in my last 2 posts. But those were phrase based rAgAs, defined by key phrases. You just couldn't do anything and everything you wanted with them. You had to have a keen understanding of the phrases and rAgA bhAva, the compositions in them and knowledge of different ways of interpreting the rAgA while still maintaining its recognizable identity and only then you could think of ways and styles of improvising swaras and the rAga.
This is where the modern approach to rAgAs reveals its biggest strength. It makes it very easy to form phrases of all kinds - short, long, linear, twisted, multiple notes, brighas, connecting far off notes, skipping notes, sequential patterns (3 octave plus elaboration, varying gamaka levels, using swaras in complicated rhythmic patterns, etc.etc. In other words, the full works : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamak_(music)
Notice that the definition of gamakas seems to have altered slightly from the pure veena-vocal techniques of phrasing a note to plot devices of what you can do with said notes as well.
Of course there are also some specific non-linear organic phrases in this particular chakra of ragas (e.g. GPM(P)-GR (G)RSS,,-DN,S) which can be sung and only enhance the rAgA and not sound out of place (of course, you'll have to listen to AlApanAs to get the feel of those phrases, not all of them can be literally turned into swaras as they use virtual notes).
This means I really cannot give you a phrase list for gauri manOhari (some of you will be thanking God I'm sure). There are too many even in one expansive AlApanA to properly capture in words. You are best advised to listen to the compositions, AlApanAs, neravals, swaras and RTPs and decode the phrases and that would be far more practical.
gaurimanOhari is a rAgA with enormous elaboration potential, IMHO a little more than keeravANi because that D2 has a wider range of possible motion compared to D1. But in practice it is underutilized and seems to have gotten the short end of the stick when it comes to stage opportunities, overshadowed by kharaharapriya (I joke that gauri manOhari is a victim of rAga sexism, having said that please kindly do not divert the thread
) and keeravANi (who uses some popular compositions to keep gaurimanOhari at a lower profile). What we can do is talk about the role of the notes. The rAgA's most important distinguishing note is the D2, which gives it a lush, cool flavor, devoid of the introversion of keeravANi. Of course use of G2-R2 combination gives the rAgA great emotion, a bhakti bhava. The gamakas on G2 are very important to the identity of the rAga. G2 is almost always sung with oscillations and gamakas as a phrased note. The use of a plain G2 will be rarer compared to the oscillated G2 with kampita and vali (quite less than dharmavati, which has the excuse of M2 being far away and restricts the G2 as a result). IMHO plain G2 will probably used for a contrasting expression as it can change the mood of the rAgA significantly. Now note that nothing anywhere says you can't or shouldn't sing a plain G2, but it will need a little more skill and experience to nail it.
On either side of G2, R2 will be almost always plain, except for janTa (keeping in mind the gamakas on the G2). M1 is also a vital note, but it will mostly be a plain note when paired with G2, using heavy gamaka from G2 will make it sound more like bhairavi for a split second, so that's usually avoided. M1 however will use nokku and kampita when it does not lead to G2 (like MPDNS or SNDP-M,).
All other notes can be used as "staircase steps" for extended karvais and beginning and ending phrases with ease.
gaurimanOhari doesn't seem to be even as popular as it's prati madhyama equivalent dharmAvati for some reason. The most probabe cause seems to be the lack of popular heavyweight compositions in it. It does find some presence in the RTP segment, but there it is clearly 2nd tier in popularity behind the big rAgAs and the rakti rAgAs, and even some vivAdis these days.
More by Charulatha Mani in her article "Godly Gaurimanohari" : https://www.thehindu.com/features/frida ... 271861.ece
So coming to the compositions in gaurimanOhari, let me start yet again at a very unusual place. gaurimanOhari on one occasion became a star among rAgAs, depicting a song on the Divine source behind music (did you guess it, don't click the link and cheat) :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9msd0j1n9yA --
Oh yes, verily a star and a super-hit. It was used in many other film songs too. Sh. Ilayaraja has also composed aplenty in gaurimanOhariIn CM, gaurimanOhari seems to have been first brought out by Thyagaraja, as with other sampUrna mElas of which he was the pioneer. We have 2 of his compositions in it. With my earlier understanding, things should have been simple at this point - I'd have moved on to giving links to recordings. However, very interestingly, karnatik.com lists as many as 6 kritis of Oothukadu Venkata Kavi in it, not one or two, SIX! Now I'm curious and have quite a few questions. Allow me to go off road into the jungles for a while...
We now know that the sampUrna mElakarta system already existed before the Trinity. However, most of the 72 rAgAs were only on paper till that point. So who was the first to start using gaurimanOhari? Thyagaraja or OVK?
Was OVK aware of both systems of rAgAs? (We now know for sure that Thyagaraja was aware.) Why I ask this is because If a composer has 6 compositions to his credit in one rAga, we really need to study those carefully, as it indicates that composer has taken special interest in that raga. But the need is even more when it is in a rAgA that is widely considered to have been given its break by Thyagaraja. Was it OVK? Or are the tunes of these compositions the work of a later tunesmith's? Are those his compositions or a later composer's in the family? (That last one is easier to answer given his singular style).
Or did OVK actually compose in gauri vElAvali and we are now singing them in gaurimanOhari? Unfortunately we have no idea how many of OVK's original tunes have survived to the present day - there is evidence he has used the old rAga phrases of his era for some songs preserved in notations (we do not use those prayogams today), that tells you the approximate time period of the tune notated and also helps establish that at least the songs with older phrases are not the work of later composers. What about others? Now we have plenty of proof that very few of the Trinity's kritis have been preserved in their original tunes since their times, and most of them have changer dramatically despite (or because of) their big shishya paramparas, so who knows what happened to OVK?
More information and publications on the sources, documentation and researching of OVK's songs, tunes and lyrics are very much needed, like what we are doing for Thyagaraja and Dikshitar. OVK's family kept many of the songs to themselves for a long time, he did not have a big shishya parampara, and we do not how far the prevailing traditions influenced his music. In those days all composers were very well aware of the lakshanas of existing ragas. We do not know if OVK was known to other composers of that era, or whether he was known but not publicized (he kept a low profile).
I personally have a doubt on the popular timeline whether OVK was indeed well before the Trinity or a contemporary as the dates of the timeline of his family tree aren't adding up. There is a big issue when you push back OVK's time to 1700-1760 and that is the development of ragas itself. Venkatamakhin wrote his work somewhere around 1650 +/- a couple of decades - at that time he was able to identify lakshanas for only 19 out of 72 melas, though he seemed to have realized the possibility of 72. His grandson first fully developed the asampUrna mEla system, so that would at the very earliest put its development in the late 17th century. The naming scheme for the 72 ragas (kaTapayadi) happened almost a century after Venkatamakhi's time and it was the Dikshitar family that gave many of those ragas in the 72 asampUrna mElAs their debut. So the asampUrna mEla system must have been completed by the early 18th century before the time of Ramaswamy Dikshitar. The sampUrna mEla system of Govinda definitely came on the heels of the asampUrna sometime after the rAgAngA scales were fixed. How do we know? Because Ramaswamy Dikshitar and his family did not use the sampUrna mElas, but Thyagaraja did.
So when you date OVK back to c.1700-1760, you start wondering how his songs could be in the sampUrNa or apoorva rAgAs that were popularized much later by the trinity. If you look at the present list of OVK's ragas, you won't find a single asampUrna rAgAnga raga there (No, his rasamanjari is different from Dikshitar's). You'll find old rAgAs in vogue during that period, still in use today, but not the old ones that went extinct since. But there are plenty of newer names. For ragas whose names are found in Sangraha Choodamani, the best estimate for that book is c.1800. We now know based on phrases in manuscripts that Thyagaraja himself hardly had 4-5 ragas whose lakshanas matched SC - they were his own creations and his disciples gave them names. So the older you date OVK, the less and less likely that his original tunes could have been in the modern rAga system. The longer his songs have been around, the more changes in traditions and lakshanas they were exposed to, the greater the possibility that they have been retuned in modern rAgAs. 320 years is an eternity in CM -- 4 musical yugas have come and gone in this time!
So given what I have seen with the Trinity's compositions, I have absolutely no doubt that the ragas of OVK's songs, and by extension the tunes have also been through the same modernizing and retuning process, but his unique lyrically shaped rhythmic structures, tAlAs and naDai changes might be better preserved. Lyrics make a good scaffold for rhythm and given OVK's unique signature rhythmic devices, the rhythmic aspects must definitely have fared better than the rAgAs - even here I would not be wrong to consider that some of the naDai changes could have been later ideas. Exceptions would be some of the old notated songs in classic ragas like mOhanam or gambhira nATa that haven't changed over the ages, those might still be preserved today. Also there are some ragas that are used uniquely by OVK and no one else. Perhaps those might have survived.
I'd say that most of his tunes were modernized by the late 19th-mid 20th century and by the time modern musicians found them, they have been this way for a while now. E.g. brindAvana nilayE was set to tune by GNB. Who knows how many more have been set to tune over those lyrical scaffolds in recent years?
If OVK was indeed more recent, then could there have been cross pollination between his musical ideas and the Trinity's? If he lived in a later period, maybe a senior contemporary of the Trinity, it makes it more likely he could have known of both the raga traditions as they would have begun to establish themselves seriously by then. But then he'd have been more well known. Unfortunately we can only speculate. His songs are proving to be a second Swati Tirunal at times - at least for the Maharaja his dates are clear and we might find old material in the libraries, but OVK's songs seem to have mostly been passed on orally, with only some songs containing old prayogas in notebooks AFAIK. Those old versions though, would make valuable treasure, and might date back to the Trinity period at least given those old prayogams. But they aren't coming out anytime soon.
On the sliding scale of compositions which I wrote sometime back half joking half serious, (viewtopic.php?f=2&t=33561), I know where most of the Trinity's songs fall and I wonder where OVK's present versions will end up. With the paucity of documented records of OVK's compositions, we can only examine the lyrics and overall musical style for support. Out of the 590 available songs of OVK, tunes aren't yet there for all of them and many are coming out in the last few years even. It doesn't help that even today, the flag bearers of OVK's compositions aren't as forthcoming with the sources and details of research into his compositions and their tunes and lyrics(or probably don't have all the details themselves) -- so in the end we'll have to take their word for it, and believe they did their best to resurrect his works keeping in mind his uniquely delightful style.
So to conclude, we didn't know who used gaurimanOhari first - OVK or Thyagaraja. Or whether OVK's songs were originally in gaurimanOhari to begin with, or if all those are his. Assuming they are, the first 2 questions remain. The older OVK is dated, the weaker his case becomes, while the history of ragas favours Thyagaraja's side. Investigating the matter of OVK's original rAgAs and tunes raises more questions than answers - the lack of detailed information on the research carried out into OVK's compositions, their tunes and how they came to be, hasn't helped. Thyagaraja and Dikshitar are better documented.
Anyway, this issue of lack of info aside, I will of course cover OVK's compositions here as far as I can find recordings of them. I hope they'll answer some of my doubts. Let's get back on road now...
Coming to other composers, there is a kriti attributed to Dikshitar (parAshakti Ishvari) in gaurimanOhari (no way). His composition kumAri gauri vElAvali is in the SSP in gaurivElAvali, so any tune you hear of Dikshitar in gaurimanOhari is a later invention. Swati Tirunal has a composition in it. Tiruvottiyur Tyagayya, Garbhapuri Srinivasa Iyengar, Harikesanallur Muthiah Bhagavatar, Papanasam Sivan, Shuddhananda Bharati, Mysore Vasudevacharya, the 72 mElakarta composers (Koteeswara Iyer, M Balamuralikrishna and others), all the way down to Dr. V V Srivatsa, Madurai G S Mani and even K Ramaraj (of the old guard of rasikas.org) have all composed in it, but only some of the songs are well known.
EDIT : thanks to @srkris for extending the character limit to 15000 now. So I'll cover compositions in gaurimanOhari in the next post.
