A Crash Course in Identifying Ragas
A few people asked me to give them the fu in identify ragas and I thought this is reason enough to write this 'mini howto'!
This write-up is not aimed at the Music Student. Music students have a natural course and more 'systematic' way of gaining the ability to start identifying ragas. This is only for the longing 'rasika' who wants to know the underlying 'raga' that comprises a song (now, this isn't only about Carnatic. You are most likely to 'enjoy' applying this over non-pure-carnatic music like light-music or even your favourite Rock song!).
Being able to identify ragas could be a plus in many ways:
1. It just gives you a 'kick' to find what 'raga' a given song is in.
2. It gives you brownie points if you are in a carnatic-speaking audience to say "ah, this is a pure Agmark kapi raga"
3. The Sex-Appeal: TamBram women are hot*. Almost all of them know Carnatic and it gives you an amazing ability to date and mate. (This may not be very appealing to the women population reading this (atleast not to the non-Fire women, I suppose). But hey, some TamBram guys get turned on by Carnatic as well, so there!)
Alright! Before proceeding to read, ask yourself the following questions:
1. Do I enjoy listening to Carnatic or Carnatic-like Music? (hint: Most of south indian filmi music - Ilayaraaja and some of Rahman types music is based on Carnatic too!)
2. Can I reproduce a piece of tune I heard? (by singing, humming, whistling)
3. Do I often tend to say "'this' song sounds like 'that' song"?
If you answered 'yes' for all of the above, you would probably benefit by this text (or so I genuinely hope).
I'm going to hypnotize myself and continue to write the rest of this text. Heh. No, but what I would do is look into myself and find out 'why' and 'how' whatever raga identification I do works the way it does and then come up with a 'rule' to it.
Firstly, It is easier to start identifying ragas than identifying a 'western scale'. Why? Ragas are more than just scales. They have set 'patterns' that are characteristics (think of how a Ballad or a 'Kural' has a 'pattern' in its layout. The grammar). A pattern is very 'hummable' and memorisable. We are not even going to be dealing with swaras (notes) in this text. Yay! Alright, let's me do the the 'hypnotising' trick...
Experiment: When I imagine the song "Puthu Vellai Mazhai" from "Roja" (Its Yeh Haseen Vadiyan from Roja), the flow of "Vellai Mazhai" the song brings memories of the opening verses of the classical/filmi song "Alaipayuthey" (or even the lines "Pookkal Illaye" from the song "Poomalai Vaangi Vanthaan" (Sindhu Bhairavi)). (of course, this is besides the obvious 'ga ma ri' standing out and hitting my head with a large hammer, saying "hey, I'm a kanada")
Same Experiment-part 2: Think of "Azhagana Ratchasiye" from the movie "Mudhalvan" (or mudhalvudu in telugu? or mudhalvaru in Kannada? ;) ). What does it 'remind' you? The lines "adimanasa aruvamanayil narukkuriye" reminds me of the way the lines "kathai kelungal" goes in the song "raman kathai kelungal" from Chippikkul Muthu (Tamil) (the telugu equivalent being the song Rama Kanavemira from Swathi Muthyam, I suppose).
Observation: How I "associated" one song to another, I haven't been able to objectively observe. But there is one thing to be noted here. The ability to see 'connections' between multiple songs is important. Where 'connections' here is where I said "this line sounds like the part of that line". The ability to make 'connections' is quite dependant on the number of songs you know. To me, When I listen, more than just being a passive listener, I also keep singing the song. So we have our first 'rule' being formed here:
Rule#1: Listen to as many carnatic-like songs as possible. Try and find out what raga it is based on. Several sites on the net list the ragas of your favourite film songs. It is not necessary that you need to 'rote' song-raga associations within N hours. But as you listen, find out the name of the raga if possible. What is important is the ability to associate or 'feel' the phrases of a raga. Tagging it is just a matter of giving a 'name' to a concept. The raga is the concept here. And the concept keeps getting refined over time.
Enhancement to Rule#1: Like they say about studying for exams, the typical south-indian approach: "writing once is worth reading 10 times". I remember writing the formulae for volumes of sphere and cone and what not several times :) Singing a song once is much better than passively listening to a song (no matter how 'bad' you sing, try and hum/sing/whistle. It not only improves your ability to 'sing' over time but also instills the habit of 'correcting' your voice in real-time when you go off-pitch. This very function enables you to see differences between two different 'notes' even if you don't end up learning what notes make up a given raga the very event of a 'note' sounding different will help you say "ah, this is some other raga").
Experiment: I go past into the subsequent lines of the first 'example' in the above experiment -- 'Puthu Vellai Mazhai'. The lines beginning with 'Nathiye Neeyaanal Karai Naanaaven' in the next 'paragraph' don't seem to fit with _any_ 'patterns' in any of the other 'kanada's that I know of! Of course, they won't because that paragraph is no longer a kanada!
Observation: Film Music tends to be less adhering to rules of a classical music form. In the above example, The second paragraph is a cute mathematical play. What is called a 'tonic shift' or a 'bedham' in Carnatic terms. What that means in plain english is that Rahman has just done a 'traversing' from Kanada to its parent raga - Karaharapriya and started playing karaharapriya from such a calculated 'note' that it neither brings in too many notes other than what existed in the first paragraph but at the same time it brings in a 'mood change' (the psychological effect of a 'tonic shift' is usually a 'mood change').
Rule#2: Filmi songs (the pop/non-carnatic types) are more free-form. If you really want to master the art of identifying ragas, listen to more real carnatic than filmi songs to progress at atleast some rate at which you won't get 'frustrated' and 'give up' half way through the exercise. Believe me, listening to Carnatic is like listening to the 'roots'. It is quite easy to make 'associations' to filmi songs from Carnatic songs than between equivalent 'filmi songs'. More likely is the fact that people disagree upon which raga a given filmi song is in simply due to the presence of such 'tonic shifts' and 'foreign notes' that makes it difficult to pin down a given filmi song to a single raga. If you have listened to Jazz (no, not the 'simple' old 40s/50s classic vocal Jazz (a la Ellah Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, etc.,.). I'm talking about 'real' Jazz whose roots exist even today in modern Jazz -- Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis and thereby Pat Metheny, John Scofield and the likes) you will notice that this 'mood change' happens quite 'dramatically' and quite often within a single song and it ends up sounding almost like 'chaos'. This very 'chaos' factor exists in subtle quantities in Filmi music too (especially those written by Rahman and Ilayaraaja!). 'Foreign Notes' and 'Tonic Shifts' are Bad for the Health of a Young Raga Identifier(TM).
Note that, I'm not asking you to 'stay away' from Filmi songs. I'm just telling you to not try too hard in trying to figure out the 'raga' of a filmi song. Do attempt. Enter in a nice debate with your fellow 'raga identifier'. It is only easy to identify when you are trying out Carnatic. For the carnatically uninitiated, It is only natural to think carnatic is too 'complex' or to say "this is not my cup of tea". But really, there are very sweet 'entry level' songs one can listen and get 'started'.
Here are some things I would recommend to get 'started' on:
This write-up is not aimed at the Music Student. Music students have a natural course and more 'systematic' way of gaining the ability to start identifying ragas. This is only for the longing 'rasika' who wants to know the underlying 'raga' that comprises a song (now, this isn't only about Carnatic. You are most likely to 'enjoy' applying this over non-pure-carnatic music like light-music or even your favourite Rock song!).
Being able to identify ragas could be a plus in many ways:
1. It just gives you a 'kick' to find what 'raga' a given song is in.
2. It gives you brownie points if you are in a carnatic-speaking audience to say "ah, this is a pure Agmark kapi raga"
3. The Sex-Appeal: TamBram women are hot*. Almost all of them know Carnatic and it gives you an amazing ability to date and mate. (This may not be very appealing to the women population reading this (atleast not to the non-Fire women, I suppose). But hey, some TamBram guys get turned on by Carnatic as well, so there!)
Alright! Before proceeding to read, ask yourself the following questions:
1. Do I enjoy listening to Carnatic or Carnatic-like Music? (hint: Most of south indian filmi music - Ilayaraaja and some of Rahman types music is based on Carnatic too!)
2. Can I reproduce a piece of tune I heard? (by singing, humming, whistling)
3. Do I often tend to say "'this' song sounds like 'that' song"?
If you answered 'yes' for all of the above, you would probably benefit by this text (or so I genuinely hope).
I'm going to hypnotize myself and continue to write the rest of this text. Heh. No, but what I would do is look into myself and find out 'why' and 'how' whatever raga identification I do works the way it does and then come up with a 'rule' to it.
Firstly, It is easier to start identifying ragas than identifying a 'western scale'. Why? Ragas are more than just scales. They have set 'patterns' that are characteristics (think of how a Ballad or a 'Kural' has a 'pattern' in its layout. The grammar). A pattern is very 'hummable' and memorisable. We are not even going to be dealing with swaras (notes) in this text. Yay! Alright, let's me do the the 'hypnotising' trick...
Experiment: When I imagine the song "Puthu Vellai Mazhai" from "Roja" (Its Yeh Haseen Vadiyan from Roja), the flow of "Vellai Mazhai" the song brings memories of the opening verses of the classical/filmi song "Alaipayuthey" (or even the lines "Pookkal Illaye" from the song "Poomalai Vaangi Vanthaan" (Sindhu Bhairavi)). (of course, this is besides the obvious 'ga ma ri' standing out and hitting my head with a large hammer, saying "hey, I'm a kanada")
Same Experiment-part 2: Think of "Azhagana Ratchasiye" from the movie "Mudhalvan" (or mudhalvudu in telugu? or mudhalvaru in Kannada? ;) ). What does it 'remind' you? The lines "adimanasa aruvamanayil narukkuriye" reminds me of the way the lines "kathai kelungal" goes in the song "raman kathai kelungal" from Chippikkul Muthu (Tamil) (the telugu equivalent being the song Rama Kanavemira from Swathi Muthyam, I suppose).
Observation: How I "associated" one song to another, I haven't been able to objectively observe. But there is one thing to be noted here. The ability to see 'connections' between multiple songs is important. Where 'connections' here is where I said "this line sounds like the part of that line". The ability to make 'connections' is quite dependant on the number of songs you know. To me, When I listen, more than just being a passive listener, I also keep singing the song. So we have our first 'rule' being formed here:
Rule#1: Listen to as many carnatic-like songs as possible. Try and find out what raga it is based on. Several sites on the net list the ragas of your favourite film songs. It is not necessary that you need to 'rote' song-raga associations within N hours. But as you listen, find out the name of the raga if possible. What is important is the ability to associate or 'feel' the phrases of a raga. Tagging it is just a matter of giving a 'name' to a concept. The raga is the concept here. And the concept keeps getting refined over time.
Enhancement to Rule#1: Like they say about studying for exams, the typical south-indian approach: "writing once is worth reading 10 times". I remember writing the formulae for volumes of sphere and cone and what not several times :) Singing a song once is much better than passively listening to a song (no matter how 'bad' you sing, try and hum/sing/whistle. It not only improves your ability to 'sing' over time but also instills the habit of 'correcting' your voice in real-time when you go off-pitch. This very function enables you to see differences between two different 'notes' even if you don't end up learning what notes make up a given raga the very event of a 'note' sounding different will help you say "ah, this is some other raga").
Experiment: I go past into the subsequent lines of the first 'example' in the above experiment -- 'Puthu Vellai Mazhai'. The lines beginning with 'Nathiye Neeyaanal Karai Naanaaven' in the next 'paragraph' don't seem to fit with _any_ 'patterns' in any of the other 'kanada's that I know of! Of course, they won't because that paragraph is no longer a kanada!
Observation: Film Music tends to be less adhering to rules of a classical music form. In the above example, The second paragraph is a cute mathematical play. What is called a 'tonic shift' or a 'bedham' in Carnatic terms. What that means in plain english is that Rahman has just done a 'traversing' from Kanada to its parent raga - Karaharapriya and started playing karaharapriya from such a calculated 'note' that it neither brings in too many notes other than what existed in the first paragraph but at the same time it brings in a 'mood change' (the psychological effect of a 'tonic shift' is usually a 'mood change').
Rule#2: Filmi songs (the pop/non-carnatic types) are more free-form. If you really want to master the art of identifying ragas, listen to more real carnatic than filmi songs to progress at atleast some rate at which you won't get 'frustrated' and 'give up' half way through the exercise. Believe me, listening to Carnatic is like listening to the 'roots'. It is quite easy to make 'associations' to filmi songs from Carnatic songs than between equivalent 'filmi songs'. More likely is the fact that people disagree upon which raga a given filmi song is in simply due to the presence of such 'tonic shifts' and 'foreign notes' that makes it difficult to pin down a given filmi song to a single raga. If you have listened to Jazz (no, not the 'simple' old 40s/50s classic vocal Jazz (a la Ellah Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, etc.,.). I'm talking about 'real' Jazz whose roots exist even today in modern Jazz -- Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis and thereby Pat Metheny, John Scofield and the likes) you will notice that this 'mood change' happens quite 'dramatically' and quite often within a single song and it ends up sounding almost like 'chaos'. This very 'chaos' factor exists in subtle quantities in Filmi music too (especially those written by Rahman and Ilayaraaja!). 'Foreign Notes' and 'Tonic Shifts' are Bad for the Health of a Young Raga Identifier(TM).
Note that, I'm not asking you to 'stay away' from Filmi songs. I'm just telling you to not try too hard in trying to figure out the 'raga' of a filmi song. Do attempt. Enter in a nice debate with your fellow 'raga identifier'. It is only easy to identify when you are trying out Carnatic. For the carnatically uninitiated, It is only natural to think carnatic is too 'complex' or to say "this is not my cup of tea". But really, there are very sweet 'entry level' songs one can listen and get 'started'.
Here are some things I would recommend to get 'started' on:
- Try and get some sweet sounding vocalist's rendition of simple Carnatic songs. Don't go in for the 'hardcore' artists like D K Pattammal / D K Jayaraman. I for one, didn't like D K Pattammal's voice when I began with. I used to listen to a lot of M.S.Subbulakshmi when I was a child so I was 'tolerant' already. If you are totally new, probably a Bombay Jayashree or a Sudha Raghunathan will do. If you are a female, I really don't know what kind of 'male voices' women dig ;/ I would anyway blindly risk recommending Sanjay Subramanyam.
- If you understand/appreciate Tamil/Tamil Poetry, Bharathiar songs will be perfect. I was totally in love with the way the dude thinks -- Chinnanchiru Kiliye was my 'first love' (just because I loved the way he wrote "marbil anivatharkae, unnaippol vairamanigal undo?").
- If you just like Music for the sake of Music and not really for the lyrics, then Mandolin Shrinivas is an excellent start. There are several Bharathiyar Songs rendered by Mandolin Shrinivas but they may become too 'bland' after a while. That would then be a good indication that you should 'move on' to other kind of songs in Carnatic music!
- When beginning with, I for one, found the 'serious' numbers made up of ragas like Varali and Thodi and such 'scary' and had an aversion towards them. If you belong here, Jumpy numbers might be a turn on for you to begin with. Listen to 'Raghuvamsa Sudha' or 'English Note' or 'Toli Janma'. There are a set of 'sweet' and mellowful ragas -- Rithigowla, Madhyamavathi, brindhavanasaranga (Ranga Puravihara sung by M.S.S is an apparent 'Super Hit', so to speak), Mohanam, Shankarabharanam, Bilahari, Abhogi, Shriranjani , Kapi (TONS of filmi songs you can relate to!), Kanada, Sahana and so on.
- You might just have 'one' specific favourite film song. Find out its raga, hunt for Carnatic songs in that raga. This will not only get you hooked onto Carnatic but will also help collect more 'patterns'. Maybe "idhazhil kathai yezhuthum" from the movie "Unnal Mudiyum Thambi" is your favourite? Listen to 'Natanalabhramayaku rendered by M.S.Subbulakshmi!
To sum it all up, listen, listen and listen as much as you can (without forcing yourself to do it!). Correlating songs is the key. The 'Eureka!' moment involved in identifying a raga can be quite rewarding and will set you sailing on a wonderful journey to appreciate Music at a deeper level. Listening to your favourite filmi songs is good. But listening to "light" Carnatic music will help you get there easily. Remember, saying the 'name' of a raga is trivial. Don't even worry if you keep saying 'mohanam' instead of 'karaharapriya' by mistake. What is important is that you must 'see' the connection between two songs of the same raga.
Let me know if you think there are more 'experiments' and 'rules' that you think must figure in here. I hope you will find this piece of text useful. If not, i hope it was atleast entertaining ;)
* Subject to the 'genes' of the families/relatives involved in the said wedding. The weddings I've sampled stand a good evidence for that. So you can take my word, really. ;)