Part of Carnatic Classical
Carnatic music, the classical tradition of South India, builds on raga and tala and centres on the voice and the kriti. Students begin with exercises in raga Mayamalavagowla.
Historical Timeline
The scholar M. B. Vedavalli has written a monograph on Ragam Tanam Pallavi that follows alapana, tanam and pallavi exposition from the earliest treatises to the present day.
One hypothesis holds that some kritis grew from famous pallavis, and the reverse also happened. U. Ve. Saminatha Iyer records that Ghanam Krishna Iyer, a contemporary of Tyagaraja (1767 to 1847), improvised a pallavi in raga Atana in Tyagaraja's presence and later reworked it as a kriti. Pallavi texts often dealt with secular, everyday themes, and musicians valued them for the elaboration they allowed more than for their words. The writers V. N. Muthukumar and M. V. Ramana suggest that the devotional emphasis of pallavi texts may belong more to the 20th century.
Earlier books, among them Tiruvottiyur Tyagayyar's Pallavi Svara Kalpavalli, gave pallavis in notation. Vedavalli credits P. Sambamoorthy as the first author to set out the structure of a pallavi and the stages of its exposition. She adds that shorter modern concerts have compressed that exposition, and that performers now leave out many of the stages Sambamoorthy described.
Tanam and pallavi take shape
M. B. Vedavalli treats the Sangita Sudha, attributed to Raghunatha Nayaka of Thanjavur in the early 17th century, as the earliest account of an alapana close to the modern one. Tanam and pallavi exposition developed after it.
RTP at Court
Concerts at the courts of kings and wealthy patrons are described as centring on RTPs in major ragas such as Sankarabharanam, Todi and Bhairavi. Maha Vaidyanatha Iyer (1844 to 1893) was a noted exponent of extemporaneous singing and raga alapana.
The modern concert format
Mohan Ramanan links the present form of the concert to the founding of the Music Academy in Madras in 1927. Concerts settle at about two to two and a half hours, built around kritis, with RTP after the bulk of them.
Rare ragas and new forms
Performers use RTP to present rare ragas, sometimes naming the raga in the pallavi text, and sing pallavis that move through several ragas or talas. New variants appear, such as a Ragam Tanam Mallari, which replaces the pallavi with a mallari from the nagaswaram repertoire.
Playing Techniques
The Three Parts of Ragam Tanam Pallavi
An RTP moves from free rhythm to strict metre: ragam has no pulse, tanam adds one, and pallavi sets a composed line in a tala.
Ragam is the raga alapana. The performer sets out the raga's permitted notes and characteristic phrases, growing in pace and in the complexity of the patterns. Vocalists use open syllables such as aa, ri, na and ta in place of note names. After the singer, the violinist takes a turn at the raga.
Tanam (also spelt thanam or taanam) sets the raga to a steady pulse on syllables such as a-nam-tam, also given as tha, nam, thom, with no tala cycle. The custom is to sing it without percussion. The vocalist S. Sowmya has noted that tanam with mridangam, once confined to the Navaratri Mandapam concerts in Thiruvananthapuram, is now common. Tanam is said to have developed on the veena, whose drone strings supply its rhythmic patterns. A tanam can also move through several ragas, a ragamalika or "garland of ragas".
Pallavi follows: one composed line in a tala, which becomes the theme for the rest of the item.
How the Pallavi Is Developed
In an RTP the pallavi is a short line of text set to one or more cycles of a tala; in a kriti the same word names the opening section. The line divides at the arudi into two halves, the purvangam and the uttarangam, with a brief held pause (vishranti) on the last syllable of the first half. Some performers take a traditional pallavi or a line from a well-known kriti.
The tala may be simple or complex, and the beat may be divided in different ways (gati). The performer sings the line in three degrees of speed against the same tala (trikalam), and may re-set it in another nadai, the number of pulses in each beat, often tisra, three to a beat, keeping the arudi in place.
Niraval comes next: improvised melodic variation on the words of the line. Then come kalpanaswaram, improvised passages sung on the note names sa, ri, ga, ma, pa, da, ni, each returning to the point where the line begins (the eduppu).
Tani Avartanam (Percussion Solo)
The tani avartanam is the extended solo by the percussionists. The mridangam leads, often joined by the kanjira, ghatam or morsing, and the solo lasts from about two to twenty minutes.
The drummers first play solo turns, then trade patterns, and close with a joint finale, after which the main artist takes up the melody again. In fuller renditions of an RTP, the tani follows the elaboration of the pallavi. In Ramnad Krishnan's 1967 Bhairavi RTP, T. Ranganathan on mridangam and V. Nagarajan on kanjira begin the tani at 28 minutes 52 seconds, after the kalpanaswaram.
Journey to Mastery
Follow this structured journey to master this discipline
Alapana (Ragam)
Tanam
Pallavi in Tala
Niraval and Kalpanaswaram
Full RTP with Percussion
Past Performances
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