rajeshnat wrote: ↑08 Dec 2021, 16:02
CM musicians in general cannot pause at their pace , because they have to be in aligned with the rythmmic beats of percussion and with the flow of krithi. HM musician has a liberty of stopping at any point and stay with the main sruthi, the krithi is just an addendum for raga . There is just structural constraints within carnatic vs hindustani that dictates the pragmaticness.
That may be true as stated but is it not the case that these "structural constraints" are man-made i.e. self-inflicted? We have a choice here -- the tradition may demand higher complexity of rhythmic structure in general but nowhere does it say that this can be done at the expense of tonal fidelity. We can choose to slow things down or find other workarounds if speed is the obstacle to sruthi shuddham. Blaming the kritis for it seems a non-starter to me.
rajeshnat wrote: ↑
In general I have noticed when HM musicians sing suddenly say a volley of swaras they also go off sruthi. Take the volley of same set of swaras say by MMI he does not lose shruti. In general This characterization as though HM have more shruthi then CM is bit like telling cycles are less pollution free then two wheeler automobiles. sEach genre has its own challenges - ask HM musicians to take a thamizh kayal with karadu moradana thamizh words like say tiruvadi saranam enru nambi vanden or a volley of telugu words with a difficult eduppu or take off like kadanuvaariki or some dense sanskrit words like akshayalingavibho . They have never even tried .
Your comparison is akin to comparing a league-level tennis player with Federer. MMI was among the very very few who strived and achieved tonal perfection. You have to pick a similar once-in-a-century musician to compare with. In any case, I concede that not every HMian sings every phrase to perfection, only in general terms. But your example of MMI shows that it is certainly possible to sing traditional CM with speed and verve _and_ sruthi. Certainly not easy, but possible and worth striving for. We just need to work harder.
Re: your examples of kritis with difficult words, I don't buy the argument that the words make us go off shruthi. My western voice teacher while commenting that my Indian songs were very very consonant-heavy, also pointed out that I was repeatedly going off pitch on some words in particular and helped me correct them. Until he pointed these out I was oblivious to this fact. He specifically asked me to sing a composition with fewer words -- I sang a varnam and we worked on the syllable attack there first before we moved on to kritis. The point is that it can be done -- just needs discipline and the deliberate choice to practice certain phrases harder until you can execute to perfection. A carpenter cannot complain that his work is shoddy because his saw is blunt. He knows what he needs do to the saw.
I go back to my earlier argument that we have a choice. Our tradition has produced such kritis that are consonant-heavy but the tradition is of us, we as a community influence the tradition going forward. The common excuse of "what to do, our elders have said this and we cannot change it" does not apply so well here. We can always change the tradition and create new kinds of kritis. Perhaps some seer or avant garde composer will accept this challenge and compose kritis with far fewer words.
Your argument that HM is devoid of compositions with difficult words is not quite true either. They may not be the mainstay of the music, but they are performed and sometimes performed with pyrotechnic speed as well.
rajeshnat wrote: ↑
In general in CM those voices that have a heavier usage of brigas within the course of delivering krithis , there is a bit of tension in voice which cannot conform to shruthi smoothness . I would any day prefer a daring Semmangudi , Maharajapuram VIshwanatha iyer with their carnatic ideas then a sweet shruthi aligned Bombay Jayashri or a hindustani counterpart who usually squats consistently on few notes and takes a longer slumber there . Musical ideas remain to be a prime struggle for most of the hindustani musicians (not all)with excessive repetition. But there are lot of youngsters in CM who are excessively taking a brash approach , some of them lose quite a lot of shruthi , but that is only one half of practioners.
You seem to imply that the two things are mutually exclusive. SSI was a great musician inspite of his voice, but that does not mean that an SSI with a great voice cannot exist. Also, as the vidwan Sriram Parasuram said in one of his lecdems, the typical singing of CM has added on a lot more complexity than in, say, Veena Dhanammal's time. These brigas and complex sangatis have been added by us in recent times. Given this observation, it seems illogical to complain that these brigas keep us from singing in tune.
rajeshnat wrote: ↑
May be this post is opening a new topic like "Why do HM musicians struggle with ideas ?"
I find some of the ideas that HM musicians bring to the table very deep and fascinating (even though I am not trained in HM). Sometimes I find myself wondering how I can structure my niraval the way they structure their alaps and taans -- that would give me the opportunity to sometimes explore the raga behind the song and the words of the neraval line rather than quickly settle on the much easier thigh-slapping rhythm-bound exercises that are the norm in CM.
Thanks for the discussion.
-T
NB
@rajeshnat Looking back, my use of whitespace seems to have improved but only marginally here.