I have wondered about this question myself. Was Carnatic music sung at a slower tempo (on average) before, say 1947 to pick a random cut-off. The evidence is not there. There are a handful of musicians from pre-GNB era whose recordings are very freely available (we must be careful not to use the old EPs because they could have been sung fast just to squeeze into three and half minutes). The easiest example is Ariyakudi, He is unarguably pre-GNB but we cannot find any recording of any kriti that could be called "slow" by any definition. In fact it is the opposite -- Ariyakudi sings some twenty odd kritis in one concert and his alapanai is terse and precise rather than drawn out and contemplative. The next example is Chembai who was performing even before GNB. The only word to describe his style is "brisk". I recently heard a recording of Mysore Vasudevacharya apparently recorded in 1960s. In that recording he is anything but slow. Now add the veena "style" of Veena Dhanam. In the few recordings available she is a bit slower than the rest but only marginally so. If anything modern veena playing has actually *slowed* down from the traditional idiom starting with S, Balachander and to a lesser extent Kalpagam Swaminathan. Modern veena experts like Jayanthi Kumaresh, J&J, Balachandran, etc have slowed it down some more trending towards sitar-like exposition.vr92 wrote: ↑18 Jul 2024, 06:59 Hopefully not too late to the discussion
I wonder of the perceived lack of “tehrao” is due to much of modern Carnatic music having evolved from the Nadaswara bani which prioritizes brighas and crisp sangatis over long pauses. Many influential vidwans (GNB particularly) have explicitly based their singing on this style. Another factor may be the fact that our compositions our highly structured, and we value fidelity to the sahitya a lot more than in Hindustani music.
Any thoughts on this?
So I can only conclude that the average tempo in Carnatic music has been like this for more than a hundred years if not longer. It could have been even faster in the centuries before. I still have no idea what speed the Trinity would sung their compositions at, But I have a feeling with no evidence to back it up that the likes of Maha Vaidyanatha Iyer and Poochi Srinivasa Iyengar actually sang at an extremely fast tempo compared to current speeds.
I cannot tell when the focus on fast complex voice rolling (aka brigas) as well as the tala-oriented rhythmic complexity started -- are brigas really a result of cross pollination from nadaswaram or merely a synergistic amplification? I feel that latter is more likely .
What confounds my analysis is that the parallel history of mridangam playing is quite a different story. The experts tell us that mridangam playing as we know it only evolved in the last hundred years from the generation just before Palghat Mani Iyer and Palani. So the question I dont know the answer to is who was accompanying Maha Vaidyanatha Iyer melodically and on percussion, and how did they actually play. We have an anecdotal quote that Veena Dhanam remarked that GNB reminded her of Vaidyanatha Iyer. So did Vaidyanatha Iyer carry off his fast tempo virtuoso expositions on his own without the help of a master craftsmen on the violin and mridangam?
-T