bhairavam - Dikshitar

[SrinathK]

This is the modern version of kAlabhairavam bhajeham (the only recording I could get) : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0GwUVUjlrsc - it is more sUryakAntam than bhairavam (which is what happens when you invent a sampurna melakartha much later down the road that can sing all your raga's phrases and then some more, robbing your raga dry )

And THIS is the SSP version :- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kzARguFHDVg - Yes, seriously. Book raw, but that's how this raga went. The very handling of bhairavam is so bizarre with N2 and D1 being used at will (including right at the opening line) that I can't recognize it at all.

At this point I have no idea what Dikshitar's concept of a rAgA was at times, or what the concept of a rAgA itself used to be in the 17th and 18th centuries. If ragas keep using extra notes like this and freely skip notes on the ascent and descent (I now wonder if dhattu was a gamaka that originally meant skipping swaras rather than the zig zag combinations that we know it to be today).

All said, if this is the way Dikshitar sang old ragas or if that was the prevailing tradition of the times, it makes a lot of things we know about ragas today irrelevant to those times. A melakartha was simply a raga that used all the 7 swaras, who cares how. Even the very idea of distinguishing ragas by removing or adding some swaras to their equations is junked. Ragas seem to be more like species of chameleons and less like individual persons back in those days!

I am even beginning to think that the music wasn't even strictly raga based at one point.

That or there are some errors in the SSP at times. Hey, no book is ever perfect, that's why multiple editions exist.

[SrinathK]

Now that I'd have been into this rAgA business for a while, it would have been better for me (if I had known) to split the bhairavam of the Dikshitar school into a separate thread (will see if the mods will help). After about a month or two, my ears have now got used to the prayogas of the old school of CM and with what I'm coming to learn daily, I think I will have to do a second (or even third) round of covering rAgAs A-Z with better understanding and only then this topic will get properly organized in my head.

The bhairavam we sing today is essentially more of sUryakAntam than anything else. But that gamaka on it's D2 hides its history. This was a very distinct bhAshAnga rAgA with both D1 and D2 as well as N2 and N3 that seriously needs to be resurrected. Just reiterating, the original version of kAla bhairavam bhajEham : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kzARguFHDVg

This rAgA is the most bhAshAnga of bhAshAnga rAgAs I've ever heard, even after listening to it many times I'm wondering whether to use N2 or N3 or D2 or D1 here and there, especially when both are possible and have been used - even Subburama Dikshitar himself admits of a lot of possible combinations of D and N in the phrases and that it takes experience to nail the rAgA bhAva on the head. Muthuswami Dikshitar got it absolutely beautifully in kAla bhairavam. In this aspect, it makes bhairavi (also bhAshAnga) look utterly simple.