Glossary

Aarohi   It means 'ascending in order', and the progression thus des­cribed indicates movement from notes of lower pitches to those of higher.

Abhoga It means 'till completion' and refers to the last section of musical compositions, especially in dhrupad.

Alankara Literally means 'that which decorates or embellishes.' In music it refers to features such as a change in the sequence of notes, their repetition, introduction of variety in timbre in one single phrase, etc. Embellishments are employed to bring in more beauty in presenta­tions. A broad parallel would be figures of speech in literature.

Alap Elaboration of a musical idea contained or implicit in the original tonal phrase, rngn-frame, composition, etc.

Antara The second section of a composition following immediately after the first and generally highlighting the upper half of the octave-range.

Amivadi   Those notes included in a raga but different from vadi and samvadi notes.

Ardhatala   These tala-s are regarded to be less than full-fledged on account of their inherent simplicity of construction. These are often used in folk and other non-elite categories of music.

Ashtapadi A song-type originally composed by the poet Jayadeva in the twelveth-thirteenth century in his dance-drama Geelgovind. The form was revived in Hindustani vocal art music for solo performances by musicians of the Gwalior school in the nineteenth century.

Auchar   Following from the word ucchara meaning 'articulation', it mainly refers to the initial and primary spelling out of melodic ideas in raga-presentation.

Avanaddha  Instruments featuring a membrane for cover resonators. In the science of musical instruments they are classified as membranophones because in such instruments membranes are the primary sound-creating agents.

Bada Khayal The Khaya-composition in Hindustani vocal music charac­terized by a relatively slow tempo and, hence, conducive to expan­sive melodic elaborations.

Bal Sections of elaborations in rhythm-music mainly created by changes in dynamics and accentuation of their respective sound-syllables.

Bandish A common term for a musical composition, though sometimes confined incorrectly to melodic music, especially of the art category.

Bandish-ki-thumri  A type of thumri set to teentala and designed to be used in dance-performances.

Bani Refers to the four basic styles of singing/rendering dhrupad, mainly from the repertoire of vocal art music.

Barabari Tempo which is in equal measure to the tala in progression.

Bhajan   A genre of vocal devotional music also presented from the concert-stage.

Biruda   A section of a composition containing salutation to the deity, guru, etc.

Bol Units of meaningful as well as meaningless sound-syllables used to elaborate musical ideas.

Chaiti A genre of semi-classical vocal music based on folk-songs sung to welcome the spring season in Uttar Pradesh and adjoining areas.

Chaturang A genre in Hindustani art music in which the sthayi, antara, sargam and sound-syllables used in tabla or pakhawaj compositions are used in four successive sections of a four-part composition set in raga and tala.

Chikari High-pitched strings in instruments such as the sitar, used for creating tonal-cum-rhythmic patterns in melodic elaborations.

Chota khayal A composition in the khayal-geme usually set in fast tempo and rendered after the bada khayal.

Deshi Apart from being the name of a popular raga, the term refers to one of the two ancient categories of music. Deshi, as opposed to margi, was described as essentially regional, enjoyed by all and free from the rules pertaining to raga and tala. The other type of music, namely margi was designed to please god and relied on strict adher­ence to rules related to raga and tala.

Dhala  Sounds or notes low in pitch.

Dhrupad Genre in vocal art music having a nearly four-century old history. It is regarded to be the oldest form still in circulation.

Dhuya Natyashastra refers to dhuya, as a song-type used in drama according to prescribed rules. The term seems to indicate a relation­ship with dhrupad, a genre current in art music today. However, the connection between the two in tenuous.

Dhyana   The state of contemplation. The concept and some related techniques came to be associated with music, especially raga, on account of the influence of the philosophy of tantra. As a culmina­tion of a process, each raga was described as an icon with a definite posture, colours, weapons, costume, etc. The musician was expected to contemplate the icon so as to help him realize the spirit of the raga. The concept was further extended after the sixteenth century to bring into vogue the unique series of pictures Ragamala and the picturization styles perfected therein.

Drut   It is the tempo generally described as 'fast' though there are controversies as to the exact unit of measurement employed to determine the validity of the description. The tradition is to differ­entiate tempi as vilambit, madhya, and drut. The first, vilambit (slow) is half that of the madhya (medium) in tempo. The medium tempo, in its turn, is half of the drut (fast) tempo. In other words, Indian musicology, for many reasons settles on the concept of relative musical time as contrasted with absolute time.

Dugun   Obtained from the Sanskrit term dvigun meaning double or twice. Refers to the doubling of the speed of a melodic or rhythmic phase.

Gamaka An important embellishment in music-making, vocal as well as instrumental. In it, musical notes are so produced as to touch upon the lower as well as the upper adjacent notes by resorting to a vibratory mode of vocalizing or playing.

Ghana The term meaning 'solid' refers to one of the four instrumental classes, the other three being avanaddha, sushira, and tala. Members of the ghana class are technically described as idiophones or autophones as the entire body of the concerned instrument phonates when played. The obvious examples are cymbals, rattles, gongs, and clappers. Instruments such as jhanj, kartal, morchang, and different kinds of bells abound in India. They are mostly employed to create rhythm. Primitive, folk, devotional, and popular categories of music use them in appreciable measure.

Gharana   A school of thought in music which determines the nature, proportion, aim, and actual rendering of each technical feature in music-making. It is a formulation of the basic musical philosophy or ideology which influences conception, teaching, learning, perfor­mance, reception, and codification of music in its major aspects.

Ghazal A popular poetico-musical form of Hindustani semi-art or light music with considerable assimilation of initial Persian and later Urdu poetic influences.

Grama The basic gamut of notes employed in the early music-tradition.The ancient tradition was stated to have employed three grama-s, beginning from either shadja, madhyama, or gandhara note. Later, the third grama, based on gandhara reportedly went out of vogue as it required moving in an usually high range of notes.

Hori   A genre of light or semi-art vocal music consisting of songs describing the well-know festival of colours, holi. Songs dealing with the same theme are also sung in the dhrupad form of art music, but then they are composed in tala dhamar and, hence, called hori-dhamar. Their treatment naturally differs from the hori-s sung in the semi-art category. These songs mostly celebrate Lord Krishna and his amo­rous play with gopi-s.

Jamjama A musical embellishment which consists of forceful and speedy employment of a number of notes.

Jhala A distinctive, fast-paced, climactic, and highly rhythmic pattern­ing of higher notes normally employed in playing string-instru­ments such as si tar.

Jod A distinctive way of elaborating musical ideas by combining notes (often by pairing them) while moving in a tempo faster than in the earlier phase of the non-tala section in melodic presentations on instruments such as sitar.

Kajri A genre in semi-art vocal music. It describes the rainy season and the associated themes of separation, reunion with the beloved, and so on. The genre, as practiced in the concert-music, is a processed form of folk songs of similar import.

Kalbana A genre in Muslim devotional music paired with another genre known as kaul.

Khatka   A musical embellishment consisting of three or more notes employed quickly, forcefully, and successively. It is used in many forms of semi-art music.

Khayal A dominant genre in Hindustani vocal art music distinguished by expanded and often improvised statements of musical ideas made concrete mainly through the interpretation of raga, use and exploration of tala, and creation and exploration of bandish-s. The genre, which is a late sixteenth century phenomenon, has fruitfully accommodated features of earlier forms and epitomized noteworthy potentialities of Hindustani music as a whole. This is why it has also encouraged emergence of numerous gharana-s, styles, and efforts of individual musicians to remain in the great traditions and, yet, carve out a niche for themselves.

Khayalnuma A genre of Hindustani vocal art music combining features of khayal as well as tarana.

Kutapa  Bharata in Natyashastra refers to different arrangements of in­strumental groups (employed in theatric presentations) as kutapa.

Langda Dhrupad A type of dhrupad composition more flexible than normally understood, but not as free in movement as a khayal com­position.

Lehra   A fixed instrumental and melodic composition employed to provide an unvarying reference frame to the solo performance of rhythm instruments such as the tabla,

Madhya The term meaning 'middle' or 'medium' is used to describe the tempo, a section of compositions, a pitch-range, etc., situated be­tween the low and high or between the slow and fast, etc.

Mandra  A low note or range of notes.

 Manjha   It refers to the middle section of compositions and means 'positioned in the middle'.

Margi   The ancient sacred music in India, it was in contrast to the deshi, the more regional and mundane kind of music prevalent in the land. The classification became redundant after the medieval period.

Mat School of thought. A comprehensive philosophy of music govern­ing nature, use and codification of a considerable number of impor­tant musical features. This term may be taken as a precursor to the contemporary concept of gharana.

Matra   Usually means 'beaf, but it is more correctly translated as measurement, the basic minimal unit for measuring and dividing the flow of musical time which determines the tempo of music. This, in him, leads to the fundamental phenomenon of musical rhythm.

Meend Continuous movement from higher to lower notes in (melodic) musical progression. Regarded to be an important musical embel­lishment. Instruments such as harmonium are criticized because it is not possible to execute this embellishment on them.

Mela An early term synonymous with that in art music. It is the fundamental, generative arrangement of notes both in aroha and avaroha. The arrangement functions as the parent scale from which raga is generated. The mela system came in vogue to replace the murchhana-system around the fifteenth-sixteenth century. Each mela was named after the important raga it generated and such a raga was called melakarta.

Misra The term means 'mixed' and it is used to indicate melody, etc., partaking features of more than one raga.

Mohra A short composition played to precede the first beat of the tala-cycle introduced on tabla, etc.

Mudra Informative textual part of a musical composition consisting of the name of the composer.

Mukhada In composition-texts, it is the melodic-textual phrase repeated after every completed statement of a musical idea. In tabla and other such instruments, it indicates a short composition played before the sam, that is, the first beat of the tala-cycle.

Murchhana The ancient mode of extending available tonal frameworks by commencing ascents and descents, ranging over seven notes, everytime from a new note. This mode gave way to the mela or that system around the sixteenth century.

Murti A musical embellishment consisting of a small number of notes executed in fast tempo but with tenderness and delicacy. It is mainly used in the 'lighter' forms of music and music-making.

Nom-tom   A phase of melodic musical elaboration presented without tala by employing meaningless syllables such as nom, torn, dir, tana. Also employed by players of musical instruments such as veena, which follow vocal music in this respect. The phase is chiefly asso­ciated with the singers/players of the dhrupad genre.

Nrityanuga An early classification of musical instruments was done on the basis of their accompanying functions. Instruments were, thus, described as followers of either song, or another instrument or dance.

Odava  Consisting of five notes.

Pada   Broadly means a song. In the earlier musicological literature, however, the term referred to the textual part of a musical compo­sition as contrasted with the melodic and rhythmic aspects.

Panchapalli A type of rhythmic composition on tabla, etc., consisting of five successive sections each set in a different tempo.

Paran   A major composition-type in the rhythm-music composed for pakhaivaj. It is of many kinds and an ability to extensively elaborate a paran is recognized as a criterion for judging a player.

Pat Variation in the tempo of notes, rhythms, etc., in arithmetical units such as double, treble, and so on of the original tempo.

Patakshara  Onomatopoetic sound-syllables employed to identify 'notional' alphabets of various instruments. For example, in tabla, tirkid, dha, ta, na; in pakhawaj, dhingad, gadigan, dhin dhin; or in sitar, da da, dir, dir, etc., are so identified. These and such other 'letters' are obviously expected to give us some idea of the tonal colour produced by instruments under discussion.

Peshkar An important genre of rhythm-music in tabla-solo. It is usually played in the initial stages of the concert and consists of select, major sound-syllables composed to provide a basic pattern afford­ing scope for the elaboration of rhythmic ideas.

Prabandha Musical composition or genre. It is a generic term indicating methodical arrangement of musical components such as melody, rhythm, words, poetry, metre, etc. The contemporary term bandish is a useful equivalent.

Qaid It means ‘imprisonment’ or 'confinement' and refers to focusing on a note to weave around it tonal patterns for elaborating raga.

Qawwali A popular genre of Islamic devotional music which has emerged from the Sufi tradition in India.

Qayada  An important form of rhythm-music on tabla, rendered solo. Composed of select sound-syllables with varied complexity die player elaborates it further to the best of his ability.

Rabab A string instrument not much in vogue today. A rabab player is called rababiya.

Raga The basic arrangement of the traditionally accepted thirteen notes in the musical gamut. This basic framework is elaborated according to the established norms in Hindustani art music. Raga is a highly sophisticated concept which distinguishes Indian art music from other melodic systems such as Arabic and Persian.

Ragadhyana An iconographic presentation of raga-s, probably inspired and influenced by the tantra philosophy. Coupled with shloka-s describing raga-images these iconographic presentations were expected to help performers contemplate in order to effectively render the concerned raga-s. This 'practical' aspect of the phenomenon was, however, soon relegated to the background. The ragadhyana tradition soon merged into the later pictorial tradition of the Ragamala paintings.

Ras   A rare compositional variety of tarana in which sound-syllables from the dance-repertoire are composed in a certain raga and tola.

Rela A fast-paced compositional type for membranophonic instruments, especially the tabla and the pakhawaj.

Rishabha  The second note in the traditional gamut of musical notes.

Sadra  A sub-type of khayal in Hindustani art music composed in tola jhaptala.

Sam  The first beat of any tala-cycle. In the early tradition, one of the three ways of establishing a relationship between the beginnings of the song and the tala-cycle was known as sama, indicating thereby an exact correspondence of the melodic and rhythmic cycles.

Sampurna Consisting of the seven notes of the basic scale, the term is employed to describe raga-s having seven notes.

Samvadi  Notes in the basic musical gamut are divided in four classes according to their relative importance in the raga concerned. Vadi is the most important, and samvadi, the next in order of importance, holds 'conversation' with the vadi. Anuvadi forms the third class and consists of all other notes included in the raga. The fourth class- viadi- refers to those notes which are nearly excluded or very rarely used.

Sanchari An early tradition of musical genres (still relevant to dhrupad-music) prescribed four subsections to a composition and identified them as sthayi, antara, sanchari, and abhoga.

Sansthana An early term synonymous with the modern term that which means a generative framework of seven notes arranged by selec­tively including/omitting certain notes. These frameworks are used to extract raga-frames elaborated in music-making. Obviously, that-s themselves are not expected to be presented as music. They merely function as launching-pads for the music to be created. The use of the term marks an end to the murchhana system of music-making prevailing till about the sixteenth century.

Sargam A short term indicating the gamut of notes included in music-making. It is also a name for a technique of music elaboration in vocal music. In it, the note-names are themselves sung to make concrete the musical idea.

Sargamgeet   A music composition made with the names of the notes used as components. That is to say, it does not have words.

Sath   Accompaniment in music-making, whether melodic, rhythmic, instrumental or vocal.

Sawan Hindola Name of a genre of songs sung to welcome the rainy season. As the name suggests, the songs often describe swings and their role in merry-making.

Seedhi   The term means 'straight-moving' and refers to rhythmic and melodic movement of a kind.

Shabda Normally understood as 'word' in compositions, etc. In a larger philosophical perspective, the word is explained as 'the property of the ether and the experience of the ear.'

Shadava  Consisting of six notes.

Sher A couplet in the Urdu verse-form identified as ghazal.

Shuddha that The that consisting of shuddha, that is, not augmented or flattened notes.

Sruti Microtonal interval.

Sthayi With reference to the fundamental arrangement of notes, it is a repetition of the same note. As a name of the compositional section, it refers to the first section which normally covers the lower half of the octave space (for example, as in khayal).

Sur Swam, that is, note.

Suravarta A composition of note-names usually used to initiate a trainee in the intricacies of raga.

Sushira According to Indian musicology it is the name of the class of instruments which produce sound by blowing air through sound-holes. Instruments falling under this class are called aerophones.

Swara  Musical note.

Swaragrama The fundamental arrangement of notes in a scale in ancient Indian musicology. Depending on the name of the first note, that is the note from which the basic scale began, early Indian practice identified three swaragrama-s as shadjagrama, madhyamagrama, and gandharagrama respectively.

Swarartha A medieval compositional genre in which names of the intended notes (preferably in short forms) were used to compose and present a piece.

Tabli A wooden or metallic surface of the resonator of musical instru­ments, especially tata, that is those technically known as chordo-phones.

Tala   A highly processed and generative arrangement of beats' in a certain tempo expected to provide an unvarying time-cycle for me­lodic as well as rhythmic elaboration*.

Talapani  A specialist person engaged in keeping rhythm through the actions of hands and fingers in a prescribed manner.

Tan or taal Normally understood as the fast-paced musical and melodic elabo­rations in Indian music, vocal as well as instrumental.

Tapkhayal A genre of vocal music which combines the features of tappa and khayal.

Tappa   A compositional genre in Hindustani vocal music reportedly inspired by the camel-drivers' songs in Punjab and adjoining areas.

Tar   Usually refers to the highness of pitch. It also means a string, especially of metal.

Taraf Sympathetic string in instruments such as sitar.

Tarana   A vocal genre in art music consisting chiefly of meaningless syllables.

Tata According to Indian classification of instruments the class which produces sound through vibrating strings. Technically, instruments of the class are known as chordophones.

Tenaka In the early tradition, meaningless sounds—tenashabda—were regarded auspicious and used in composing music.

Thapiya A style of playing membranophonic instruments such as pakhawaj with open palms.

That See sansthana.

Theka   The basic composition for rhythm instruments such as tabla. It concretizes the otherwise abstract entity of tala.

Thok A phase in melodic metallic elaboration on instruments such as sitar. In it, strokes on the wooden or the metallic body of the instru­ment play a significant role in shaping the elaborated musical idea.

Thumri An important form of 'light-classical' vocal music mainly char­acterized by the freedom it takes from the tala and raga rules in art music, as also by its depiction of various moods associated with the sentiment of love.

Tihai Repeating a phrase, etc., thrice for artistic effect in melodic as well as rhythmic music.

Tipalli A composition in rhythm-music consisting of three different tempi, that is, tempo-changes or variations within a single piece, especially for tabla.

Tivra Pitchwise, the highest state of two notes that is, madhyama and nishad in the accepted gamut is described as tivra. Its literal meaning is 'sharp'.

Tivratara In the early tradition of microtonal intervals, notes higher than the tivra were known as tivratara.

Toda  A genre in the music composed for tabla and sitar.

Tuk Section of a composition as in dhrupad, etc.

Udgraha An early term referring to the first section of a composition.

Uparaga Term for a raga derived from another raga regarded more basic.

Uthan  Refers to the opening passage of rhythmic composition.

Vadi The term indicates a note which is central to a particular raga. The majority of the elaborated patterns in that raga are woven around it. Also see anuvadi, samvadi, and vivadi.

Vadya Musical instrument. Literal meaning, 'that which is played upon'.

Varna   The four basic ways of organizing musical tones, viz. sthayi (repeated), arohi (ascending), avarohi (descending), and sanchari (a mix of all the three).

Vibhasha An early term referring to a sub-type of the main raga. Vilambit  Slow in tempo. Also see madhya and drut. Vilambit-Alap  Musical elaboration, that is, alap in slow tempo.

Vistara  Elaboration. Chiefly refers to melodic as distinguished from rhythmic ideas.

Vivadi Notes not included or used very rarely in a raga.

 

Search with Mixcat Interactive

Please tell us what you would like to see in Nad-Sadhna. Email us your suggestions at nadsadhna@yahoo.com