Tala (music)
Traditional A tala (IAST tāla) literally means a 'clap, tapping one's hand on one's arm, a musical measure'.
[7][8][9] The music traditions of the North and South India, particularly the raga and tala systems, were not considered as distinct until about the 16th century.
There on, during the tumultuous period of Islamic rule of the Indian subcontinent, the traditions separated and evolved into distinct forms.
The tala forms the metrical structure that repeats, in a cyclical harmony, from the start to end of any particular song or dance segment, making it conceptually analogous to meters in Western music.
For example, some talas are much longer than any classical Western meter, such as a framework based on 29 beats whose cycle takes about 45 seconds to complete when performed.
Another sophistication in talas is the lack of "strong, weak" beat composition typical of the traditional European meter.
However, it does not imply a regular repeating accent pattern, instead its hierarchical arrangement depends on how the musical piece is supposed to be performed.
[14] The pattern repeats, but the play of accent and empty beats are an integral part of Indian music architecture.
[14] The tala as the time cycle, and the raga as the melodic framework, are the two foundational elements of classical Indian music.
[6] The raga gives an artist the ingredients palette to build the melody from sounds, while the tala provides her with a creative framework for rhythmic improvisation using time.
[20] As these fields developed, sangita became a distinct genre of art, in a form equivalent to contemporary music.
This likely occurred before the time of Yāska (~500 BCE), since he includes these terms in his nirukta studies, one of the six Vedanga of ancient Indian tradition.
Some of the ancient texts of Hinduism such as the Samaveda (~1000 BCE) are structured entirely to melodic themes,[21][22] it is sections of Rigveda set to music.
Deeply and systematically embedded structure and meters may have enabled the ancient Indians a means to detect and correct any errors of memory or oral transmission from one person or generation to the next.
[26] According to Michael Witzel,[27] The Vedic texts were orally composed and transmitted, without the use of script, in an unbroken line of transmission from teacher to student that was formalized early on.
This ensured an impeccable textual transmission superior to the classical texts of other cultures; it is, in fact, something like a tape-recording.... Not just the actual words, but even the long-lost musical (tonal) accent (as in old Greek or in Japanese) has been preserved up to the present.The Samaveda also included a system of chironomy, or hand signals to set the recital speed.
[28] The chants in the Vedic recital text, associated with rituals, are presented to be measured in matras and its multiples in the invariant ratio of 1:2:3.
[31] The Vedic Sanskrit musical tradition had spread widely in the Indian subcontinent, and according to Rowell, the ancient Tamil classics make it "abundantly clear that a cultivated musical tradition existed in South India as early as the last few pre-Christian centuries".
Before Natyashastra was finalized, the ancient Indian traditions had classified musical instruments into four groups based on their acoustic principle (how they work, rather than the material they are made of).
[33] Time keeping with idiophones was considered a separate function than that of percussion (membranophones), in the early Indian thought on music theory.
[33] The early 13th century Sanskrit text Sangitaratnakara (literally 'Ocean of Music and Dance'), by Śārṅgadeva patronized by King Sighana of the Yadava dynasty in Maharashtra, mentions and discusses ragas and talas.
[34] He identifies seven tala families, then subdivides them into rhythmic ratios, presenting a methodology for improvisation and composition that continues to inspire modern era Indian musicians.
Each tala is divided in two ways to perfect the musical performance, one is called kala (kind) and the other gati (pulse).
This is counted additively in sections (vibhag or anga) which roughly correspond to bars or measures but may not have the same number of beats (matra, akshara) and may be marked by accents or rests.
The first beat of any tala, called sam (pronounced as the English word 'sum' and meaning even or equal) is always the most important and heavily emphasised.
A composition may also start with an anacrusis on one of the last beats of the previous cycle of the tala, called ateeta eduppu in Tamil.
Talas have a vocalised and therefore recordable form wherein individual beats are expressed as phonetic representations of various strokes played upon the tabla.
