GAMAKA AND VADANABHEDA : A STUDY OF SOMANATHA'S RAGAVIBODHA IN HISTORICAL AND PRACTICAL CONTEXT.

Format:

Book

Thesis/Dissertation

Author/Creator:

AYYANGAR, RANGANAYAKI VEERASWAMY.

Contributor:

University of Pennsylvania.

Subjects (All):

Music.

0413.

Local Subjects:

0413.

Physical Description:

545 pages

Contained In:

Dissertation Abstracts International 41-12A.

System Details:

Mode of access: World Wide Web.

text file

Summary:

One of the most striking aspect of Indian classical music is the particular quality of its melodic material. This quality is achieved, among other things, through the different techniques of ornamentations of the various scale degrees in the music. The term for ornament in Indian music texts is gamaka. The present dissertation is an historical and critical study of the gamaka.

Among the many music treatises that describe the gamakas, Somanatha's Ragavibodha (dated 1609 A.D.) is the most important because it is the only text that has an entire chapter on ornaments. Somanatha has called these ornaments vadana-bhedas and has created notational symbols for them after having described, in detail, their realizations on the contemporaneous fretted instrument, the rudra v(')ina. Further, he has exemplified the vadana-bhedas by incorporating them in his extensive music examples.

Somanatha has acknowledged that his vadana-bhedas were based on the gamakas and sthayas (components of a raga) encountered in the Sang(')ita-ratnakara (13th c. A.D.) and other earlier texts. A study of these texts clearly indicate that (1) the gamakas and the sthayas were primarily vocal techniques and (2) the rudra v(')ina was a post thirteenth century instrument. So it is in Ragavibodha that an attempt has been made for the first time, in descriptive tradition, to describe instrumental performance reflecting vocal techniques.

Somanatha has described twenty vadana-bhedas plus three other terms to indicate (1) specific registral positions of the scale degrees and (2) phrase endings. A study of the vadana-bheda techniques indicates that most of them fall roughly into four categories, namely, (1) fingering, (2) deflection, (3) slides and (4) others. The name of each vadana-bheda is either reflective of its specific action and/or its resulting realization.

An analysis of the distribution of the various types of the vadana-bhedas in the musical illustrations in Ragavibodha indicates that there are in each of the first three categories, at least one type that is widely distributed either singly or in combination and some that occur rarely, again either singly or in combination. Further, it also indicates that some combinations are widely distributed, whereas some others are narrowly restricted.

Though there is no one-to-one correspondence between the gamakas of the earlier texts and the vadana-bhedas of Ragavibodha, there is enough correspondence, however tenous, between these two sets of ornamentation descriptions to indicate some degree of historical influence.

Two post-Ragavibodha works, namely, Sang(')ita-parijata of Pandita Ahobala and Raga-tatva-vibodha of(' )Sr(')inivasa, are other important works that describe ornamentation with reference to the v(')ina. However, the ornaments are designated gamakas.

Though there are these texts on music, contemporary performance practices belong to oral traditions. In this dissertation, only the Karnatic tradition, in which the author is trained, is examined with reference to the gamakas. The ten gamakas of the oral Karanatic tradition may be traced back to the middle of the eighteenth century; there are some texts that describe the ten types of gamakas. However, there is no consistency about either the names or the orderings of these gamakas in the oral tradition. Some of the names of these gamakas reflect their relationship to the gamakas and vadana-bhedas in the textual tradition either nominally or functionally or both.

It is important to reiterate that Somanatha was the first theorist, in the descriptive tradition, to attempt to describe in his Ragavibodha instrumental vadana-bhedas based on vocal gamakas. He was also the first to describe, with adequate notation using these vadana-bhedas, actual music of his time through extensive music examples.

Notes:

Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 41-12, Section: A, page: 4878.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Pennsylvania, 1980.

Local Notes:

School code: 0175.

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