A Concert of Carnatic Music
Music lovers of traditional Indian Carnatic Music were pleased to here David Reck on vina, Gordon Korstange on bamboo flute and Umayalpuram Mali on Mridangam on Saturday night at Sri Aurobindo amphitheater at Bharat Nivas in the Pavilion of Indian Culture. Well known trio were playing ragas of famous musician-saint Tyagaraja, of Kothavasal Venkatrama Iyer, Muttusami Dikshitar and Vyasaraya. Carnatic music is based upon a repertoire of thousands of songs, each of which has been passed down orally trough chains of master musicians from centuries ago to the present.
Each song is set in raga, a musical mode which “colors the mind” and a tala, a time-cycle counted with the hand. The musicians use the song and the raga and tala in which it is set to weave a texture of improvisation beginning with the slow unfolding of the raga’s “colors” and concluding with rhythmic patterns traded back and forth, building to a crescendo and returning, finally, to the idam or “place”, a recurring phrase drawn from the song.
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