Raag and taal

Friends who sit through a recording with me for the first time always ask the same thing, about ten minutes in and as politely as they can manage. What sets this music apart from every other kind? I have never answered it well on the spot, so this is the slow answer.

Two ideas hold up everything in Hindustani classical music. One is the raag, which decides which notes are played and how they move. The other is the taal, which decides how time is counted while they are played. The instruments, the schools, the hour a piece belongs to and the names of the forms all sit on top of those two, and once they are clear, most of what happens in a performance stops being a mystery.

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Table of contents

1. A raag is a character
2. A taal is the cycle
3. Aalap, and then the composition
4. The room the rules give
5. Further listening

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A raag is a character

On paper a raag looks like a scale, because the first thing anyone writes down about one is its list of notes, and the mistake nearly everyone makes at first is to stop there. A scale only lists the notes you may use. A raag adds the rules for moving between them, and the rules are where the music is. It says which notes are leant on and which are touched in passing, which are skipped while climbing and used while descending, which may only be reached from below and which only from above, which phrase announces the raag in a bar or two, and which notes never appear at all. Two raags can share every note and be nothing alike, the way two people can share a vocabulary and never be mistaken for each other. The Bhimpalasi page on this site sets one raag’s rules out in full, if you want to see what the grammar looks like written down.

Each raag also comes with an hour of the day and a temperament, and the two go together. Yaman belongs to the early evening, it is the first raag most students are taught, and its one raised note gives it a bright, unhurried gait. Bhairav belongs to the hour after dawn, with two notes flattened, and the singers who know it best describe its mood as solemn peace. Bhimpalasi is the early afternoon and its quiet ache. Darbari Kanada belongs to the deep of the night, a grave raag that the tradition credits to Tansen’s court and that even good musicians approach with care. When you sit down to play one of these, you are agreeing to stay inside that character for the next quarter of an hour or the next two, and you can take it a long way, but Yaman will not turn into Bhairav for you. It will only stop being Yaman.

The word itself says as much. Raag comes from a root that means to colour or to dye, and the oldest text to use it in this sense, more than a thousand years old, defines a raag as a combination of notes that, with its graces, pleases the listener. The tradition’s shorter gloss says a raag colours the mind, and anyone who has heard one long sitting of a single raag knows how many colours that can be.

A taal is the cycle

A taal is the cycle of beats that a piece of music lives inside, and it is the answer to a question a newcomer rarely thinks to ask, which is how the singer and the drummer know where they are. The cycle has a fixed length, sixteen beats or twelve or ten or seven, and a fixed shape inside that length. The beats are grouped, some groups are strong and one is soft, and the drummer plays a set pattern that marks the whole cycle out, over and over, so that everyone on stage can hear where the count is. The cycle’s first beat is called sam, and it is the beat everything returns to.

The groups are what the hands are doing at a concert. Musicians and listeners who know the taal mark the strong groups with a clap and the soft one with a wave of the hand, so that a taal can be counted out silently in the lap. Teentaal, the commonest cycle, is sixteen beats in four groups of four, the third of them the waved one. Ektaal is twelve beats in six pairs, with a slower, more spacious walk. Jhaptaal is ten, in groups of two and three and two and three, which gives it a lopsided lilt. Dhrupad has its own cycles, Chautal at twelve beats and Dhamar at fourteen, played on the pakhawaj, the barrel drum, rather than the tabla.

What a first-time listener misses is how little the cycle resembles a metronome, and how much it resembles a room with one door. The musician keeps wandering off from the door and finding a way back to it, and every time the melody and the drum arrive at sam together there is a small, shared satisfaction that the whole room feels. The commonest way back is a trick called the tihai, a phrase played three times over, timed so that its last note lands exactly on sam. If you have ever found yourself clapping in the middle of a concert without knowing why, you were almost certainly clapping on sam, because everyone around you was.

Aalap, and then the composition

Take the taal away and what is left is the aalap, the slow opening section, which has no beat and no drum under it, only the drone. It may wander anywhere and last as long as it needs, and its job is to lay the raag out note by note, so that by the end of it the listener knows the character before a single composition has been sung. On the surbahar this is the bulk of my practice, and in dhrupad, the older of the two traditions I practise, it is most of the performance. It is nearer to sitting in meditation than to performing, moving through the notes, listening, and letting one suggest the next.

Put the raag inside a taal and you have a composition, called a bandish when it is sung and a gat when it is played on an instrument. A composition is a fixed tune, a few lines long, set to one cycle, and once it begins the freedom of the aalap is bounded on every side. The tune has to sit inside the cycle, come back to sam, and answer the drummer, and the drummer answers back. Out of that comes the most exciting thing in the music, which is the moment an artist leaves the cycle by a route nobody expected and still lands on sam to the beat, when a second earlier it looked impossible.

Both halves are needed, and a whole performance travels from one to the other. The aalap shows you what the raag is like on the inside, and the composition trains you to carry it, keeping its character while it walks in time. One is a conversation with yourself and the other is a conversation with the drummer, and neither is complete without the other.

The room the rules give

I arrived at this music as an adult, and like most people who arrive from outside I took the rules for the obstacle. A raag has notes you may not play, a taal has beats you may not miss, and it looked as though the art must lie in getting away with breaking them. The more years I spend inside the form, the more clearly I see it the other way round. The rules are what let the artistry be seen at all.

The reason is simple once said. If everything were allowed, nothing would mean anything, because a choice only carries weight when something else was possible and forbidden. Yaman cannot turn into Bhairav and Teentaal cannot pass itself off as Ektaal, so every choice a musician makes inside those limits is a real choice, and a small departure from the expected phrase means something precisely because there was an expected phrase to depart from. A note held a beat longer than the rules would have it is a breath held against the rules, and the listener feels it because the rules are in the listener too.

The tradition has a name for practice taken this seriously, naad yoga, which means a discipline made of sound, and the name is exact. Sitting with one raag in the hour before the day starts, or picking up one composition again after a gap of months, is work of the same kind as any practice that expects you back every day, and the structure is not the wall between you and the experience. It is the experience itself, and I keep returning because the form keeps making room.

So when you next sit down with a recording of this music, listen for a character before you listen for a tune. Notice when a phrase comes back a little changed from the last time. Notice when the drum and the melody arrive together, and how far the musician travelled to earn it.

Further listening

If this has made you want to hear the thing itself, two short videos are worth the time.

• Raga and Tala: Exploring the rich musical traditions of India, from Orchestral Tools. A short, friendly survey of the same ground with a little around it, the split between the Hindustani music of the north and the Carnatic music of the south, the spoken syllables with which drummers say a rhythm out loud before playing it, and the main instruments. Start here for the map.

• Breaking Down Classical Indian Music: Raag and Taal, from PBS Great Performances. The composer Reena Esmail walks a host raised on Western classical music through raag and taal, while the violinist Kala Ramnath and the tabla player Abhijit Banerjee show what she means in the same room. Go here for the feel.