Beyond Tālaprastāra in Indian Music

A generating function is a clothesline on which we hang up a sequence of numbers for display."-Herbert Wilf 2Th e use of permutation as a tool to generate melodic patterns is discussed in early Indian texts on musicology such as the Dattilam and Bṛhaddeśī (Widdess 1995).But the earliest reference to an analogous scheme for rhythmic cycles (tāla)-called Tālaprastāra-is found only in later texts, the Samgīta Samayasāra of Pārśvadeva and the Samgīta Ratnākara of Śārṅgadeva (c.13th century CE).Th e chapter on tāla in the Samgīta Ratnākara contains more than 70 verses on this topic, and subsequent treatments of the subject follow Śārṅgadeva.A discussion of Tālaprastāra is found in many Sanskrit and Tamil texts on music written between the 15th and 17th centuries and a few later texts as well.Th e theme fi gures prominently in the Telugu musicological tradition, where one fi nds Tālaprastāra discussed in texts written as late as the 20th century.A table showing a particular scheme of Tālaprastāra is found in a manuscript attributed to Śyāma Śāśtri, one of the composers who constitute the so-called musical trinity of Carnatic (South Indian) music. 3Th e perceived importance of Tālaprastāra stems from the notion that it provides the musician a scheme to generate diff erent tālas.Despite the extensive treatment of Tālaprastāra in medieval literature, there are no examples of musical forms (compositions) that allow us to study either the necessity or the practical utility of this scheme.Nor is its use to be found in contemporary music.Indeed, it is fair to say that Tālaprastāra as described in these texts has remained largely, if not entirely, within the theorist's realm.Are we then to conclude that the generation of rhythmic variety and complexity, and their practical realization in the sense of inventing new tālas, lie solely within the domain of percussion music?Th e purpose of this paper is to argue that the scheme was not restricted to the domain of percussion as there is at least one example in Indian music, viz., the works of the 15th century Tamil poet Aruṇakirinātar, 4 where rhythmic variety is realized in an entire corpus of

Aesthetics · Art · Linguistics · Prosody · Rhythm · tar (computing · Animal Vocal Communication and Behavior · Computer Science · Diverse Musicological Studies · Neuroscience and Music Perception · Philosophy

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