The first time I came across the phrase ‘graha bheda‘ was in a book called Sangeetha Darpana by Prof. Ramaratnam. For someone who exactly knew the aarohana and avarohana of three or four raagas, a detailed discussion of graha bheda, it’s possibilities and limitations were too much to swallow. What? Getting Kalyani from Shankarabharana and todi?
Luckily, I had the luxury of having my grandma’s old harmonium at my disposal. Using that, and testing out some of the things in that book, I was able to make sense of what the professor was saying! But over the years, and after becoming a somewhat serious listener of Indian music, I am glad to say the topic excites me today, as much as it did so many years ago.
To cut a long story short, I was asked to present about some topic that could be of interest to students of music at Mahati School of Music in Cupertino, CA last week. And I chose to talk about graha bheda, as used in Karnataka sangeetha.
I tried to intersperse it with some examples which I sang myself, and some examples from professional performing artists. I could not cover all the clips I had, and also some of the other points that I wanted to bring up for want of time, but the participation of kids during the presentation was really very encouraging, to say the least.
Here is a recording of the lec-dem. It is about 50 minutes long, and starts around the 3rd minute marker.I did not have time ( or patience) to edit it, and so it is posted as it is 🙂
Comments are welcome, more so if they are in the form of other nice graha bheda examples!
-neelanjana
4 comments
Comments feed for this article
ಮೇ 8, 2009 at 2:39 ಅಪರಾಹ್ನ
Sumant
Ramprasad, Enjoyed the illustrations and the research very much.
LikeLike
ಡಿಸೆಂಬರ್ 5, 2010 at 10:39 ಅಪರಾಹ್ನ
Vijayakumar
Thanks for the wonderful explanation. thanks for the trouble taken to record and upload that is useful for rasikas like me.
LikeLike
ಜನವರಿ 19, 2012 at 5:10 ಫೂರ್ವಾಹ್ನ
krishna
really enlightening
LikeLike
ಜನವರಿ 4, 2013 at 9:31 ಫೂರ್ವಾಹ್ನ
neelanjana
Reblogged this on ಅಲ್ಲಿದೆ ನಮ್ಮ ಮನೆ and commented:
My friend Pavan pointed out that the google video link wasn’t playing anymore. So, reblogging with updated youtube link.
LikeLike