Article 1: First steps into western music theory - For the carnatic aficionado

I am hoping this is the beginning of a series of articles on the rudiments of western music theory. It assumes the reader understands carnatic music. This series starts as a result of a conversation with Harish Ganapathy, who figures on my top 3 list of carnatic singers. (I will post a link into a few of his songs shortly :)

I am not an expert at all on Carnatic music. My knowledge of it barely scratches the surface. But I believe I know the basics enough to take the carnatic expert through the basics of western music, and from there you (the carnatic music expert) are on your own.

The 7 basic notes of music remain intact, of course. Different singers pick Sa's at different pitches convenient to them. Basically they are picking a Sa at a frequency that is comfortable to them given the range of their voice. [For the violin player it makes no difference whatsoever, and so they can tune their Sa to whatever is the singer's comfort].

In western music, the concept of Sa is a bit more nebulous. Western music, as most of you probably know has the 7 notes A, B, C, D, E, F and G. Each of these notes maps to a particular fundamental frequency. So one carnatic singer's Sa could map the the note C. And another singer's Sa could map to the note D. Lets say these singers are singing Sankarabharanam. The first singer would then be singing the scale of C Major, and the second singer would be singing the scale of D Major.

Which brings us right over to the concept of scale. The scale concept should not really be confused with the Raga concept of carnatic music. There are only 2 well known and often used scale modes in western music - the major and the minor. These correspond, (for sake of understanding) to Sankarabharanam and Keeravani. Any piece of music in western music is written in either a minor scale or in a major scale.

The Sa of the scale determines what that scale is called. If the Sa is E, then the scale is E major or E minor. If the Sa is G, then the scale is G major or G minor. Within the same performance, singers and instruments effortlessly move between different scales for differnt songs. Even during a single song, the Sa can change from E to G. That means that a song in E major can quite possibly move to G major. (E and G are examples to illustrate. They are not necessarily good movements!). Even within the same piece of music, you can move from G major to E minor. These are all just movements of notes, and western music is extremely flexible in this respect. There is hardly a major piece of music in western classical music which begins and continues right through till the end on the same scale.

Compare this to Carnatic, where a song starting in Sankarabharanam in a Sa mapping to E, will always stay fixed between the defined 7 notes until the end of the song (unless it is a ragamalika or something, which is comparatively much rarer in carnatic music, anyway).

In the next article, I wll talk about the individual notes in western music and how they map to carnatic. That will give a clearer understanding of how the western music performer plays Keeravani starting from G, or Sankarabharanam starting from A, or extrapolating it further, how they play a Kalyani or a Shanmugapriya. The basics are the same, the fundamentals are the same, but the way of reading, the way of writing, and the way of understanding is a little different.