Raga (rāg /राग (Hindi), raga (Anglicised from rāgaḥ/रागः (Sanskrit)) or rāgam /ராகம் (Tamil)) are the melodic modes used in Indian classical music. "Rag" is the modern Hindi pronunciation used by Hindustani musicians; "Ragam" the Tamil form used by Karnatak musicians. The origins of Indian classical music can be found from the oldest of scriptures, part of the Hindu tradition, the Vedas. ... This article or section should include material from List of Carnatic singers. ... Sri Purandara Dasa (1494-1564) (the follower (dasa) of Lord Purandara Vittala [Lord Vishnu in one of his many avatars. ... In Hinduism, the Trimurti (also called the Hindu trinity) are three aspects of God in His forms as Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva. ... Sri Tyagaraja (17??-1848), an ardent devotee of Sri Ramachandra, was one of the principal composers of Carnatic music, and is also regarded as the most important of the trinity of composers. ... Muttusvami Dikshitar is one of the Carnatic music composer trinity. ... Syama sastri, who is said to be one of the trimurthis in music, was born at Tiruvarur on Apr 26, 1762. ... Sri Swathi Thirunal Rama Varma(April 16, 1813 - December 25, 1846) was a South Indian king of the state of Travancore, in India. ... Madurai Shanmukhavadivu Subbulakshmi (popularly known as M.S. or M.S.S.) (September 16, 1916 - December 11, 2004) was a renowned carnatic vocalist. ... Hindustani (हिन्‍दुस्‍थानी) classical music is an Indian classical music tradition originating in the North of the Indian subcontinent circa the 13th and 14th centuries CE. Developing a strong and diverse tradition over several centuries, it has contemporary traditions established primarily in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. ... For information on Princess Sruti of Nepal see Princess Shruti. ... In Carnatic music, a melakarta or melakartha or janaka or sampoorna raga is one that comprises all seven swaras. ... The katpayadi sankhya is a way of determining the number of a melakarta ragam from the first two syllables of the name of the raga. ... The notes, or swaras, of Indian music are Shadjamam, Rishabham, Gandharam, Madhyamam, Panchamam, Dhaivatam and Nishadam. ... In Indian classical music, Tala (tāl (Hindi), tāla (Anglicised from tālaṃ (Sanskrit)), tāḷam (Tamil)), literally a clap, is a rhythmical pattern that determines the rhythmical structure of a composition. ... Hindi (हिन्दी) is a language spoken in most states in northern and central India. ... The Sanskrit language ( संस्कृता वाक्) is one of the earliest attested members of the Indo-European language family and is not only a classical language, but also an official language of India. ... The consonant ழ் believed to be unique to Tamil and Malayalam Tamil of Tamilians is a Dravidian language predominantly spoken in southern India and Sri Lanka, with smaller communities of speakers in many other countries. ... In music, a mode is an ordered series of musical intervals, which, along with the key or tonic define the pitches. ... The origins of Indian classical music can be found from the oldest of scriptures, part of the Hindu tradition, the Vedas. ...

A raga functions both as description and prescription. It describes a generalized form of melodic practice; it prescribes a set of rules for how to build a melody. It specifies rules for movements up (aarohanam [आरोहणम्]) and down (avarohanam [अवरोहणम्]) the scale, which notes should figure more and which notes should be used more sparingly, which notes may be sung with gamaka, phrases to be used, phrases to be avoided, and so on.¹ The result is a framework that can be used to compose or improvise melodies, allowing for endless variation within the set of notes. }} Wiktionary has a definition of: Melody In music, a melody is a series of linear events or a succession, not a simultaneity as in a chord. ... In music, a scale is an unordered collection of notes or pitches, as opposed to a series of intervals, which is a musical mode. ... A musical composition is a piece of original music designed for repeated performance (as opposed to strictly improvisational music, in which each performance is unique). ... Improvisation is the act of making something up as you go along. ...

Although notes are an important part of raga practice, it by no means exhausts what a raga is. A raga is more than a scale. Many ragas share the same scale.

The underlying scale may have five, six or seven tones made up of swaras. This provides one method of classifying ragas. Ragas that have five swaras are called audava (औडव) ragas; those with six, shaadava (षाडव); and with seven, sampoorna (संपूर्ण) (Sanskrit for 'complete'). Those ragas that do not follow the strict ascending or descending order of swaras are called vakra (वक्र) ('crooked') ragas. (To see the order of notes, check the article on swara.) In music, a pentatonic scale is a scale with five notes per octave. ... The notes, or swaras, of Indian music are Shadjamam, Rishabham, Gandharam, Madhyamam, Panchamam, Dhaivatam and Nishadam. ... The Sanskrit language ( संस्कृता वाक्) is one of the earliest attested members of the Indo-European language family and is not only a classical language, but also an official language of India. ... The notes, or swaras, of Indian music are Shadjamam, Rishabham, Gandharam, Madhyamam, Panchamam, Dhaivatam and Nishadam. ...

The basic mode of reference is that which is equivalent to the Western Ionian mode (this is called Bilawal thaat in Hindustani music). All relationships between pitches follow from this basic arrangement of intervals. In any given seven-tone mode, the second, third, sixth, and seventh notes can be natural (shuddha, lit. 'pure') or flat (komal, 'soft') but never sharped, and the fourth note can be natural or sharp (tivra) but never flatted, making up the twelve notes in the Western equal tempered chromatic scale (but without Western pitch equivalencies like, for example, A# and Bb). Ragas can also specify microtonal changes to this scale: a flatter second, a sharper seventh, and so forth. There are 22 or of these microtones, called shrutis, per octave. Furthermore, such variations can occur between styles, performers or simply follow the mood of the performer. There is no absolute pitch; instead, each performance simply picks a ground note, which also serves as the drone, and the other scale degrees follow relative to the ground note. In music theory, the major scale is one of the diatonic scales. ... -1... Alternate uses: Flat (disambiguation) Figure 1. ... This article is about the musical notation. ... Equal temperament is a scheme of musical tuning in which the octave is divided into a series of equal steps (equal frequency ratios). ... The chromatic scale is a musical scale that contains all twelve pitches of the Western tempered scale. ... Microtonal music is music using microtones -- intervals of less than a semitone, or as Charles Ives put it, the notes between the cracks of the piano. ... Absolute pitch is either the exact pitch of a note described by its number of vibrations per second, or the ability, commonly referred to as perfect pitch, to identify a note by name without the benefit of a reference note. ... Drone can refer to: Male honeybees - see drone (bee) In music, a continuous note or chord - see drone (music) Shortened form of the music genre known as dronology An Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV), often used for target practice In the fictional Star Trek universe, a humanoid enslaved by the Borg... In music or music theory a scale degree is an individual note of a scale, both its pitch and its diatonic function. ...

Some Hindustani (North Indian) ragas are prescribed a time of day or a season. During the rains, for example, many of the Malhar group of ragas--associated with the monsoon--are performed. Some musicians take these prescriptions very seriously. However, since the majority of concert hall performances take place in the evening and night, musicians often have to make concessions for the sake of public performance.

The two streams of Indian classical music, Carnatic music and Hindustani music, have independent sets of ragas. There is some overlap, but more "false friendship" (where raga names overlap, but raga form does not). In north India, the ragas have recently been categorised into ten thaats or parent scales (by Vishnu Narayan Bhatkhande, 1860-1936); South India uses a somewhat older, more systematic classification scheme called the melakarta classification, with 72 parent (melakarta) ragas. Overall there is a greater identification of raga with scale in the south than in the north, where such an identification is impossible. This article or section should include material from List of Carnatic singers. ... Hindustani (हिन्‍दुस्‍थानी) classical music is an Indian classical music tradition originating in the North of the Indian subcontinent circa the 13th and 14th centuries CE. Developing a strong and diverse tradition over several centuries, it has contemporary traditions established primarily in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. ... South India is a geographic and linguistic-cultural region of India. ... In Carnatic music, a melakarta or melakartha or janaka or sampoorna raga is one that comprises all seven swaras. ...

Note that the term "parent scale" is a metaphor, and is potentially misleading. It might seem to imply that scales came before ragas, or that ragas are made from scales. In fact, it's the other way round--parent scales (both melas and thats) were induced from raga practice. Again we stress that ragas are not scales.

As ragas were transmitted orally from teacher to student, some ragas can vary greatly across regions, traditions and styles. There have been efforts to codify and standardize raga performance in theory from their first mention in Matanga's Brhaddesi (~10th c.) Some people approach raga performance from the Vedic philosophy of sound; others from a Sufi perspective; still others approach raga primarily as an aesthetic entity; others approach it as a kind of combinatorics. Oral history is an account of something passed down by word of mouth from one generation to another. ... The Vedas are part of the Hindu Shruti; these religious scriptures form part of the core of the Brahminical and Vedic traditions within Hinduism and are the inspirational, metaphysical and mythological foundation for later Vedanta, Yoga, Tantra and even Bhakti forms of Hinduism. ... A schematic representation of auditory signaling Sound is an alternation in pressure, particle displacement, or particle velocity propagated in an elastic material (Olson 1957) or series of mechanical compressions and rarefactions or longitudinal waves that successively propagate through medium that are at least a little compressible (solid, liquid or gas...

Indian classical music is always set in raga, but all raga music is not necessarily classical. Songs range from being clearly in one raga or another to being in a sort of generalized scale. Many popular Indian film songs resemble ragas closely. Again, it is important to stress that just even if song shares a scale with a raga, it isn't necessarily "in" the raga. Filmi is Indian popular music as written and performed for Indian cinema. ...

Footnotes

1. Nothing other than the aarohanam and avarohanam (and, in Hindustani music, the pakad--melodic catch phrases) is ever actually written down; if such things are written, they are mostly neglected. The subtle rules of where to give gamakas to notes, what phrases are correct, and so on are usually codified in special songs called varnams. These songs show the characteristics of the ragam in practice and are transmitted orally.

External links

• Rajan Parrikar's guide to about 30 ragas (http://www.sawf.org/music/articles.asp?pn=Music/) with audio examples.
• The Raga Guide (http://www.wyastone.co.uk/nrl/world/raga/) (4 Ragas, with ragamala paintings)
• David and Chandrakantha Courtney's Homepage (http://www.chandrakantha.com/) --an excellent introductory resource with audio samples.
• Musical Nirvana (http://www.musicalnirvana.com/index.html) --includes some introductory material, raga descriptions, artist biographies and discographies, and a glossary; information on both Hindustani and Carnatic music.
• Sound of India (http://www.soundofindia.com/) --online music lessons, raga descriptions with audio, and musicological articles.
• ITC Sangeet Research Academy (http://www.itcsra.org/) --scholarly organization devoted to the promotion of Hindustani classical music; includes information on artists past and present, Hindustani sangeet (theory), and current events in the Indian classical world.