How to introduce each rāgam
By now, you have introduced the idea of a rāgam to your child. And you have a sense of the rough stages of learning we will target. This article is about an effective method to introduce any new rāgam to a child. This is particularly important in stage 2. Beyond that stage, you and your child will start building your own sense of what works best. As usual, here are the principles, followed by how to put them into practice.
Principles
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Focus on the most perceivable aspects of a rāgam: Here, we understand what we are
aiming for. First, let us ask, what is a rāgam? Or better yet, how does one perceive
a rāgam? It could be:
- relationship of notes to one another (most technical)
- rules for ascending and descending the scale
- characteristic phrases <– Our secondary focus
- feel/mood (least technical, easiest) <– Our primary focus
Ask your child how a new rāgam feels (eg: fast, slow, powerful, sleepy, playful), and how it makes her feel (eg: happy, sad, energetic)
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Association: next, we have our child learn a new skill of associating a rāgam name with its feel/mood and its characteristic phrases. This allows your child to grasp and label these. I usually teach my child a new association at dinner time when I have his attention.
- Immersion: once taught, I find 2-5 days of immersion in the rāgam works very well in having the child firmly internalize and retain the rāgam.
Putting it to practice
Great - now let us put these principles to practice! Here is a structure for learning a rāgam:
1. Pick a rāgam
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Pick a rāgam to learn that is not “close” in any way (has adequate contrast) to any of the rāgams learned so far
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Here is a rāgam sequence you can use. Feel free to use your own too:
- Bilahari
- Dvijāvanti
- Vasantā
- Atāṇā
- Ānandabhairavi
- Hamsadvani
- Revati
- Valaji
- Śuddadanyāsi
- Sindubhairavi
- Nāttai
2. Teach the rāgam
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Rāga Surabhi (ragasurabhi) is a fantastic resource for introducing a rāgam. Each rāgam is presented in three parts: ārohaṇam/avarohaṇam, a dense set of characteristic phrases using the rāgam name, and pallavi1. I found the second part to be the most valuable because the association between the ālāpanai and the rāgam name is built-in! I play the ragasurabhi track for the rāgam a few times back to back, and let it sink in.
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The first part of the ragasurabhi track, the ārohaṇam/avarohaṇam, is very helpful as well: it sounds too technical initially, but after a handful or rāgams, I found that a rasikā, young or old, is able to intuitively grasp how the ārohaṇam/avarohaṇam relates to a rāgam. In other words, don’t skip this part: the payoff on this is not immediate, but is well worth it.
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I typically teach and re-teach the rāgam by playing the ragasurabhi track three or four times, spread out over a week
3. Immerse passively with reference songs
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Pick one reference song per rāgam. It can be any song you don’t mind listening to repeatedly
- And play this song on repeat in the background for say, 30 minutes a day, for 3-4
days. I do this when my child is playing in the morning. Every time the track starts
up, I ask him what rāgam it is, and repeat it to him if he is unable to answer. This
creates the association.
- Alternating the ragasurabhi track with the reference song helps
- Once the budding rasikā is comfortable with learning new rāgams, I usually teach one or two new rāgams every week or two. This means that the passive listening sessions are about an hour each sometimes, and include two rāgams.
- Once internalized, the reference song becomes the child’s representation of the rāgam. Even now when identifying a rāgam, my child sometimes yells the reference song’s name out first before mapping that into its rāgam
Summary
For each rāgam you teach:
- pick the rāgam considering contrast to already familiar rāgams
- teach the rāgam using the ragasurabhi ārohaṇam/avarohaṇam, followed by characteristic phrases with the name of the rāgam
- immerse for a few days with a reference song (call out the rāgam name periodically)
And that is it! Follow these steps for the first few rāgams, and share your experiences as comments below.
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Pallavi: first line of a song ↩