How to introduce the idea of what a rāgam is
A rāgam is a highly abstract concept. It is actually incredibly complex to define in words, and virtually impossible to transfer that understanding to someone else. Thankfully, children don’t know this and don’t worry about this. They pick it up intuitively, easily, and quickly, just like they pick up language, and “speak” and think in it. We adults can, too. Below are the principles of how to introduce the idea of a rāgam to a child or to yourself, followed by ideas on how to put them into practice.
Principles
- Abstraction: How do you teach a child abstract concepts like “shape” or “color”? You don’t. You simply point out rectangles and circles and triangles for a while, and the abstraction to “shape” magically happens by itself. Once the mind abstracts it, it becomes easier to learn new shapes, and spot shapes and combinations of shapes everywhere. It’s no different with rāgams. However, following the techniques below may help speed up this process of abstraction, and thus, learning
- Contrast: When teaching a child colors, you would start with a say, a couple of colors that are clearly different, like blue and yellow. Picking purple and violet as a child’s first introduction to colors would be a poor idea. Similarly, we will use rāgams of greatest contrast to commence our learning, and narrow down the contrast as we advance
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Repetition: Repeated hearing, both active and in the background helps the brain
record the flavor
- To help create the association within the mind, it helps to say aloud what rāgam is being played at steady intervals
- Internalizing: Wait for the learner to get a good sense of the first two rāgams before teaching them more. Once they are able to distinguish at even a very basic level between the first two rāgams, they have gotten a taste of what “colors” (rāgams) mean, and are ready to learn more colors (rāgams)
Putting it to practice
Great - now let us put these principles to practice! Here is the first learning exercise:
1. Pick two tracks with contrasting rāgams
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First, pick two rāgams of a high degree of contrast. Contrast should ideally be in overall mood/feel, ārohaṇam/avarohaṇam, typical tempo, family/mēḷakartā, style, and anything else. Here are a few rāgam pairs that I have found to work well. Feel free to pick any one pair:
- Hamsadvani and Dvijāvanti
- Mōhanam and Sāvēri
- Śuddadanyāsi and Hamsānandi
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Next, pick a single music track in each of these two rāgams. I’ve linked each of the rāgams in the list above to a suggested track, but feel free to pick your own too.
If you are picking your own:
- Pick a reasonably simple (no ālāpanai or manodharmam), short (3-5 minute) track. YouTube is your friend, as is the fantastic Carnātic YouTube Collection database
- Contrast in the track themselves also helps. In the links above, I’ve picked one
male and one female voice for each of the pairs. If you are picking instrumental
tracks, pick different instruments. Eg:
- Hamsadvani and Dvijāvanti (instrumental version)
- you will be listening to these tracks a lot on repeat, so you might consider picking songs from your favorite composer and language, and a track of good audio quality
- See: Making introductions gentle if you have trouble getting your child to listen to Carnātic music tracks at all
2. Repeat these two tracks over a few days
- Start by playing the first track over and over again, throughout the day
- Consider playing this on repeat mode, 5-10 times at once. Repeat this 2-3 times a day for 3-5 days.
- At least once per playing of the track, speak out the name of the rāgam to the child
- Once your child has internalized that track, and once the song has become familiar, do the same for the second track
3. Evaluate
Of course, our child would have to be old enough to communicate with you. For very young children, monosyllabic words are fine as long as what they are communicating is clear.
- Basic: Can your child identify each of the two tracks (by the name of the rāgam) when played from the beginning?
- Intermediate: Can your child identify each of the two tracks (by the name of the rāgam) when played from an arbitrary point in the middle?
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Advanced (optional): try playing a differing song in the first rāgam, and see if they can identify the rāgam. It helps to offer them the two rāgams and ask them to pick amongst those two. The database is very handy to find a track (eg: second Dvijāvanti track)
Tip: With the advanced question, if you are an adult using this guide to learn, remember you are not figuring out which rāgam the new track is, but rather, only guessing which of the two rāgams it is relatively more similar to.
As long as your child can pass the basic test above, you are ready to move on to teaching them more rāgams. You might be surprised at how quickly they learn!