Konnakol Duet in 75/16: Using Non-Isochronous Cycles as a Framework for Durational Transformations

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by Oscar Smith

Here I will analyse the various time-shaping strategies occurring in a collaborative online konnakol¹ video (link below) by South-Indian musicians B.C. Manjunath and Varijashree Venugopal. Using a 75-pulse tāla as a framework, the musicians perform various durational augmentations and diminutions that will be closely analysed.  I will also reveal some of the choices the musicians made and show the textural variety they achieve in this multi-tracked scenario.

Context

This piece is an innovative konnakol composition by B.C. Manjunath (born 1976, hereafter BC), a Mridangam player and konnakol artist based in Bengaluru (formerly Bangalore), who has toured the world as a performer, and often teaches Karṇaṭak music workshops at various Western institutions.  When he isn’t touring, BC films himself performing konnakol compositions (some traditional, some more innovative of his own devising) and uploads them to his YouTube channel, which many internet viewers have marvelled over.  Particularly viral highlights include an extraordinarily virtuosic performance using a tāla derived from the proportions of the Fibonnaci series/golden ratio.  Transcription videos of this particular performance went viral (18 million views on Facebook) and have been dubbed over by other musicians (often kit drummers) playing his incredible rhythms.

In the video that I will analyse in this paper, BC invited Varijashree Venugopal (born 1991, hereafter VV), a Carnatic singer also from Bengaluru to record with him in 2018 in a composition of his own devising intended to demonstrate the performers’ virtuosity and expertise.  Incidentally, she has an equally interesting YouTube channel which features her singing along with Coltrane sax solos in Carnatic solfege with extreme precision.

From the video description, it seems that BC recorded his part, perhaps included some instruction on the tāla and told VV what he envisioned for her part, but ultimately let her create her own part as she was in the US at the time, not in Bengaluru, their shared home city.  She listens to BC’s part through an earphone as she records her part.  Interestingly and innovatively, rather than simply speaking the solkattu syllables, VV sings them, presumably to a melody of her own devising (not BC’s).

Listeners will hear a fairly conventional konnakol performance media: a clapped tāla and vocalised rhythms in the solkattu rhythm solfege.  The tāla serves its normal function as a fundamental rhythmic structure and is performed on the hands through clapping and tapping of fingers on the opposite palm.  In more “traditional” Karnatic music, the tāla equates fairly neatly with our idea of meter.  As I will show, however, this piece challenges that notion of tāla equating to meter.  In this instance, there are two performers, so they exploit this by adding textural variety, both in their solkattu and the tāla.  However, unlike a more traditional konnakol performance, there appears to be no improvisation, given the multitracked nature of the recording.  Instead, BC very systematically manipulates the vocalised rhythmic material, explained below.

Analysis

In this piece, BC explores a few particular vocalisations, most prominently a syllabic archetype or jathi for 5s: “ta dhi gi na thom”.  Throughout, BC speaks his parts and VV sings hers in a pentatonic scale, adding to the five-ness of the composition.  For the first six (of 12) cycles of the tāla, BC uses this pattern of syllables exclusively and stretches them using very exacting rhythmic diminution and augmentation processes.  For the first tāla cycle, VV sings solo the syllables “ta dhi gi na thom” five times with incrementally decreasing interonset durations as shown in Figure 5.  The pattern of having a sequence of any number from three to seven equally spaced notes is called tirmana (Camón 2020).  The interonset duration between them is called matra, (Camón 2020).  Thus, the following pattern is five tirmanas, comprised of five notes beginning with a matra of 5, a matra of 4, progressing sequentially down to a matra of 1.

The totals of each line given on the right add up to 75, which makes it equivalent to one repetition of the tāla cycle.  However, this decreasing order of group totals is the reverse of the tāla—the vocalisations are contracting (25, 20, 15, 10, 5) while the internal groups of the tāla are expanding (5, 10, 15, 20, 25).  While these overlapping patterns do not align much, one important moment of alignment is the five final 16^th notes, where the tāla and VV’s singing are in unison.  Next, BC joins the texture and they sing this same pattern but with doubled matra (10, 8, 6, 4, 2).  VV begins five 16^th notes later, and hockets with BC.  However, in order to keep a strict even hocket and compensating for VV’s delayed entry of five 16^th notes to finish in alignment with a tāla cycle, she has to subtract one 16^th note from the last note of each of her five tirmanas, visualised in Figure 6.  Note that these expanded durations are very difficult to perform as the syllables in the first line occur at a rate of 32bpm, just above the threshold of human perceptual abilities.

Next, BC and VV come back into unison and triple the proportions.  However, to successfully perform what would be interonset durations outside human abilities to perceive regularity—for example, notes with a matra of fifteen 16^th notes would come by at a glacial 21bpm—they simply vocalise each line of the first cycle (seen in figure 5) three times, illustrated in figure 7.  They are able to retain the groups of five syllables from the opening pattern—even though these new proportions were generated by a tripling process—because five is a common multiple of each of the new totals (75, 60, 45, 30, 15).  This tripling naturally lasts for three tāla cycles, accounting for the 4^th, 5^th, and 6^th repetitions of the tāla, remembering that in the 4^th and 5^th cycles BC and VV are taking turns to perform the tāla backwards.

 

 

Now we reach the halfway point of the composition.  This next section, which lasts for the remaining half of the piece, is referred to as the korvai, which Nelson (1991) defines as “an intricate rhythmic composition ending in a mōrā”.  In this korvai the performers explore a new set of durational values, and proceed to diminish them down, essentially mirroring the expansion (doubling and tripling) that has been occurring up to this point.  The korvai is comprised of three sections: the first section lasts for three tāla cycles, the second for two, the third for one.  The material for each of these sections is essentially the same, except tripled or doubled in proportions (hence lasting for three, two or one tāla cycles).  The basic form of the material, only heard in the final twelfth tāla cycle, is groups of 16^th notes that last for the following amounts: 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3 | 9, 3, 9, 3, 9 which adds up to 75 16^th notes.  The material can be broken down into two processes, which I have indicated with a vertical bar.  The first is a simple subtractive process, which according to Camón is called gopuchayati (pers. comm., 2020)—9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, which lasts for 42 16^ths.  Next, there is an alternation between two durations, 9 and 3, which happens three times before landing on the cycle boundary and lasts for the remaining 33 16^th notes of the 75/16 tāla cycle.  In Karnatic music, this idea of a cadential rhythm which is repeated three times before landing on the end/next beginning of a cycle is called mōrā and is very similar to the term tihai that is used in Hindustani music.  However, they begin with a tripled version of this korvai, then doubled, then single, so I will analyse them in this order.  Much like in the tripled version of the tirmanapattern, to achieve what would be very long durations, they simply recite each line of the singular form of the pattern three times (see Figure 8).  The mōrā used here relates in length to the gopuchayati, in that the longest version of the gopuchayati is worth 27 16^ths, and after all the incremental subtractions, its shortest version is nine 16^ths in duration.  It highlights the contraction process that was enacted in the gopuchayati, almost like a kind of zooming effect immediately moving from telescopic to microscopic.  Additionally, to add some textural variety, BC speaks the first third of each line of the gopuchayati, VV sings the second third, and they come together for the final third of each line.  This complex interaction would have been especially difficult for BC because he had to record it alone with no reference.

 

 

 

 

 

Next, we hear a doubled form of the korvai, which lasts for two repetitions of the tāla.  Here they sing/speak in strict alternation for the gopuchayati, this time beginning with VV, and the syllables remain much the same as in figure 8, only they are spoken twice instead of three times.  However, for the mōrā, they vary the syllables and divisions, rather than simply reciting the syllables shown in figure 8 twice.  To achieve a total duration of 27 in the tripled form, they used three groups of nine: Ta – dhim – ta dhi gi na thom x3.  In this doubled form, which must have a total of 18, they could have chosen to use two groups of nine: Ta – dhim – ta dhi gi na thom x2 (see figure 9).  However, to keep a consistent triple division of the total (18), they use three groups of six.  They use the syllabic archetype for 5s that was the focus of the first section of the piece, with an added rest after the second syllable, creating a slight hiccup in the rhythm: ta dhi – gi na thom x3.

Finally, to tie the piece off, we hear the korvai in its singular form, which covers the twelfth and final repetition of the tāla cycle (see figure 9).  We hear each part of the subtraction sequence (gopuchayati) only once each and in unison, but again we hear variations in the syllables used for the long part of the mōrā.  The pattern as shown back on page seven is 9, 3, 9, 3, 9.  However, the 9 component of this is broken up into three groups of 3 16^th notes.  One possibility might have been to use a common syllabic archetype such as ta ki da.  Instead, BC uses ta dhi gi na thom except at a 32^nd note rate, bringing us to an exciting, rhythmically dense finish and harking back to the syllables used in the tirmana section.

Mōrā typically repeat three times, but in this instance it should be noted that the mōrā in the tripled and doubled forms have been missing the final part of their third repetition (e.g. 9 9, 3 3, 9 9, 3 3, 9 9 in the second, doubled mōrā).  With the addition of the final downbeat that completes the twelfth 75/16 tāla cycle, we hear 9, 3, 9, 3, 9, 3; a complete third repetition of the mōrā is finally realised.  By having only incomplete versions of the mōrā prior to this, the musicians maintain tension until the very last moment of the piece when all the durations are finally completed.

Now that we have examined all the sections and techniques used in the piece, let us take a bird’s eye view of the whole structure.  Broadly put, it forms a <> shape.

[1] Konnakol (‘Koni’ which means ‘to recite’ or ‘to say’. This word was adopted in the Tamil language and put with the word ‘Kol’ which means ‘to rule’ or ‘to reign’.” (Young, 1997)) is a South-Indian vocal performance genre which adapts the instructive rhythm solfege syllables (solkattu) used for teaching and learning the mridangam in a specific performance art beyond their pedagogical function.