Solkaṭṭu, then, pervades every aspect of metered Karnatak music, which is among the most rhythmically sophisticated of the world’s music systems. It is also a powerful tool for developing a strong sense of well-organized rhythm in nearly any form of music, as the rest of this book will demonstrate.
Why Study Solkaṭṭu?
It may be surprising to find out that such a valuable method for rhythm training is not taught on its own in India. Drummers, dancers, and melodic musicians learn whatever aspects of solkaṭṭu are appropriate for their respective disciplines, and musicians intuitively adapt it for their own analytic uses. There is really no need for a separate course in solkaṭṭu.
But in the West, many musicians and composers have become interested in the rhythmic intricacy of Indian music. Most of these musicians do not have the time or inclination to take up a full study of Indian music or dance. For them, a separate course in solkaṭṭu is an ideal way to learn the rhythms of Indian music without having to take on a new musical instrument or technique. In addition, many teachers of basic musicianship have become interested in the elegance and effectiveness of solkaṭṭu as a method for training in fundamental rhythmic skills. This interest is largely due to three of solkaṭṭu’s most important attributes: the physical confidence it develops, its portability, and its inherent musicality.
PHYSICAL CONFIDENCE
Solkaṭṭu binds spoken material together within the metric context called tāḷa, which is counted by recurrent patterns of hand gestures. Since the same person is speaking patterns and counting tāḷa, this binding together is a somatic, kinesthetic experience; it all happens within the same body. The relationship between the phrases and the tāḷa is either accurate or not: if so, there is a feeling of confidence; if not, the musician knows immediately that something is awry and can move to correct it. Over time, one learns to trust this bodily knowledge. As the coordination of voice and hand becomes a matter of muscle memory, musicians find that they are able to learn challenging rhythms more and more quickly.
PORTABILITY
Solkaṭṭu requires no instrument for practice or performance. One can practice anywhere—in one’s room, on a train, in line at the bank—while doing anything—walking, standing, sitting, or lying down. Obviously, the tāḷa gestures and syllables must be performed without disturbing others or drawing unnecessary attention to the practicer. But this portability makes it possible to call a pattern or exercise to mind virtually anywhere. My solkaṭṭu course is usually taught in the spring, and I often see students walking along on warm April days, apparently talking to themselves. A closer look often reveals the telltale signs of impromptu solkaṭṭu practice: the mouth moving slightly, a hand beating time on the thigh, and a faraway look in the eyes.
INHERENT MUSICALITY
Solkaṭṭu always includes spoken phrases within a tāḷa; there is never a situation in which something happens in a tāḷa that cannot be spoken by a musical phrase. Consider the usual method of counting sixteenth notes in 4/4 time:
one e and a two e and a three e and a four e and a
Here numbers demonstrate the rhythm; there is no specific musical content involved. This may be called abstract, or meter-centered, counting.
The same number of syllables may be counted within the same number of beats in a four-beat tāḷa, as follows. Touch the palm and fingers of one hand against the other:
clap, pinky, ring, middle
Instead of counting in numbers, a Karnatak musician uses syllables, four for each beat, as follows:
| clap | pinky | ring | middle |
| ta ka di mi | ta ka di mi | ta ka di mi | ta ka di mi |
This is an example of a phrase-centered approach to counting. Karnatak musicians virtually never count in numbers, even when marking rests, but in syllables. The inherent musicality of using phrases instead of numbers for counting makes solkaṭṭu immediately approachable for students. Previously exotic-sounding syllables and phrases quickly take on concrete musical meaning. Rhythm training, which can be dry and abstract, is suddenly accessible and fun.
Sources of Syllables and Tāḷas
Information about solkaṭṭu syllables and tāḷas comes from two intertwined sources: the unwritten legacy passed along from teacher to student through at least two millennia of Indian music, including more than ten thousand Karnatak songs, and the treatises written by musicologists and music theoreticians during the same period. These two sources are not always easily separated. A treatise is usually based on the performance practice of a given period and often represents an attempt to codify it. To the extent that it succeeds, it may in turn actually influence performance practice.
SYLLABLES
Our main source regarding the syllables is the teaching lineage itself, specifically that of the mrdangam and other percussion instruments. Spoken syllables, including the first four mentioned above, ta, di, tom, and nam, are the beginning of any mrdangam student’s training. They also appear in the Nāṭyaśāstra (ca. 200 BCE–200 CE) and other treatises.
Indian writers on music have largely ignored the subject of drumming, and non-Indian writers on Indian drumming have, until recently, reduced the place of spoken rhythmic syllables to the role of “drum syllables,” mnemonic devices meant to imitate the sounds produced on the mrdangam, tavil, and other percussion instruments. But as Douglass Fugan Dineen pointed out in his 2005 M.A. thesis from Wesleyan University (“At Home and Abroad: An Investigation of Solkaṭṭu in Karnatak and Non-Karnatak Contexts”), the Karnatak tradition has never limited the use of syllables to drumming. All Karnatak musicians and dancers use them.
The vocabulary of syllables in this text comes from my study of the mrdangam under T. Ranganathan (1925–1987), himself a disciple of Palani Sri M. Subramania Pillai (1908–1962). Sri Ranganathan’s teaching career in the United States spanned more than twenty years at Wesleyan University and the California Institute of the Arts. I was his student at both schools and served as his teaching apprentice during my residency as a Ph.D. candidate at Wesleyan from 1980 to 1983. It was at these two institutions that Ranganathan first taught solkaṭṭu as a subject separate from drumming. My vocabulary of syllables has also been influenced by more than six years of teaching solkaṭṭu at Wesleyan.
TĀḶAS
Our sources regarding tāḷas are more convoluted. The biggest difficulty in tracing the practical history of tāḷa is the lack of written music; Indian music has always been an oral tradition. The earliest writings about Indian music, beginning with the Nāṭyaśāstra, describe tāḷas as sets of hand gestures. From the thirteenth century on, tāḷas seem to have been cyclic. The best sources from the history of performance practice are the songs that form the repertoire of Karnatak music and the pedagogical exercises teachers use to prepare students to learn them. We can gather from these that tāḷas have been used as regular, cyclic meters since at least the sixteenth century.
For the last hundred years or so, conventional wisdom has assumed the existence of thirty-five tāḷas, although no one seems to know who originated them. A group of seven tāḷa structures (sets of hand gestures) is typically presented as the suladi sapta tāḷas. Each of these includes at least one laghu, a tāḷa segment made up of a clap and finger counts. By allowing five different durations for the laghu (four, three, seven, five, and nine beats,