Karnatik Music’s Celestial Compositions – Sound Scene 2024

Listen  |  Days  |  Shape  |  Rhythm

This exhibit features vocal recordings of seven 18th-century songs from South India that describe the celestial planetary compositions of - the Sun, Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, and Saturn, which directly correspond to the days of the week from Sunday to Saturday. 

This exhibit has three entry points, through which you choose to experience these aural ancient planetary worlds across - geometric shapes, rhythmic cycles, or the days/planet's name.

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Instagram: iambalakrishnan

The audio examples are a set of seven kritis, which are tripartite-compositional song forms, in Sanskrit. These songs describe the celestial planetary compositions of the Sun, Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, and Saturn for each day of the week and were composed by the 18th-century Karnatik (South Indian Classical) Music composer Muddusvami Dikshita. What makes these compositions unique is that they predate Gustav Holst's early 20th-century set on the planets. The Kriti is believed to be ecstatic spontaneous utterances rooted in the composer's particular religious experience expressed in the song form and is composed in a specific modal scale, ‘raga,’ and a specific beat cycle, ‘tala.’ This compositional set of Dikshita is based on the seven primordial talas. This choice of the time-cycle-based compositional group for the planets is influenced by how tala is time-measure and how the vicissitudes of time affect us in Indic thought and philosophy.

Each celestial deity and corresponding composition is associated with a specific raga, tala, color, geometric pattern, and iconography. For example, the Sun is associated with a circle, the color white, the element fire, the gemstone Ruby, and a deity on a chariot pulled by seven horses (Dikshita ingeniously sets the Sun composition in a 7*2 = 14 beat cycle). 

The user will be attentive to the rhythmic cycles, the prosody in the poem-song, iconography, elemental correlation, and their rotation and/or resolution statistics. It is my hope that we can pause, listen, and be mindful of the planetary life-world we inhabit. By doing so, we can act in dialogue with nature, not against it.

Credits

Curation, Website, Content
Balakrishnan Gayathri Raghavan

Music 
Vocal: Balakrishnan Raghavan
Guitar, Mixing: Alex Wand

Portions of the materials used for the Sound Scene Installation are included under the Fair Use exemption of the Copyright Act for purposes of criticism, commentary, educational, or research purposes. The copyright of the original materials is retained by the respective copyright holder(s).

Text excerpts, Planet Iconography: 
FOLKWAYS RECORDS Album No. FES 4131 © 1981 by Folkways Records & Service Corp., 43 W. 61 st St., NYC, USA 10023. Available Online here.

Paintings: 
S Rajam (1919-2010). From the book Art heritage of India, 2009. Designed and Published by L&T ECC Division, Chennai - 600 089. Available Online here.