ABSTRACT
Karnatic music is continually expanding the possibilities of the 'tradition'. For its musicians, any new development is simply another way of looking at or deepening what has already existed for many centuries. Talk about experimental' or traditional' music means nothing to karnatic musicians, since everything is just an enhancement of the possibilities laid down ages before. This chapter discusses great interest to western musicians, since they explore new gatis; an immense variety of new talas and ways to construct them; and finally, how to use gati changes more frequently. Essentially, the 'return' of the shadanga talas provoked important changes in many aspects of karnatic music, the most important of which were the possibility of having many more, and more intricate, talas and the development of the use of combinations anuloma-pratiloma. Asking musicians what characterises a visamayati results in enormously varying explanations and turns this technique into a theoretical concept that karnatic musicians barely use.
