ABSTRACT
Motives, phrases, and longer expressions of Ritigaula, or of any raga, and their relationships, at whatever structural level, can be described and defined in terms of three fundamental aspects of musical pitch-space: harmonic, directional and registral. The harmonic orientation of scale-degrees and phrases in musical pitch-space is of two kinds: with respect to a common tonic, and with respect one to another. Scale-degrees—and in fact sequences of scale-degrees—may be harmonically related to one another through parallelism of one or more degrees at the scale-degree distance of fourth or fifth, completely independently of whatever relationships one or more of those degrees may have directly with the drone-tonic. The discussion of phrase derivation and elaboration in the lower-falling D-category has already encroached on the concatenation level of phrase combination.
