ABSTRACT
The eventual comparison of understanding pre-modern extemporized discourse with present-day discourse in Ritigaula in the retrospect how astonishingly consistent over time have remained both this particular ‘topic’ for extemporized discourse—the raga Ritigaula—and its associated syntax, in the tonal language of South Indian art music. In Raga Alapanas and Thayams, Vasudeva Sastri supplied registral indications suggested to him by the observations on overall range in the Sangita-sudha. In modern practice the preliminary announcement of the raga is supposed to comprise an unmistakably characteristic labeling phrase or two, and perhaps a quick run-through of a few more phrases. Analogous recurring sequences of motives and deviations pervade the much longer expository sections of eyecup and udgraham in the sample alapana, that is, the two raga-vardhanis in the Sanskrit terminology of the Sangita-sudha. A composition too, such as a kriti, is no more than the conjoining of a general formal scheme with a realization of the chosen raga.
