ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the temporal aspects of dapha at a variety of levels, looking at time-periods from as short as a tal cycle to as long as a year. The alternation of tin and chu played by the tah is shown on the upper, single-line staff. In the pedagogical version this continues throughout the song, except that there is a change of tempo between the first line of each verse, and the second. The temporal order of events in performance is thus not a rigid script, but a flexible schema. The style of drum accompaniment gives a different character to the slow and fast tempo sections of the performance. Panchalal informed the author that there are two groups of songs. The term he used for ‘group’ in this context was gan. Singers at Dattatreya acknowledge the difference in performance schema between what they term nandi songs and all other songs.
