Vijayalakshmy Subramaniam is a vocalist in the ancient Carnatic tradition from South India. She's a scholar of the music as well. And during the Fall 2010 semester, she's a visiting Fulbright-Nehru Scholar at Duke. A highlight of her visit is the recital she'll present this Thursday, Oct. 28 at 8pm in the Nelson Music Room.

Recently she gave a presentation entitled "Carnatic Music: A Bridge Across," part of the Rare Music series co-sponsored by the Duke University Music Instrument Collections (DUMIC) and the Duke University Libraries. Standing in the lobby of the Biddle Music Building, in front of the instrument collection, she started by singing an invocation. It's a traditional way to begin a recital of Carnatic music, but this invocation served another purpose, too — it was the primary example she turned to as she explained the concepts and techniques behind her music. Debbie Amour, a student in Subramaniam's class, assisted by plucked a drone on the tambura.

Like Western musicians, Indian musicians make seven-note scales and they have their own solfege (the Western version is familiar to anyone who's seen The Sound of Music).

In both traditions, there are higher and lower (sharper and flatter) versions of each pitch. In the Western tradition, the seven pitches are arranged into scales. The melodic basis of Indian music is the raga, which is something more than a scale. It defines not only the collection of pitches but the melodic treatment of those pitches. Subramaniam describes it as something like a "melodic mood."

She uses Hamsadhwani, the five-note raga of her invocation, to demonstrate. It's based on the same pitches as Do Re Me Sol and Ti in a major scale. But Hamsadhwani is not just the notes, it's also the way they're approached — sung as a raga instead of as a scale, Ri and especially Ni are elaborately and beautifully inflected. Each raga has its characteristic ornamentation (gamaka).

Carnatic music incorporates a great deal of improvisation. Subramaniam demonstrated two styles that are quite distinctive. In neraval, the singer elaborates the melody of a song while respecting its lyric. Using a lyric that's extremely familiar in our part of the world to bridge the linguistic gap, she notes, "I can't sing 'jing' when I'm supposed to sing 'jingle'." In swaraprasthara improvisation, on the other hand, the solfege syllables — the swara — are used instead of the lyric. There are other kinds of improvisation as well, including raga alapana, in which the performer extemporizes freely on the raga. It's the ultimate test of a Carnatic musician's skill and character.

The rhythmic basis of Indian music is the overarching rhythmic cycle known as tala. It's something like the meter or time signature of Western music, but as with scale and raga, it's more than that. Each tala has a certain number of beats, and when the performers pat their hand to keep time, they use hand gestures in a pattern that is distinct for each tala. Members of the audience will often keep tala in this manner, too, the better to appreciate the brilliant rhythmic interplay of the musicians. When Subramaniam performs, whether she's improvising or singing a composed melody, she is working within the constraints of both raga and tala. Not only that, but "you have to sound aesthetic, you have to smile, you have to enjoy what you're doing." She does all of this with utter confidence and grace, as you can see.

Carnatic music is an ancient tradition, with chants dating back more than 2000 years. The Hindustani music of North India comes from the same root, but it incorporates Persian and Islamic elements brought by successive waves of invaders. The present-day states of Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Kerala, and Tamil Nadu in the south were relatively untouched by invasion. Despite the long history, the repertory of songs is dominated by three 17th-century composers from the same city — the Trinity of Carnatic music.

It will be a classic South Indian ensemble that takes the stage in the Nelson Music Room on Thursday — a vocalist accompanied by violin and a two-headed drum called the mridangam, with a tambura droning in the background. The violin and mridangam players will have been in town for less than a day, so there will be little opportunity for rehearsal. That's not a problem, though — the compositions and the musical roles and techniques as so clear and well-practiced that rehearsal is unnecessary.

We don't have strictly different compositions for the instruments, and most of the instrumentalists also learn the same compositions, the same ragas and rhythmic structures that vocalists do. ... When I sit down to perform I have a person on the violin and I have a person on the mridangam who may not have heard the piece at all, who may not even know the raga, but the training completely helps them to fall in line with me and also improvise with me.

It turns out that this way of making music can be hard to explain to outsiders. Visa officers, for instance, who want to know about the "band" you're hoping to take on an America tour.

As she says, the building blocks of her music are not so unfamiliar. Perhaps without experiencing the music, though, it's hard to appreciate the depth of a tradition that allows musicians to form a virtuosic ensemble on the spot. Luckily we'll have the opportunity to see and hear it as it happens. Below is a sample of Subramaniam singing with her usual accompaniment (the group in the video includes not only mridangam but another percussionist playing a clay pot, or ghatam). For more information about Subramaniam and her music, visit her web site.