How little tonal material is required to make music? Spoken word poetry, hip hop and rap often flirt with these ideas, but there are other ancient systems that are familiar with these tropes very well. Prosodic singing does make for interesting musical material. A next step is to sing in tritonics, and then pentatonics, and then populate the spectrum with as many as 12 notes, and varieties of their intonations.

One very popular known abstracted musical scale is that of the pentatonic. This scale is found anywhere in the world, and we tend to know it more than we think we do - the universal appeal of this scale is displayed adequately by Bobby McFerrin in this humorous and charming example:







An illustration can be found in Ravi Shankar’s album for Vedic Chanting. In the earliest styles of Rig Vedic Chanting, there are only 3 notes - the Udatt, Anudatt and the Svarit notes. It sounds something like a tonic, a minor second and a minor seventh below. Of course in the example below, a flute is playing many more things, but I implore you to concentrate on the chanting.



So just 3 notes - qualifies as music? Could this be one of the smallest numbers enough for making a scale? Turns out there is some merit to this intuition.

The Maoris surveyed by Mervyn McLean were reported to be using almost half of all of their music as tri-tonic. There is tritonic music amongst the natives in the Andes in South America, that mostly concentrates on the notes of the major triad. Southern Peruvian carnival music is also often tritonic. Maori scales get into much more complexity. When there are few tones to hear, small differences make a huge impact to the scale.



In the vedas, there is an explicitly stated difference between Chhanda and Naad - Chhanda is the prosody of the composition. This can be somewhat equated to the metric structures of western poetry - pentameters, hexameters, and their types - Iambic, Dactylic and so on. The difference between meters and chhanda however, is pretty much exactly like the difference between taal and hypermeter. In hypermeters, there is space for ornamental complexity, but in taal, there is an *insistence* on ornamental complexity.



The fun part is how closely chhandas mimic tabla prosody. There are two types: Akshar-vritta and Matra-vritta. Akshar vritta chhandas are divided according to the letters, and matra vrittas divided according to the rhythmic durations. This is exactly the same as akshar-kaal and matra-kaal of tabla counting. Poems also have ‘vrittas’, which are more composed than chhanda. Many of these chhandas are directly used in regional language poetry, and many are indigenous to reguinal poetry. Some examples are: anushtup, shardul vikridit, etc. I will do another separate series about chhandas and vrittas.

Now these prosodic compositions lend themselves into specific taals only - because their own metric structure is so definite. They are also sung in tritonic scales. Despite the symmetry of octaves, tetrachords as scales aren’t really very popular, and pentatonics succeed tritonics in scale population.

What keeps music interesting, after all, is in a large part contributed by rhythmic complexity - and chhandas are a very interesting way to do that, as hip hop artists have discovered long ago :)

*anachronism laugh*