As She May Sing, a new post from me resulting from an experience crafted for me by my beloved mentors. The concept of Śiva & Śakti and its manifestation as conjugate priors. ❤️ 🌏 https://t.co/ILgWs7XPp3 #Gratitude

5/ asya vyākhyāna-pradarśanasya darśanāt mama manaḥ ātmā ca paramaṁ sammohanam anubhavataḥ 🙏🏽

4/ Though I was too young at the time I wish someone had pointed me to @MadrasMobile (who was also seen moved to tears in today's lecture demonstration) article on the ancient Kamalāmbika & Tyāgēśa temple as yet another repository of deep knowledge:

3/ leaves one speechless until one experiences a kind of beauty that surpasses all human ability. Like so many others visible in the video, I found myself moved to tears before the mangala kriti at the end

2/ RKS mused at the very beginning that he would only be "scratching the surface". The richness of the tapestry behind these compositions, the nondual philosophy, esoteric Śrī Vidya geometric mystical meaning of the yantras, āsanas & mathematical aptness in the rāga-tāla

1/ Witnessing and experiencing RKS's 3-hour lecture demonstration on the Kamalāmba Navāvarna Kritis was pure bliss. Astonishingly resplendent descriptions of Dīkśita's depth, technical musical brilliance & spiritual knowledge.

In Carnatic Music, legends about long dead legends keep growing by the day. No wonder it is a legendary art. #DecemberMusicSeason2025

An instructive and illuminating phenomenon is to observe, witness and to feel ML Vasanthakumari singing jaya jaya jānaki kāntha. Layers upon layers lyrical meaning of the composition accompanied, ornamented and enriched by aesthetic rāgam motifs & subtle percussive combinatorics.

Performance Hints Over the years, my colleague Sanjay Ghemawat and I have done a fair bit of diving into performance tuning of various pieces of code. We wrote an internal Performance Hints document a couple of years ago as a way of identifying some general principles and we've

Lec-dem video from 2024 margazdhi sessions of Madras Music Academy chaired by @MadrasMobile:

18/ My takeaways: This episode reveals a complex, reciprocal relationship between text and practice, showing how written sources can reshape musical tradition as powerfully as oral ones.

17/ Impact: Later Tanjore-region texts followed Shahaji, cementing kaki nishada for both ragas.

16/ Shahaji emerges as an empiricist, grounding both theory and examples in written sources—yet those very sources shaped a lasting shift.

15/ Conclusion: The transformation of Aharī and Ābhērī was not driven by oral transmission, but by textual transmission errors and reinterpretation.

14/ Explanation: Shahaji likely relied on incomplete written sources, where key modifying phrases (like kakali nishada) were missing—leading to reclassification via the closest mela.

13/ But here’s the contradiction: • Shahaji’s text → Aharī & Ābhērī = Bhairavi Mela • Manuscripts → same songs labeled Aharī Mela

12/ Dr. Srilatha shows that the melodic phrases Shahaji cites for Aharī and Ābhērī are directly traceable to these manuscripts. One Ābhērī example even comes from a gīta by Venkatamakhi himself.

11/ Crucial intervention: Gīta manuscripts. These notated chaturdandi forms include paratexts (marginal notes) that preserve raga identities and details missing in treatises.

10/ Ragalakshana of Shahaji (1684–1710) lists: • 20 melas • 115 ragas It defines Aharī as belonging to Bhairavi Mela and provides melodic examples from chaturdandi forms.

9/ Then comes the turning point: Late 17th-century texts from the Tanjore region suddenly reclassify both Aharī and Ābhērī into the Bhairavi Mela, • Dropping kakali nishada • Adopting kaki nishada —simultaneously.

8/ In Chaturdandi Prakashika (c. 1650), Venkatamakhi asserts harmony between lakshana (theory) and lakshya (practice) for ragas like Aharī.