Introducing Yourself to Indian Classical Music 9-The Saptaswaras or Saptak and What Lies in Between
To recap from the last post, the seven notes in Hindustani music, collectively known as the saptak (octave) are further divided into 12.
The notes Sa and Pa may be considered constant (for now!), but the other five notes have variations.
Here are the notes again with the variations:
1.Shadja=Sa
2.Komal Rishabh=Re
3.Shuddha Rishabh=Re
4.Komal Gandhar=Ga
5.Shuddha Gandhar=Ga
6.Shuddha Madhyam=Ma
7.Tivra Madhyam=Ma
8.Pancham=Pa
9.Komal Dhaivat=Dha
10.Shuddha Dhaivat=Dha
11.Komal Nishad=Ni
12.Shuddha Nishad=Ni
The “notes” in-between such as Komal Rishabh, Komal Gandhar etc are known as semitones (in English).
What is the difference between notes and tones?
A tone refers to the particular quality of a sound, a pitch that we hear. What we are doing when we speak of a tone, is speaking of a particular frequency.
A note refers to the name we give to a particular tone, denotes its position (e.g. in a scale) and it’s pitch.
When we speak of Indian music and start dividing up the scale into 12 etc as we are doing now, we often tend to speak in terms of tones and semitones rather than notes, because we want to speak of tonal variations.
Komal Rishabh, Komal Gandhar etc are not new notes, but are tonal variations on the notes Rishabh (Re) and Gandhar (Ga) etc.
We start calling the notes (e.g Sa, Re, Ga) “tones” and the variations (eg Komal Rishabh, Komal Gandhar etc) “semitones,” (sometimes referred to as half-notes, or half-tones).
The words “note” and “tone” can tend to be used interchangeably.
Indian music is full of tonal variation….and we need to begin to speak not just of semitones, but of microtones. The above variations, can be further minutely variegated. This cannot be represented on a keyboard.
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