I am sure that this post will prove to be the most interesting post for advance students of Indian Music. As we have discussed earlier, the ‘Ten Thaat System’ does not fully describe the scope of Hindustani scales. According to the definition of a Thaat, a Thaat is a scale of seven notes that uses at least one instant of each and every note. That leads us to the 32 Thaat System. 32 Thaats are essential to find all theoretical Raags of Northern and Southern Indian music.
Now, how do we find these 32 Thaats. The formula is purely mathematical. That turns many people off from even touching the subject. However, there are a number of ways to illustrate this formula so it would make perfect sense to all musicians.
In this post, we are going to find 32 Thaats by flipping the scales. I have been talking about Thaat flipping in the last few posts. So by now you must have a very good idea what that is all about.
According to the Thaat Flipping theory, the first scale is Kalian. Kalian looks like this:
S,R,G,M,P,D,N or
Tone, Tone, Tone, Semitone, Tone, Tone, Semitone.
In Kalian, all notes are in their upper position. Or, we can say that all notes are Tivar. Now it is just matter of lowering (making them Komal) the notes systematically to get 32 Thaats.
In the following illustration:
1. First, starting from the top (Nishad), we lower one note to get a scale.
2. Then we flip that scale (swap the Vikrat notes). The Komals become Tivars and the Tivars become Komals.
3. We continue to add notes downwards to find all possible combinations and flip each Thaat to reveal its counterpart.
Remember, there are only five notes in Indian scale that have two positions. These notes are: R, G, M, D, N. Whatever notes are ‘Komal’ in the original Thaat, they should be ‘Tivar’ in the flipped Thaat.
Play with the following interactive infographic, by clicking the ‘Next’ button. In the next post I will describe these Thaats in plain text. Enjoy.
[iframe width=”100%” height=”300″ src=”https://www.sangtar.com/canvas/170202-flip-thaats_Canvas.html”].
what will you say about lalit raga using two M