WHAT IS RAAG

योऽसौ ध्वनिविशेषस्तु स्वरवर्णविभूषितः । रञ्जको जनचित्तानां स च राग उदाहृतः ।।

"That which is a special dhvani, is bedecked with swara and varna and is colorful or delightful to the minds of the people, is said to be raga" - Matanga in the Brihaddesi.

Raga describes a generalised form of melodic practice. It also prescribes a set of rules for building the melody. It specifies the rules for movements up (aahroh [आरोहणम्]) and down (aavroh [अवरोहणम्]) the scale, which Swara (notes) should figure more and which notes should be used more sparingly, which notes may be sung with gamaka, phrases to be used, phrases to be avoided, and so on. The result is a framework that can be used to compose or improvise melodies, allowing for endless variation within the set of notes.

The basic mode of reference is that which is equivalent to the Western Ionian mode (this is called Bilawal thaat in Hindustani music and Shankarabharanam in Carnatic music). All relationships between pitches follow from this basic arrangement of intervals. In any given seven-tone mode, the second, third, sixth, and seventh notes can be natural (shuddha, lit. 'pure') or flat (komal, 'soft') but never sharpened, and the fourth note can be natural or sharp (tivra) but never flattened, making up the twelve notes in the Western equal tempered chromatic scale (but without Western pitch equivalencies like, for example, A# and Bb). A Western-style C scale could therefore theoretically have the notes C, Db, D, Eb, E, F, F#, G, Ab, A, Bb, B. Ragas can also specify microtonal changes to this scale: a flatter second, a sharper seventh, and so forth. Treatises from the first millennium report that the octave used to be divided theoretically into 22 microtones ("shrutis"), but by the 16th century, this practice seems to have died out. Furthermore, individual performers treat pitches quite differently, and the precise intonation of a given note depends on melodic context. There is no absolute pitch (such as the modern western standard A = 440 Hz); instead, each performance simply picks a ground note, which also serves as the drone, and the other scale degrees follow relative to the ground note.