The ''Chaturdandiprakashika'' (; "The Illuminator of the Four Pillars of Music") is a

Sanskrit Sanskrit (; attributively , ; nominally , , ) is a classical language belonging to the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European languages. It arose in South Asia after its predecessor languages had diffused there from the northwest in the late ...

treatise written by the musicologist

Venkatamakhin Venkatamakhin (; ) or Venkatamakhi, was an Indian poet, musician, and musicologist of Carnatic music. He is renowned for his '' Chaturdandiprakashika'' in which he explicates the melakarta system of classifying ragas. Venkatamakhin composed ge ...

in the mid-17th century. It introduced a theoretical

melakarta Mēḷakartā is a collection of fundamental musical scales ( ragas) in Carnatic music (South Indian classical music). ''Mēḷakartā'' ragas are parent ragas (hence known as ''janaka'' ragas) from which other ragas may be generated. A ''melak ...

system to classify and organise

raga A ''raga'' or ''raag'' (; also ''raaga'' or ''ragam''; ) is a melodic framework for improvisation in Indian classical music akin to a musical mode, melodic mode. The ''rāga'' is a unique and central feature of the classical Indian music tradit ...

s in the

Carnatic music Carnatic music, known as or in the Dravidian languages, South Indian languages, is a system of music commonly associated with South India, including the modern Indian states of Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Kerala and Tamil Nadu, an ...

tradition of India. In the 20th-century, this system would form the basis of the

thaat A Thaat () is a "Parent scale" in North Indian or Hindustani music. It is the Hindustani equivalent of the term ''Melakartha raga'' of Carnatic Music. The concept of the ''thaat'' is not exactly equivalent to the western musical scale because t ...

system that is used in

Hindustani classical music Hindustani classical music is the classical music of northern regions of the Indian subcontinent. It may also be called North Indian classical music or, in Hindustani, ''shastriya sangeet'' (). It is played in instruments like the violin, sita ...

today. Some portions of the ''Chaturdandiprakashika'' are now lost.

Description

In Carnatic music, a mela is a scale of

svara Svara or swara (Devanagari: स्वर, generally pronounced as ''swar'') is a Sanskrit word that connotes simultaneously a breath, a vowel, the sound of a musical note corresponding to its name, and the successive steps of the octave or '' ...

s in ascending order in a melodic unit forms the basis and gives birth to

s. While the concept of melas is said to have been introduced by

Vidyaranya Vidyaranya (IAST: Vidyāraṇya), usually identified with Mādhavācharya (not to be confused with Madhvacharya, Madhvāchārya (13th c.)), was Jagadguru of the Sringeri Sharada Peetham from ca. 1374-1380 until 1386 - according to tradition, a ...

in the 14th century, and a number of other musicologists before

had expounded on the subject, there was a lack of a standard work that systematically classified the ragas of classical music.

Vijayaraghava Nayak Vijaya Raghava Nayak (also Vijayarāghava Nāyaka, 1590s-1673) was the fourth and last king of Sevappa Nayak's line. He ruled from 1634 to 1673. In 1673, Vijaya Raghava Nayak was defeated in battle by the Madurai Nayak king Chokkanatha Nayak who ca ...

() commissioned Venkatamakhin to prepare such a treatise which led to the creation of the ''Chaturdandiprakashika''. The title translates to "the illuminator of the four pillars" (of music). It alludes to a system of four divisions of composition, namely (rhythmically free exposition of a

), (melodic inflection), (vocal composition in a raga) and

prabandha Prabandha is a literary genre of medieval Indian Sanskrit literature. The ''prabandha''s contain semi-historical anecdotes about the lives of famous persons. They were written primarily by Jain scholars of western India (Gujarat and Malwa) from 1 ...

(a compositional structure). The work led to the creation of the melakarta system of classification and the formulation of the 72 mela (or parent) ragas that are the foundation of the classical music of South India today. In the early 20th-century,

Vishnu Narayan Bhatkhande Pandit Vishnu Narayan Bhatkhande (10 August 1860 – 19 September 1936) was an Indian musicologist who wrote the first modern treatise on Hindustani classical music, an art which had been propagated for centuries mostly through oral traditions. ...

, a musicologist from

Bombay Mumbai (, ; also known as Bombay — the official name until 1995) is the capital city of the Indian state of Maharashtra and the ''de facto'' financial centre of India. According to the United Nations, as of 2018, Mumbai is the second- ...

, chanced upon the ''Chaturdandiprakashika'' and used its melakarta system as the basis for the

system that is currently used to organise and classify ragas in

. Some portions of the treatise are now lost.

Notes

References

* * * * * {{cite journal , last1=Powers , first1=Harold S. , year=2001 , title=Bhatkhande, Vishnu Narayan , journal=

Grove Music Online ''The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians'' is an encyclopedic dictionary of music and musicians. Along with the German-language ''Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart'', it is one of the largest reference works on the history and theo ...

, publisher=Oxford University Press , doi=10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.article.03008 , language=en Sanskrit texts Carnatic music