In Indian classical music, time moves in cycles. A tala fixes a number of beats that repeats for the length of a composition, and melody and rhythm are shaped to fit it. Once you feel where a cycle starts again, you can sense where a phrase is heading.
Adi tala, counted by hand
Carnatic music builds a tala from parts called angas. The musicologist Gordon Thompson describes Adi tala, one of the most common in South Indian music, as eight beats: a four-beat laghu followed by two drutams of two beats each.
Each part has its own gesture. The laghu is a beat of the palm followed by counts on the fingers, starting from the little finger. Each drutam is a beat followed by a wave of the hand. One full cycle of Adi tala looks like this:
beat, little finger, ring finger, middle finger | beat, wave | beat, wave
Thompson notes that in Carnatic music no single instrument keeps time for the others, and that musicians and listeners often show the tala with these gestures. At a concert you will often see the singer counting, and some listeners quietly counting along.
A different count in the north
Hindustani music organizes time in its own way. Teentaal, widely used, has sixteen beats (matras) in four sections of four. Claps, called tali, open the first, second and fourth sections. The third opens with a wave, called khali. Hindustani talas are closely tied to a repeating pattern of drum syllables, the theka, played on tabla or pakhawaj. In teentaal, open strokes dominate the clapped sections, while closed, damped strokes fill the khali section, so the drum itself tells you where you are.
The two waves do different jobs. In Adi tala the wave is simply the second beat of a drutam. In teentaal, khali marks a contrasting part of the cycle.
Listening for the cycle
Try counting Adi tala along with a singer who is keeping it by hand. Notice where the lines of the song begin and how they return to the same point in the cycle. Hearing the cycle come round a few times is often enough to start anticipating it. For how musicians use the first beat of the cycle as a point of arrival, see When Do You Applaud?
For more on how the two traditions differ, see Carnatic and Hindustani: Two Distinct Listening Traditions. For other ways into rhythm and melody, see Start Listening.
