A concert listing is short: a title, a date, the names of the musicians. Even so, it tells you a fair amount about the evening.
Start with the names
The credits are a good place to start. A Carnatic vocal concert usually brings together a singer, a violinist and a mridangam player, often joined by ghatam or kanjira. When AFA presented Vignesh Ishwar in October 2023, the listing named Kamalakiran Vinjamuri (violin), Sumesh Narayanan (mridangam) and Anirudh Athreya (kanjira). All four shape what you hear, which is why all four are named.
The instruments also show which tradition to expect. Mridangam, ghatam and kanjira are associated with Carnatic music. Tabla, sarangi and sitar usually signal Hindustani music.
Some concerts have a title. The October concert was billed as “The Music in Dance,” a sign that the program would follow a theme. The listing does not say how; that becomes clear in performance.
When the pieces are listed
Printed programs may be provided at some concerts. A printed program usually lists each composition with its raga, tala and composer. Look for the main piece: a composition in a substantial raga that the musicians expand at length through alapana, niraval and kalpanaswaras. The tani avartanam, the percussion solo, often follows it. Shorter pieces usually come after it. “RTP” stands for ragam-tanam-pallavi, an extended form in which an unmetered exploration of the raga (ragam) and a pulsed exploration without a fixed tala (tanam) lead to a composed line set in tala, the pallavi, which is then elaborated through improvisation.
What a program leaves out
Every item gets one line, whether it lasts three minutes or much longer. A list can also change during the concert. In a 2017 interview, the vocalist Sikkil Gurucharan described learning to read an audience and alter his list as the concert went on. When nothing is printed, some listeners identify the raga by ear, some check after the alapana, and many simply listen.
A program tells you who is on stage and roughly what they plan. It cannot tell you how long each piece will run.
For more on the evening itself, see What to Expect. To follow the music as it unfolds, see Start Listening.
Image: Lalgudi G. J. R. Krishnan and Lalgudi Vijayalakshmi (violin) with Trichy Sankaran (mridangam) and Tripunithura Radhakrishnan (ghatam), who performed together for AFA in October 2017. Image: AFA archive.
