Alapana of life

What better topic could a music lover (I simply cannot refer myself as a musician - that would amount to injustice to those real and pure souls) choose for her first post than alapana, the foundation for a composition and in turn the whole kutchery! To any carnatic musician or rasika, raga alapana is special. To a musician, it is a fruit of knowledge, creativity, hardwork and an ultimate expression of bhava-anubhava. To a listener, it is a source of rasika-anubhava, a prologue which makes the transition to a song smooth, enjoyable and is music beyond language.

Every raga is composed of a number of swaras and simply put, raga alapana is a musical expression sans lyrics of the permutation and combination of these swaras. Alapana precedes a composition. Raga alapana is a form of pure melodic improvisation in which the musician renders a series of phrases so as to create the mood of the raga and lay a foundation for the composition (and probably other creative aspects) to follow.

A raga expansion may be compared to a journey of exploration, each step promising more. The fact that neither the artiste nor the audience know what may be created adds romance to the exercise. However, alapana is not performed without any stragety. Years of learning (or in the rarest of rare cases, prodigal) and listening equips the artiste with the layout for an alapana (which would eventually come down to knowledge of the raga, swara-gyanam, voice culture and creativity), although the details would take shape only as he or she performs.

Sometimes life has its alapanas and as it is in the case of music where the alapanas are more often longer than the compositions themselves, the alapanas of life are longer the events which they preceed. The child that crawls for months, only to stand up and walk in a few minutes; the boy who studies a year long, only to get done with his exams in a few days; the girl who goes through five years of law school, only to get enrolled in the bar in a few minutes; the couple who wait for ages for their love to succeed, only to get married in a day; the mother carrying her child in her womb for nine months, only to give birth in a few minutes; and life in itself - to be overtaken by death in a few seconds. Yet, just as it is in music where an alapana gives life to a composition, these alapanas are those that give life to all those moments of bliss in our lives.