Listening Examples:

Listen to the following samples. Do you hear a clear beat or rhythm? Can you find the matra?

Slow Tempo – Vocal with Tabla (Kishori Amonkar)

Medium Tempo – Sitar with Tabla (Nikhil Banerjee-Swapan Chaudhuri)

Fast Tempo – Santoor with Tabla (Shiv Kumar Sharma-Shafaat Ahmed Khan)

(music sources)

Introduction to Matra

A matra is the beat, or pulse, of a tal. And essentially, the matra is simple to understand; every tal is a just a cycle of matras, or beats.

But for both new listeners and students, hearing and feeling the matra can be surprisingly difficult.

The matra itself may be simple, but the relationship between the surface music and the matra is one of the most complex and unusual areas of northern classical Indian music.

For this reason, learning to feel the matra may be the single most important skill you can develop as a listener. Without it, you will be lost.

And for tabla players, a strong sense of the matra is one of the most important and challenging skill areas, and takes years to develop.

In this section, we will look only at the matra’s most basic characteristics. But for students and serious listeners, you will continue to learn about the many different ways that the music relates to the matra.

Every tal has a fixed number of matras

The number of matras, or beats, in a tal does not change. And once the tal starts in a performance, it doesn’t stop until that part of the performance is over.

Here are the number of matras in the most common North Indian tals:

• Tintal: 16
• Rupak Tal: 7
• Jhaptal: 10
• Ektal: 12
• Kaharawa Tal: 8
• Dadra Tal: 6

Although the number of matras in any tal is fixed, the tempo (speed) of the matras can change. Usually, it increases throughout a performance. More importantly, the subdivisions of each matra can and do change greatly in a performance.

The tempo of the matras in a tal is known as lay. And dividing the matra into different subdivisions (2:1, 3:1, 7:1, etc.) is known as layakari.

Both lay and layakari greatly affect how we hear (or don’t hear) the matra, and are discussed in their own sections.

A matra does not always feel like a beat

For many people, the word "beat" means something like a rock beat, or a jazz beat. Here the meaning of beat is "rhythm" or "groove", and we can clearly feel it in the music.

In classical Indian music, you do not usually feel the matra so clearly. This does not mean that musicians do not play on the beat, or do not create a groove that we can easily follow. Sometimes they do.

But often they play off the beat, or around the beat, and the matra is difficult to find.

A matra is more like a pulse

A matra is less like a beat and more like a pulse: a steady heartbeat beneath the performance. What is happening on top may or may not show the pulse in an obvious way, but the pulse is always there.

In light-classical tals such as dadra or kaharawa, you can often feel a steady rhythm throughout an entire performance. Listen to the sample below of a performance in kaharawa tal, a cycle of 8 matras:

Light-Classical Bhajan, Vocal with Tabla (Chhannulal Misra)

Once you are familiar with the rhythm of kaharawa tal, you can easily follow this piece.

Classical tals also sometimes have a clear pulse, especially in fast tempos, such as the santoor with tabla example that we heard above:

But in most classical music, there is not a steady rhythm or groove which is repeated over and over. The pulse of the matra is steady underneath, but you will often hear a lot of rhythmic variation on top.

Listen to the clip below. See if you can find the matra beneath the performance:

Sitar with Tabla (Shahid Parvez-Kumar Bose)

Learning to Follow the Matra

For both students and listeners, the best way to start following the matra is to learn to keep time in the traditional manner of clapping and waving. And then keep time as you listen to a performance, or while you are speaking tabla compositions.

When listening to accompaniment, is also helpful to know the theka for that performance.

But before either of those, you should learn how the matras in a tal are divided into vibhags. We will look at vibhags in the next two sections.

References