Friday, December 30, 2011

Raga Ranjani Part 1

The next raga we will see about is ranjanI. It is one of my favorite raga though not so favored by few of my friends :-) . The name ranjani is supposed to mean ‘one who gives happiness’. The raga can give different flavors depending on its handling which we will see about in this post. It is specific to carnatic music and an equivalent scale is not found in hindustani (to my knowledge).The (popular) scale of ranjanI is as given below along with western notes with C as Sa.
 
Arohanam:        S   R2   G2   M2   D2   S’ ……. (C  D   D#   F#   A  C’)

Avarohanam:   S’  N3   D2   M2   G2   S ……. (C’  B   A    F#  D#   C)

but the avarohanam can also come as

S’  N3  D2  M2  G2  S  R2 S .. (C’  B   A   F#   D#   C  D  C) [footnote]

Some of the first things one can notice are
1. The scale has only 5 notes in the arohanam and avarohanam. This hence is a pentatonic scale (having only 5 notes per octave). So this is NOT a melakartha raga or sampoorna raga about which we had seen in the cArukEsi  raga post. Such a raga where the scale is not complete is called a Janya raga. We will see about this in the subsequent section.

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