The Music of Hindostan c10.73

c10.73

But by Bharata’s time all the eight notes are clearly defined; they are, as we should write them, (C) D E F G A B C, because the old theory names the upper extremity of the *svara*. The *madhyama* is the note G in a scale C–C, not, as before, in a heptachord D–C; and he has a great deal to say about it. It is the ‘eldest’ (*pravara*), the ‘imperishable’ (*anāśin*), the ‘note fixed by the singers of the *Sāmaveda* in the *Gandharvakalpa*’ (musical treatise), the ‘note which would still subsist though all the other notes of the mode should disappear’. This last delightful hyperbole could not have been applied to the *aṃśa*, which, though it regulated the notes in its tetrachords, was itself liable to be shifted, and the tetrachords with it.