Hindustani Tala

The root meaning of the word tāḷa is linked to clapping. The gestures developed in ancient times served as a method of indicating the structure of a fixed period of time that would repeat cyclically—a metric cycle. The gestures essentially marked segments of the cycle. The segmentation of the cycle has always remained the primary description of a tala in the Karnatak system of South India, but North Indian (Hindustani) performance, which began to follow different organizational principles in about...