Krithis

• How his compositions were recorded
• List of Krithis (Audio available for 664/725 krithis)

How his compositions were recorded

....excerpts from the book Great Composers - Thyagaraja by Prof P. Sambamurthy

from pages 26-27,"
Thyagaraja was an inspired composer. Most of the compositions were the product of inspiration . It will be interesting to know how his disciples readily recorded in notation those songs which flowed down his mouth during moments of inspiration on Ekadasi and other sacred days.. Those were upon mango planks with steatite pencils. These planks were 18 inches lomg and 9 inches broadand half inches in thickness. They were coated black with the leaves of the plant , Bryonia grandis.

One disciple concentrated on the pallavi and recorded the samein notation and went to the bank of the river Kaveri which was just a furlong off, to memorize it. He did not stay for the anupallavi lest its music should obliterate the impression of the pallavi. The second disciple directed his attention to the anupallvi and likewise left for the another place to memorize it. The third wrote the charanas in notation and he also left for another place to memorize in solitude. If the charana , heard by him was a non-mudra charana, he stayed to write down the subsequent charana or charanas. He took care to insert the syllabes of the succeeding charanas beneath te corresponding svaras of the tune of the first charana. If the subsequent charans were clothed in different tunes (ex: Enduku nirdaya in Harikambhoj raga) the sishya who was alert recorded them in notation. THe forth sishya who was a scholar in Telugu and Sanakrit wrote down the pure sahitya, with a sence of understanding. When another song came, another set of four disciples got ready for the purpose.

The next day, the disciples sat together, consolidated the notes, learnt and memorised the full pieces and sang them before the master. The great composer, it is said used to go into raptures over the pieces.

This account of recording the pieces of the great composer is basd on the version given to me by the late Tiruvottiyur S. A. Ramaswamy Iyer who got it from Walajapet Krishnaswamy Bhagavathar and Umiayalpuram Krishna Bhagavathar and Sundara Bhagavathar, all direct disciples of Sri Thyagaraja."

from pages 180-181,
"Thyagaraja possessed the largest number of disciples known to have been associated with any single composer in India's musical history. He paired off his disciples according to the picth, timbre, compass, responsive character, ring and capacity of their voices, and taught to wach pair not more than 200 krithis. Thus he distributed his thousands of compositions amongst the several pairs of his disciples. A shrewd teacher that he was, he realized that number(of krithis) was perhaps the upper limit to the retentive capacity of the average human memory. In his days, the art of printing had not yet come to South India. The only way to ensure the rememberance of the correct renderings of the krithis was by frequently repeating them. The cleverer disciples were however allowed and encouraged to learn more pieces from the Great Composer himself or from other senior disciples. It is thus that the Walajapet disciples and the Umiayalpuram disciples came to have a rich repertoire of Sri Thyagaraja's compositions. It is estimated that Thyagaraja in all had 120 pairs of disciples and since each pair was taught 200 compositions , the number of compositions composed by him works out to 24,000."

The krithis compiled and presented here are from various sources.

List of krithis :

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