dhrupad

Dhrupad is a genre in Hindustani classical music from the Indian subcontinent. It is the oldest known style of major vocal styles associated with Hindustani classical music (for example in the Haveli Sangeet of Pushtimarg Sampradaya), and is also related to the South Indian Carnatic tradition. It is a term of Sanskrit origin, derived from dhruva (ध्रुव, immovable, permanent) and pada (पद, verse). The roots of Dhrupad are ancient. It is discussed in the Hindu Sanskrit text Natyashastra (~200 BCE – 200 CE), and other ancient and medieval Sanskrit texts, such as chapter 33 of Book 10 in the Bhagavata Purana (~800–1000 CE), where the theories of music and devotional songs for Krishna are summarized.¶

The term denotes both the verse form of the poetry and the style in which it is sung. It is spiritual, heroic, thoughtful, virtuous, embedding moral wisdom or solemn form of song-music combination. Thematic matter ranges from the religious and spiritual (mostly in praise of Hindu deities) to royal panegyrics, musicology and romance. A Dhrupad has at least four stanza, called Sthayi (or Asthayi), Antara, Sanchari and Abhoga. The Sthayi part is a melody that uses the middle octave's first tetrachord and the lower octave notes. The Antara part uses the middle octave's second tetrachord and the higher octave notes.¶

The text above is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Dhrupad”, available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence.¶

dhrupad is ancient genre of classical Indian music, according to the structured record cited below. This entry was generated automatically from that record and has not yet been reviewed by a person familiar with the tradition.¹¶

The source record links this tradition to 11 external registers, which can be verified through the citation.¹¶