North Indian music recognizes 10 such Thaats. They are Sampooran i.e. containing seven tones in the octave, whereas a Raga may contain five, six or all the seven notes or any combination thereof. A Thaat is only a group of abstract tonal forms, but a Raga is a combination of notes having the power of generating and creating emotional values.
Thaat literally means "to tie" standing for the process of tying down frets to signify musical note intervals. Carnatic music has a more comprehensive collection of parent modes called Melakartas. These are 72 in number. We will deal with these in the future issues of RagaNet.
Included in this artice are midi files of the ten thaats. We recommend you configure a player. We use the standard "mid" extension. In Netscape, use the "configure player" option to add the utility. Sing along with the Sargam.
In all this, keep in mind that the Thaats are not Ragas. We will list the the 1st derivative Ragas from these Thaats in the next article. The Ragas are named after their parent mode. For instance, For Bilaval Thaat, its first derivative Raga will also be Bilaval.
