The formal definition of a tihai is “a polyrhythmic technique found in Indian classical music, and often used to conclude a piece.”
But what actually is it?
In essence, it is repeating a rhythmic piece identically three times with equal interval in between the repetitions.
After having glanced over the glossary, you can now define a tihai as a rhythmic pattern of bol that repeat three times with equal gap in a given taal, spanning across one or more avartan, and (mostly) ends at the sam.
Whew, that was a lot of jargon. Let’s look at the importance and usage of tihai in music.
Tihais illustrate the beauty of the taal, play around with the boundaries of beats and enhances the musical experience of both the performer and the spectator.
As they can either be sung or played on an instrument, they have gained importance in the field of Indian music. Many rhythmic patterns in music end with a tihai. They **are sometimes used to distort the listeners’ perception of time, only to reveal the consistent underlying cycle at the end.
Indian vocal, instrumental and dance, all have their own unique fashion to use tihai and thus tihai is given a different treatment in every form of music. Here’s a sample tihai in Teentaal:
The number three is commonly found in ancient Indian concepts. Many such trios are seen such as Triguna, Trimurti, Trilok etc. This is also clear in the structure of a tihai - where the ‘ti’ represents three. In addition to this, the concept of tihai is thought to be originated from the oral recitation tradition of Vedas called as Ved-pathan. In the oral tradition, without any written scripts, the last pada or the phrase of the line was repeated thrice to show the end of the line. This repetition denotes the end of the current line as well as the beginning of the next line.
