Idea of Music - Raga, Swara, Gamaka & Sruti

rAga is the focus of presenting the music and thala helps organize it. Folk songs and filmy music's do use rAga for same purpose of presenting, and it will be suttle that the representation is not attributed to the music itself. So we may not notice the raga in all the musics we come across. The Indian music system does define the name to each raga based on how and when it was presented and by whom. Example there are folk tunes in Ananda Bhairavi Raga and similarly film music following the raga Sankarabharanam is Yen Veetu Thotathil. But the underlying raga never mentioned or represented in all forms of music. For a novice listeners the music could be minimum 5 minutes and the experts it can be up to 45 minutes or even more to keep the concentration. Hence one could imagine if the performer of music does a solo for 45 minutes how much concentration has to be there for such long time so does the rAga helps keep the flow of music in tact for any length of time.

rAga as an entity provides a frame work for setting boundaries for melody making.