Carnatic Music is an excellent art form.If one takes the trouble to understand the fundamentals,one can really enjoy this fine art.For the untrained ear,every raga is similar to every other raga and every song is like every other song.The skill to be
mastered is distinguishing between the various ragaas.Because of the large number of raagas in Carnatic music ,this will appear to be an enoromous task.Actually, out of the 350 ragaas that I have listened ,only around hundered are popularly
sung.

When I was faced with the problem of how to start enjoying Carnatic Music ,I did one simple thing.I recorded all the Ragaas on audio tapes.I listened to these tapes repeatedly until I could differentiate between the various ragaas.I maintained details of the Carnatic Music Programs broadcast in the four wavelengths of All India Radio,Madras between January 99 to July 99.It took me about 3 months to master of skill of differentiating the ragaas.

The details that are included in this site are

1.Name of the Song
2.Name of the Composer
3.Name of the Ragaam
4.Name of the Thalam (Rhythm)

The list shows 1108 Keerthanams. I calculated the number of keerthanams by each composer and the results are given below
:
Thyagaraja 28% (307 nos)
Muthuswamy Dikshithar 12% (135 nos)
Papanasam Sivan 6% (70 nos)
Swathi Thirunal 5% (59 nos)
Purandara Das 4% (44 nos)
Shyama Sastri 2.5% (28 nos)
Other composers put together 42.5%

The above results show that the saint Thyagaraja is the favourite of most musicians.This does not necessarily mean that
Thyagaraja has composed the maximum number of songs.In fact,Purandara Das , who lived three centuries before
Thyagaraja is said to have composed some 4,75,000 songs out of which around 8000 are said to be available in print or in
manuscript form.

I have also made a Thalam-wise analysis.The results are given below :

Adi Thalam 64%
Rupakam 17%
Misra Chappu 8%
Khanda Chappu 5%
Other Thalas 6%

This shows that the majority of songs in Carnatic Music are set to the Ado Thalam.