Dear Patrick,
The gītakas are indeed described in Bharata’s Nāṭyaśāstra, as well as in Dattila’s Dattilam. A good place to start would be
Rowell, Lewis: Form in the ritual theatre music of ancient India. Musica Asiatica 5 (1988) 140-190.
which can be partly read here: https://goo.gl/PDPEkz.
It might be noted that the names of two and a half of these gītakas (in the order in which they are treated in the above works, where they are called madraka, aparāntaka and ullopyaka, and together with other terms related to music and dance) appear on a fragment of the Spitzer manuscript, which has been edited by Prof. Eli Franco (http://hw.oeaw.ac.at/3301-4) and dated by him to the 3rd cent. CE (Franco, Eli: The Spitzer Manuscript. Report on Work in Progress. In: Abhidharma and Indian Thought. Essays in Honor of Professor Doctor Junsho Kato on His Sixtieth Birthday. Tokyo 2000, p. 559). Here is a picture of the fragment. If you would need to know on which page it is published, I could let you know by next week.
Best,
Thomas
I turn to the paṇḍitapariṣad to educate me in what look like technical terms from the science of music. Curiously, in the Yājñavalkya Smṛti (3.112–116) there is a passage about how a person proficient in music and singing can attain the highest Brahman. Why this passage is there to begin with is obscure to me. But at verse 113 we have the mention of seven “gītikāni”: Aparāntaka, Ullopya, Madraka, Prakarī, Auveṇaka, Sarobindu, and UttaraThen at 114 it says that these should be sung (probably some kinds of chants: Ṛg, Gāthā, (or Ṛggāthā) Pāṇikā, Dakṣavihitā, and Brahmagītikā.Viśvarūpa has this comment: imāny aparāntakādīni . . . sapta gītikāni gānaśāstrād evāvaseyāni. A hint as to where these come from, but not helpful beyond that.Aparārka, a bit more helpfully: aparāntikādayo bhārataśāstroktā gītaprakāraviśeṣā brahmajñānābhyāsahetor geyāḥ.Thank you all for any leads or explanations on this.Patrick
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