Music And Movies

I am interested in listening to various forms of music and I believe this attitude has given me a lot of melody and happiness. In this regard, Hindustani music, with its closeness to Carnatic music, has provided me some great moments. I wanted to share some of them here. Most of my appreciation of Hindustani music was generated by listening to tapes. (I have very rarely been to Hindustani concerts.) As can be expected, being a Carnatic music fan, I get easily attracted to those ragas which are present in both the systems. You can see that in my recommendations as well. I am sure I am missing a great number of Hindustani stalwarts and some of the canonical renditions which would be now considered legendary. If you find something missing please pardon me. My listening as well as knowledge of Hindustani music is limited. All the recommendations are for vocal music. All the tapes I mention below are available commercially. Let me start with one of the first Hindustani tapes which made a

I had long ago posted on this topic on the newsgroup rec.music.indian.misc (rmim) but I don't find it there now. So I thought I will write on this again. I have chosen to highlight a few classical instrumentalists who had played for Tamil film songs. The association of classical musicians with movies is an old one. Randor Guy had written some excellent articles about Musicians in Movies for sangeetham.com. (Hope there is some way to access their archive. Those articles were very informative). He writes mostly about the vocalists and composers including Papanasam Sivan, Maharajapuraman Vishwanatha Iyer, GNB etc. Let us start with the best of them first. Karukuruchi Arunachalam, the master musician, playing the nadaswaram for 'Sringara Velane Deva'. What an Abheri this is !!! Karukurichi's control over the instrument, the superb tonal quality and his effortless playing leave an indelible mark in your consciousness. Full credit to Janaki as well for matching up to the mast

Today came the news that one of the world's greatest film director had expired on 30th July 2007. Ingmar Bergman, the Swedish director, died at the age of 89. My first encounter with a Bergman movie was at Indian Institute of Science (IISc). I was aware, listening to quizzes, about the existence of a director call Ingmar Bergman but had no clue about his works. (The only Bergman whose movies I had watched was Ingrid Bergman, the radiant beauty of such films as 'Casablanca' and 'Notorious'). When the film society at IISc screened Ingmar Begman's 'Magician', I was curious and decided to go and watch the movie. This movie is not considered amongst the best of Bergman's work but I could understand why this director was so highly regarded. Bergman was a discovery for me. The word that instantly came to my mind to describe his style, after watching the movie 'Magician', was 'intensity'. There were scenes of great intensity in this movie, th

As with people, ragas have their own individuality. Some of the ragas are tradition bound whereas some others are very versatile, adapting themselves to various styles. I will talk about a couple of ragas which exemplify versatility. Kalyani is the only raga from the 'grand' ragas of Carnatic music which has this versatility. The 'grand' ragas that I am referring to are Todi, Sankarabaranam, Kalyani, Kambhoji and Bhairavi, the famous five. Some people may take up the case of Sankarabaranam since it is one the major scales in Western music as well. In cases like Sankarabaranam, the identity of Sankarabaranam changes so much that we are not able to recognize it as Sankarabaranam!!! To take away the carnatic flavour from a ragam like Todi and give a 'lighter' touch is a very difficult thing. I remember reading a review of U.Srinivas's concert by noted Hindu critic N M Narayanan (NMN). In the review he says that U.Srinivas tried his best to break Todi from its c

Last Saturday I was watching a program on Vijay TV called 'Coffee with Anu' in which Kadri Gopalnath and T H Vinayakaram participated. During the discussion Anu made the comment, "After all music is an universal language". All of us would have heard this many times that music transcends boundaries and music unites people etc etc. This got me thinking and I am putting my thoughts here which may run contrary to what many people say. At one level, the popular one, music does transcend boundaries. A case in point is the Western Pop genre, which has a wide following across the world. Almost everyone across the globe knows about Michael Jackson, has heard or heard of Spice Girls, Bruce Springsteen, Mariah Carey, Elvis, Elton John and many others. You can see the impact of the pop music on almost all nations. In Japan you have many pop groups, Thailand has them, India has them, Singapore has them and many other countries have pop / rock bands as well. (As in India, you

As I was writing the article on Brinda and Mukta, I realized that once I had written a tribute to K V Mahadevan and his contribution to cine music in Sangeetham.com. Unfortunately the site is down and I dont have a copy of what I posted. So I thought I will now write about K V Mahadevan's use of carnatic music in A P Nagarajan films. What I write here would be only related to the use of carnatic music in film songs by K V Mahadevan. In case you want to know more about KVM's contribution to film music as such, you should check out sites like www.tfmpage.com or www.dhool.com There are some very nice articles about KVM in these sites. KVM used lot of carnatic ragas in the films of A P Nagarajan. Let us first take the film 'Tiruvilayadal'. This is a film that not many tamil film buffs would forget. The best section, musically, is the last one involving the singer 'Bana Battar'. This segment involves four songs, of which we can safely discard the philosophical song t

My friend Ravi had called one day morning to inform me of the demise of Muktamma. Since that time I had been meaning to write this article but somehow it has not happened. As saying goes, "Better late than never". So here comes the article. I can say that I had the good fortune of having brief encounters with Brinda and Mukta. In case of Brinda the encounter was in the form of a concert and in case of Mukta I was able to meet the great lady at her house. The concert of Brinda I heard was sometime during 1984 or 1985. I am not sure which year it was. I was studying engineering at Hyd and had come to Chennai for the summer vacation. I had heard a few of Brinda Mukta's padams and javalis on Hyd radio and had wanted to hear more. I was desperately searching for their tapes in Chennai not realizing that they had never recorded. So when I saw Brinda's concert announcement in Hindu I was thrilled and set out that evening to attend the concert. The concert was held at Sastry

I had earlier written about the various types of song structures given by Tyagaraja. Now let us examine the themes that were dealt with by Tyagaraja. Basically lot of people feel that Tyagaraja's krithis are mainly 'bhajanais' or that they have a pleading tone. 'Azhugai' as they call in Tamil. This has mainly to do with the fact that many people who listen to Carnatic music dont know Telugu. That Tyagaraja's krithis all portray a similar mood is far from truth. So let us examine the different themes that Tyagaraja dealt with. First lets look at the krithis of his in which portray the 'karunya rasa'. These are the ones wherein Tyagaraja asks Rama to come and save him, give him moksham etc. A lot of his followers, who became vaggeyakaras later, used this tone often. The beauty of Tyagaraja's krithis was that they were very poetic even when the tone was imploring. You just need to check out the meaning of the krithi 'Nagumomu' in Abheri to know

Let me start my music blog by writing about one of the greatest composers of all time, Tyagaraja. Tyagaraja holds the pride of place in Carnatic Music. In this post I will try to illustrate the reasons why he is held in such high esteem. V.Raghavan, T S Parthasarathy and lot more people have written about the greatness of Tyagaraja. Many of these are scholarly works. What I am about to write is my own experience with the krithis of Tyagaraja. The first reason I feel Tyagaraja is so popular is due to the variety of song structures that he has given. I will try and give examples of those. 1. Divya Nama Sankirthanam - This is probably the most simple song structure. Here the pallavi is set to a tune. Usually this is of one or two lines. After that you get multiple charanams, all with the same tune but with different words. This would be very much suited for bhajan type of singing. The tune is also is quite simple and charming. An example of this would be a Divyanama Sankirthanam like '

This is my attempt to give my thoughts on Music, Movies and Literature. I am hoping that this would be a good place to interact with lot of people. My interests lie in all sorts of music but primarily in Carnatic Music. I like to watch the Art house films and comedy films. In books, I prefer serious literature and detective novels. I will start posting on these topics and other topics soon.