Coffee with Semmangudi

The cup was made of silver and was shining. The coffee though was not exactly ‘Tanjavur Degree Coffee’. It was good but not great.

If you get an image of me sipping coffee leisurely with Semmangudi wipe that image clean off your mind. My idea is to write about the coffee book on Semmangudi Srinivasa Iyer which was released last year during his centenary celebrations. I know I am late with the review but as the saying goes “Better late..” and all that.

The book is co-authored by V.Subramaniam and Sriram .V. (I guess Sriram put his initial after his name so that people will not mistake him to be a brother of Subramaniam). The title is “Semmangudi Srinivasa Iyer – Life & Music”. This is supposed to be a coffee table book and is priced Rs.790/-. Published by East West Books. A CD comes along with the book.

Lets have a look at the book . Sriram writes about the Life part of Semmangudi while Subramaniam writes about the Music part. Sriram, as usual, does a good job documenting the life of the titan. With his usual free flowing and interesting style, he takes us through the life of Semmangudi, right from his childhood till his end. He touches upon the important incidents in Semmangudi’s life (which was a colorful one). He does point out a few of the controversial incidents that Semmangudi was involved in but in keeping with the spirit of the book doesn’t delve deep into it, which is fine. Overall a nice presentation of Semmangudi’s life though you would have got most of this material from Sriram’s earlier book and Sruthi articles.

Subramaniam deals with the Music and here is where you see a bit of confusion. No, there is no confusion about Semmangudi’s music or Subramaniam’s understanding of it. It is just that the author seems to be confused as to whom he is writing this for. Is it for a foreigner who will buy the book because of the production values or is it for a Semmangudi fan who wants to understand more about his music? I mean, when you are analyzing the music of a maestro like Semmangudi you should assume that the person reading it will have some decent knowledge of Carnatic music. So it is a bit of a pain to read Subramaniam’s exposition on what a raga alapana is, what nerval is and what kalpanaswarams are !! I am sure if someone needs explanation to understand this, he or she will not have a clue about the analysis that is provided. It would have been much better had Subramaniam directly addressed knowledgeable rasikas and had dispensed with the explanations. His analysis is nice though I would loved it to be more deeper. I guess for a coffee table book this itself was too much !!

The production values of the book are excellent. This is the type of production values that you need to have. The cover is glossy and the cover photograph is superb. Throughout the book there are lovely black and white photographs, some priceless concert song lists and some nice cartoons of Semmangudi. Towards the end there is brief writeup with photographs of Semmangudi’s gurus and photographs of his famous disciples.

You also get a CD along with the book. The CD contains excerpts from various concerts of Semmangudi. Again I wish they had not stuck to his masterpieces, which are freely available, but had instead included some rare to find tracks. That would have given me the effect of ‘degree coffee’.

All said and done, this is a very nice and important addition to the literature on Carnatic Music, where books are few and far between. So take out your hard earned money (or ill gotten wealth :) and buy this book.

Will write about two more books about Semmangudi and one book about MS soon.

Attribution: The photograph of Semmangudi has been taken from 'The Hindu' website.