Music And Movies

In India, film music has fascinated Classical musicians and vice versa. We have seen many classical musicians get involved in film music. Their involvement is generally as an individual artist. Very rarely do you we have classical musician as music directors for films. Pandit Ravishankar, the sitar maestro, was one such musician who had been a music director for films. He was the man who provided music for Ray's amazing debut film, 'Pather Panchali'. Later Ravishankar was the music director for a Hindi film called, 'Anuradha', starring Balraj Sahni and the lovely Leela Naidu. I remember that he gave music for a film on Meerabai, which starred Hema Malini as Meera. I remember reading a rather lengthy article about this movie in 'Illustrated Weekly of India', which means the movie must have been a late 70s or early 80s one. Contrary to the popular choice of those days, Lata, Ravishankar chose Vani Jayaram to sing all the songs of this movie. Unfortunately I...

The transfer of musical ideas between the North and South India is well documented. Muthuswami Dikshitar had visited Kasi and brought along with him lot of Hindustani ragas to the South. The North Indian musicians turned Muthuswami Dikshitar's 'Vatapi Ganapatim Bhaje' into a khayal. (Wonderfully sung by Amir Khan.) Many such transfers have happened. I was aware of many of them but not about the one which inspired Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore. One of my good friends had once sent me a link to a Rabindra Sangeeth song, which was actually Tagore's homage to that monumental krithi of Muthuswami Dikshitar, 'meenakshi me mudam dehi'. Tagore had taken this krithi and had made minor modifications to it and had written the Bengali lyrics to it. The song starts as 'basanthi o bhubhanamohini'. Very nice words. Gurudev must have been very impressed by the krithi. And what is there not to be impressed by it? 'meenakshi me mudam Dehi' stands as a testimon...

                                      (S. Rajeshwar Rao) Just like Begada which we spoke about a couple of posts back, Bilahari is another ragam which is not so easy to adapt to film music. It generally ends up showing its classical colours. Illayaraja had tuned a wonderful song in Bilahari, "koondalile megam" for the film, 'Balanagamma'. He also tuned "neethone aagena sangeetham" for 'Rudraveeena' in Bilahari. In both cases you can clearly see the classical aspect of Bilahari present in the song. I am sure there are quite a few Bilahari based songs if you dig deeper in time but I can also bet that the classical aspect would dominate in those songs. Today, I am posting a song composed by S.Rajeshwar Rao, one of the great music directors of the Telugu Film industry. He has given enormous number of hits. Too numerous to enumerate here. From his songs you can see that he had a very good ...

"This is not a composition of Naushad miyan. You need to put in some effort." ("Yeh Naushad miyan ka gaana nahin hai, aap ko mehnat karni padegi."). When I read that a music director had directed these words towards a young Lata Mangeshkar, struggling with his composition, I was intrigued. For Naushad was a famous name and you don't expect a music director to dismiss him so casually. Naturally I had to find out more about the music director who made the statement. Sajjad Hussain was his name and he was a temperamental man. I discovered that due to his temperament he never got along well with the film folks and ended up scoring for only 16 or 17 movies in his career. Knowing the name was not enough. I needed to know what he had scored. One of his first composition I heard was "yeh hawa yeh raat yeh chandni". Then I heard "dharthi se dook gore", "yeh kaisi ajab dastan". Enough to show that his style was quite different from that ...

(V. Dakshinamurthy Swamy and K J Jesudas) In Indian film music, one of the biggest challenges for the music directors of yesteryear was how to tune in classical ragas for film music. In early days, they didn't try changing the classical flavor much and the old Tamil songs for example, are almost like classical krithis. When film music turned more 'modern', the music directors put in an effort to modify the raga, to make it more 'lighter', give it a different flavour so that it can reach a larger audience. This is probably easier said than done for not all ragas are equal in this respect. Some, like Mohanam and Kalyani, are eminently suitable for this modification as innumerable songs based on these ragas prove. Some others like Begada, Bilahari, Yadhukula Kambhoji do not shed their classical cloak easily and it requires a genius to transform their image to suit the film music needs. And in V.Dakshinamurthy or Dakshinamurthy Swami, as he is called now, Malayalam...