Music And Movies

(Madanmohan - Lata) "Everything stated or expressed by man is a note in the margin of a completely erased text. From what's in the note we can extract the gist of what must have been in the text, but there's always a doubt, and the possible meanings are many. "   Thus spoke Fernando Pessoa, the great Portuguese poet. (Translation given here is by Richard Zenith.) This clearly expresses the difficulty inherent in communication. When communicating using a language is difficult, think about the difficulty when a music director wants to communicate his / her ideas to the singer. While music has developed its own language, it is almost impossible to capture all the nuances using the musical notation. The micro tones, the colour needed to be invoked, the modulation required and most importantly, the emotion that needs to be conveyed. All these have to pass from mere thoughts in the music directors mind to actual song sung by the singer. D...

(Vishwanathan Ramamurthy) The aroma floating in from the neighbour's kitchen, a candle burning in someone's house, a kid arguing with his mother, a stranger running hard to catch the bus. You never know which almost insignificant incident will take you back to your past and make you nostalgic. Nostalgia attacks you at unexpected times and one of its secret weapons is the long forgotten song. Given the prevalence of film music in our society, it is no surprise that the songs we heard in our early childhood remain embedded deeply in our memory . A song heard after a long time can evoke a significant part of your autobiography: your old school, playground, childhood friends, long forgotten neighbours and some random people whom you never would have thought about earlier. "Kanchi re Kanchi re" from Hare Rama Hare Krishna is one such song which helps me in time travel. It takes me to the earliest of my memories in Boiguda, Secunderabad: the street we lived in and ...

(Roshan) "In our times, music was different." This is constant refrain we hear all the while. Our parents heard it from their grandparents, we from our parents and our children from us. (Reminds me of the 'Woodwords Gripewater' advertisement. Every generation in the family saying the same thing.) While it is easy to dismiss such talk as the rambling of a person who is not modern enough, there is generally some truth in it. Music has to change, evolve, move forward etc and in this process something gets added and something gets lost. Whether the march forward is always evolution / revolution or degeneration has always been debated and I don't think anyone has arrived at any conclusion. That is fine, because to many of us the discussion is important. Conclusions be damned !!! One of the major aspects in film music which has changed is the way the song was used earlier. The usage of songs in films had multiple dimensions. Be it conveying the heroines happiness of f...

The noted Malayalam film music director M G Radhakrishnan passed away recently. This edition of 'One song at a time' is a tribute to him. The first time I encountered M G Radhakrishnan's name was when I wanted to find out who was the music director for 'Manichitratazhu' (which was later remade as 'Chandramukhi'). I stored the name in a corner of my mind and did not encounter the name for some more time. Then, when I was watching an interview of the popular Malayalam playback singer M.G.Sreekumar, I came to know that M.G.Radhakrishnan was his elder brother. Much later I came to know that the noted Carnatic musician, Omanakutty, was their sister. I first saw M G Radhakrishnan on TV screen as a judge for one of the singing shows. He had come in as a 'guest judge'. From the way he passed comments you could clearly make out that he was a very simple and unassuming person. (There is generally lot of 'simplicity' and 'humility' in the m...

Everything turns a bit more interesting if you have some imagination. This would apply perfectly to Indian Classical Music, where imagination is key to enjoyment. In case of some singers, you enjoy their imagination and innovation. In case of some other singers, you have to just imagine that you are enjoying their singing !! Any which way you look at it,imagination cannot be divorced from Indian Classical Music. As was promised in the last post on the subject of Ragamalikas, we will discuss about Ragamalikas in 'kalpana sangeetham'. According to Carnatic music purists, the piece-de-resistance of Carnatic music is the Ragam-Thanam-Pallavi. As can be expected in a fast moving world, this has now been christened RTP. We find that Ragamalikas exists in all three arms of RTP, namely, Ragam, Thanam and Pallavi. Now, singing Ragamalikas while elaborating a ragam would be frowned upon, and rightly so. But if you are going to take up a ragamalika pallavi such an exercise in raga alap...

G K Venkatesh " By the way, why have they left out   Yaava janmada maitri , that enchanting Kuvempu poem Janaki sang under G K Venkatesh's baton?  " , exclaimed the reviewer Smriti Anand, of the now defunct, TheMusicMagazine. She was reviewing a compilation CD of Janaki's Kannada songs. If you have heard 'yaava janmada maitri' you too would have commented on its absence from any compilation of Janaki's Kannada songs. There are some songs which you will immediately recognize as something special and will hold it amongst the best songs by the singer, even if you have not heard the other songs that the singer has sung!!! 'yaava janmada maitri' is one such song. I first heard this in the 'Doni Saagali' tape. Music Director G.K.Venkatesh had set tune to the poem of Rashtrakavi Kuvempu. I am sure Kuvempu would have approved of this tune. The very first time I heard the song I was taken in by the lovely tune, the way Janaki sung the song...