Music And Movies

It's December and Music Season time. Ofcourse anyone who knows a bit about Carnatic music knows that season refers to the unorganized music festival held all over Chennai during this month. Once Music Academy starts its programs around the 15th of Dec, the season will be in full swing. It is a different experience being in Chennai during this time but that is not going to be the purpose of this post. I am going to give you a couple of delightful Telugu songs based on Carnatic ragas. While the last couple of posts extolled the virtues of Dakshnimaurthy Swami's tuning of carnatic based ragas, this post will showcase the brilliance of two Telugu composers. Composers those days had a good grounding in classical music and were able to come out with some nice songs which had the classical touch, strong enough for you to feel the raga and light enough for you to enjoy it as a film song. This year the Music Academy gives its 'Sangeetha Kalanidhi' to Sudha Raghunathan. S...

Many of my friends who read the tribute to Dakshinamurthy Swami wrote to saying either that the number of songs included were less or I had missed some important song or the other. It is impossible to list all the great songs that Swami had composed but bowing to my friends demands I am including a few more songs here. My aim here is to highlight the way Swami used Carnatic ragas in his own unique way. We start with a very Carnatic raga, Neelambari, which is generally used in 'laali' songs. It is the raga which is used to put the Lord to sleep and Tyagaraja has composed some lovely songs in this raga including 'lali' songs. That is a separate track. Let us look at how wonderfully Dakshinamurthy Swami construct a film song based on Nilambari ragam. Ofcourse, we cannot say that the song sticks to Neelambari all the time but that is OK as far as I am concerned, since the song is a lovely one. Swami uses the raga  to create a tender song. He avoids the standard app...

"We called other music directors as Master but Dakshinamuthy was always a Swami for us. He knew what we all wanted and gave it us. He has given us so many boons in music. That is why it is apt to call him Swami" Thus spoke Gangai Amaran in a Malayalam singing competition program in which he was a chief guest. He continued,"Everyone in our family: my kids, Yuvan, Bhavadharini, everyone, were sent to him to learn music. Even if they didn't learn music well, we were happy if he tapped them a few times on their head."  When Illayaraja released his magnum opus, 'Tiruvasagam' he insisted that Dakshinamurthy be the chief guest. Illayaraja in his biography writes that even after he became a music director, he went and played guitar for Dakshinamurthy Swami's recording as a sessions musician, which surprised a lot of people. Such was the respect of Illayaraja's family for music director, V.Dakshinamurthy, known popularly in music circles as Dakshinam...

As I was writing the Punnagavarali post, I was very sure that I will have to immediately write about another similar raga, Ahiri. It is not that you cannot distinguish between Punnagavarali and Ahiri. Both have their unique identities but in many other facets, they are very similar to each other. Both Punnagavarali and Ahiri are janya ragas of the mighty Todi. Both are ‘karuna rasa pradhanam’ ragas. Both are supposed to be ragas with limited scope. Both of them are vintage ragas having been with us for ages. Both are very carnatic in nature, in the sense you don’t find them outside of Carnatic music. (S R Janakiraman in one lec-dem says, “Ragas of the type of Ahiri are the pride and glory of Carnatic music”.) Both have been treated in a similar way by the trinity. Both have interesting associations linked to them. If it was the linkage of snakes and magudi to Punnagavarali is interesting, the Ahiri linkage is even more interesting. It is said that if you sing Ahiri, you w...

I don’t need to tell you that I am going to speak about Punnagavarali do I? Even young kids in South India associate this raga with snakes and snake charmers. I don’t know how this association happened or when it happened but it is now a well-entrenched association. Even if the person listening to this raga doesn’t know the name of the raga, he / she will immediately exclaim, “Isn’t this the same raga as played for magudi?” Punnagavarali is an easily identifiable raga. Maybe it is this association with snakes and snake charmers that have pushed Punnagavarali to the later part of the concert and the raga is generally regarded to be a ‘minor’ raga, used more in ragamalikas. This is not a true reflection on the scope and depth of the raga. Our musical trinity demonstrated the depth, grandeur and the variety this raga provides through their krithis. Let me talk about that now. Muthuswami Dikshitar is like a strict college professor, a great scholar, who has indepth knowledge of...

(Kaithapram Damodaran Namboodri) Sahana is one of those ragas which has so much inherent classicism in it that it is very difficult to mould it to the needs to film music. K V Mahadevan did a wonderful job of morphing Sahana enough to fit it into film music with the 'parthen sirithen' song in 'Veera Abhimanyu'. It has since then remained the gold standard as far as Sahana in Tamil / Telugu film music. Later, Deva did a take on Sahana in 'Avvai Shanmugi'. The song was 'rukku rukku rukku'. A fun song but a cliched Sahana. There are traces of Sahana in Rahman's "kannamoochi enada" but there are too many ragas mixed in that song, not just Sahana. Raja, surprisingly, hasn't given any major song in Sahana. I hear that in some ragamalika song of his, Sahana appears and as background music in 'Unnal Mudiyum Thambi' but no full song in this raga. Another song by Rahman, 'anbe sugama' from 'Parthale Paravasam' als...