Music And Movies

It was like a ritual for me. I would take the local train on one of the second Saturdays and get down at Dayanannagar Station, close to which my friend Ranganathan used to live. Ranganathan was my class mate who used to be teased a lot in school due to his girth but once out of school we became thick friends in Junior College. One of main reasons was our love for music. He was one of the few who owned a record player in those days due to his father also being a great music lover. So I used to go all the way to his house in that local train in order to listen to the records which he had. I now don't remember the records I heard at his place except for one, which was part of the ritual that I mentioned. That was the record of 'Kandan Karunai' and the last song that I always listened to before I left his house was 'Solla Solla Inikkudhada'. 'Kandan Karunai' had some lovely songs and it won its music director, K.V.Mahadevan, the National Award for music. The ...

(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 ...

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...