Music And Movies

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...

As with people, ragas have their own individuality. Some of the ragas are tradition bound whereas some others are very versatile, adapting themselves to various styles. I will talk about a couple of ragas which exemplify versatility. Kalyani is the only raga from the 'grand' ragas of Carnatic music which has this versatility. The 'grand' ragas that I am referring to are Todi, Sankarabaranam, Kalyani, Kambhoji and Bhairavi, the famous five. Some people may take up the case of Sankarabaranam since it is one the major scales in Western music as well. In cases like Sankarabaranam, the identity of Sankarabaranam changes so much that we are not able to recognize it as Sankarabaranam!!! To take away the carnatic flavour from a ragam like Todi and give a 'lighter' touch is a very difficult thing. I remember reading a review of U.Srinivas's concert by noted Hindu critic N M Narayanan (NMN). In the review he says that U.Srinivas tried his best to break Todi from its c...