Music And Movies

I strongly hold the view that women have been very instrumental in ensuring the continuing popularity of carnatic music. While the number of male musicians may be more, it is women in the form of mother and sister who have inculcated the taste for carnatic music in many a youngster. I can vouch for my own interest in carnatic music developing from my mother. She used to sing quite well, though she was not formally trained. I used to regularly take her help in identifying ragas and that slowly translated into a mammoth interest in this great art form. I know of many friends who also have a similar experience in their formative years. Another important thing is the number of rare krithis that many women (who are not musicians) know. When my classmate visited me with his family, I was pleasantly surprised to hear a rare Tyagaraja Divyanama sankeetam being sung by his wife. My colleague's wife rendered an outstanding 'Sree Bhargavi' of Dikshitar much to my surprise and awe !!!...

I am interested in listening to various forms of music and I believe this attitude has given me a lot of melody and happiness. In this regard, Hindustani music, with its closeness to Carnatic music, has provided me some great moments. I wanted to share some of them here. Most of my appreciation of Hindustani music was generated by listening to tapes. (I have very rarely been to Hindustani concerts.) As can be expected, being a Carnatic music fan, I get easily attracted to those ragas which are present in both the systems. You can see that in my recommendations as well. I am sure I am missing a great number of Hindustani stalwarts and some of the canonical renditions which would be now considered legendary. If you find something missing please pardon me. My listening as well as knowledge of Hindustani music is limited. All the recommendations are for vocal music. All the tapes I mention below are available commercially. Let me start with one of the first Hindustani tapes which made a ...

I had long ago posted on this topic on the newsgroup rec.music.indian.misc (rmim) but I don't find it there now. So I thought I will write on this again. I have chosen to highlight a few classical instrumentalists who had played for Tamil film songs. The association of classical musicians with movies is an old one. Randor Guy had written some excellent articles about Musicians in Movies for sangeetham.com. (Hope there is some way to access their archive. Those articles were very informative). He writes mostly about the vocalists and composers including Papanasam Sivan, Maharajapuraman Vishwanatha Iyer, GNB etc. Let us start with the best of them first. Karukuruchi Arunachalam, the master musician, playing the nadaswaram for 'Sringara Velane Deva'. What an Abheri this is !!! Karukurichi's control over the instrument, the superb tonal quality and his effortless playing leave an indelible mark in your consciousness. Full credit to Janaki as well for matching up to the mast...

Today came the news that one of the world's greatest film director had expired on 30th July 2007. Ingmar Bergman, the Swedish director, died at the age of 89. My first encounter with a Bergman movie was at Indian Institute of Science (IISc). I was aware, listening to quizzes, about the existence of a director call Ingmar Bergman but had no clue about his works. (The only Bergman whose movies I had watched was Ingrid Bergman, the radiant beauty of such films as 'Casablanca' and 'Notorious'). When the film society at IISc screened Ingmar Begman's 'Magician', I was curious and decided to go and watch the movie. This movie is not considered amongst the best of Bergman's work but I could understand why this director was so highly regarded. Bergman was a discovery for me. The word that instantly came to my mind to describe his style, after watching the movie 'Magician', was 'intensity'. There were scenes of great intensity in this movie, th...

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...

Last Saturday I was watching a program on Vijay TV called 'Coffee with Anu' in which Kadri Gopalnath and T H Vinayakaram participated. During the discussion Anu made the comment, "After all music is an universal language". All of us would have heard this many times that music transcends boundaries and music unites people etc etc. This got me thinking and I am putting my thoughts here which may run contrary to what many people say. At one level, the popular one, music does transcend boundaries. A case in point is the Western Pop genre, which has a wide following across the world. Almost everyone across the globe knows about Michael Jackson, has heard or heard of Spice Girls, Bruce Springsteen, Mariah Carey, Elvis, Elton John and many others. You can see the impact of the pop music on almost all nations. In Japan you have many pop groups, Thailand has them, India has them, Singapore has them and many other countries have pop / rock bands as well. (As in India, you...

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...