Tm Krishna Quotes

In its totality, a raga is a combination of musical heritage, technical elements, emotional charge, cognitive understanding and aural identity.

Social inequality gets embedded more deeply in the minds of the receiver, only to grant the giver even more power.

Interestingly, the drunkard-genius is a valorised trope when the imbiber of spirits is from among the upper castes. T.R. Mahalingam, the flautist, is a classic example of someone who was an alcoholic but whose drunkenness is spoken of with much affection. His genius eclipsed everything else, they would say. But Somu, the undisputed champion among woodcrafters, would never be given that leeway—his drunkenness is a defect born of his caste. This hypocrisy of the upper castes, and those aspiring to be like them, is insufferable. Arulraj from the Thanjavur family had a different interpretation. ‘If they (his father and uncles) had extra money, they would head straight to the liquor store. Immediately, their mood would change.’ He was speaking in the context of how the older generation unquestioningly accepted their social status and the way they were treated. Alcoholism could also have been an escape from reality.

The svara’s main function in Karnatik music is to give us a microcosm of the larger melody. But it cannot do this entirely on its own. It does so through a process of interaction. The svara, acts with other svaras to create smaller melodic units, which in turn define the larger melody. How does a svara, the ‘micro’, express the macro? It does so by representing an aspect of the larger melody, not by its fixity or rootedness, its immobility on a scale, but through its movable nature. Therefore, every svara can move, bounce, slide, glide, shiver or skip. How and to what extent a svara can be expressive depends on the nature of the larger musical identity it is part of and the nature of the other svaras within that macro identity. Svaras in some ways are like cells in a body. The cells (svaras) are determined by the content and function of the tissues (smaller melodic units), yet the larger human being (melody as a whole) is embedded in every cell, within the DNA.

In Karnatik music, compositions are mainly in Sanskrit, Telugu, Tamil, Kannada and Malayalam. Musicians will find that the aesthetics of the melody seems different when the same musical phrase is sung in two different languages. This is primarily because of the sound of the syllables, which are the pillars on which the melodic phrase is structured. This could be partly psychological – the result of the mind interpreting the melodic flow differently when other syllables are placed in the same position. The syllables and the compound sounds unique to each language register differently in our mind, making the structure of the phrase seem different.

Alapana In manodharma sangita, the principal vehicle of exploring a raga’s identity is the alapana, which in Sanskrit means ‘to speak, address, convey, communicate’. In the context of classical music, alapana is the opening of a raga that brings forth all of its facets without the use of other elements, like sahitya or tala. The focus of this exercise is entirely on the exploration of the raga. How does one explore a raga? We have already discussed what a raga is and the various factors that go into the making of its identity. A musician should have internalized the different facets of a raga before attempting to present an alapana in that raga. The resources needed for internalizing a raga lie, of course, in the numerous compositions that have been created by vaggeyakaras in the raga. In order to present the raga in an alapana, the musician needs clarity regarding the essential svaras, phrases and movements. A similar internalization exists in the mind of the musically attuned listener. In this commonality of cognition between the musician and listener is the raga’s identity. It is this internalized rendering of a raga that best reflects what is referred to as the musician’s manodharma. So closely integrated is the singer’s manodharma with the raga’s identity in an alapana that the alapana becomes synonymous with the raga.

Memory decides that forgetting is its job in the hope that the scars might disappear and explanations become unnecessary.

Mani Iyer had said, ‘My heaven is a place where Somu Asari has worked on good sandalwood and made the kattai, Parlandu constructs the muttu and I get to use that mrdangam to play a concert for Ariyakudi Ramanuja Iyengar.’ I hope this happened in a heaven where all of them had shed their respective castes and were basking in each other’s magnificence.

only if you put in effort and struggle, will you get results! But you should work with focus on one job, not do this and that. I have no complaints about the profession.

I have no doubt that this is because Thanjavur culture’s upper-caste and -class associations sit comfortably with what the dominant sections of society have deemed to be ‘culture’—or ‘high culture’ anyway.