Rajeswari Satish

Over the last few days, I have been listening a lot to KVN. Two concerts that I recently listened to were the 1975 navaratri mandapam concert at Tiruvanantapuram with LGJ and PMI, and another concert with LGJ and PR (not sure of the year)..

KVN is known as the King of neraval..Besides singing fabulous neravals for well known compositions with well known neraval lines, I think his true mastery is in weaving stunning neravals out of small compositions with seemingly "un-neraval -like" lines. For example, he sings neraval at "Nata vanchi nrpalaka Vamsha shubhodaya" for Pahi Parvata Nandini. The way he builds up momentum and LGJ's superb and original replies are a treat. 

KVN's Dhanyasi is always elegant. His neraval here for Dhyaaname @ Dharanu Velayu Sri Ramuni is what I started the day with. Sense of proportion, tempo, everything is in place. What a great musician! His music provides food for thought for me for the entire day, and helps me fuel my classes with my students as well..There can be no better way to get all the morning stuff done (kids' breakfast, packing their lunch, laundry loads and my stretching exercises)...

Hope to be able to listen to the tanis in the afternoon or evening ...I have to be driving to be able to listen carefully.

The thoughts presented here are based on my observations as a teacher of music, a mother of two girls who are learning music from me, and as a Carnatic musician living outside India.

Carnatic music is an art that is absorbed, learned and nourished by exposure to it.  Ear training is one of the most important requirements to have a head start in the learning process. It is not the only requirement, but one can be fairly confident in saying that without listening experience, there is absolutely no learning possible. The very nature of Carnatic music is such that it cannot be fully notated, it can only be learned, or even fully appreciated, only by ear training. Look at the background of any successful musician, and there is a factor of early exposure in every single case. There are exceptions where late exposure combined with a great deal of hard work has produced wonderful carnatic musicians but they are just a handful. Even in their cases, there may be other elements in early life where they have had experience with music in one form or the other.

Now, let us take a look at the actual music that the child gets exposed to.  In these times of  countless distractions, parents have to make a very big effort to make listening to music a part of their lives. It helps to have music on, whenever possible, around the house. Another big opportunity is when you can play music in the car.  I can be a very good listener when I am in the car. I am captive audience when I am driving, and so are my children. There are no distractions. In the US we spend a large number of hours driving from place to place and we can make use of that time to listen.

If the family already enjoys listening to Carnatic music, the child born into such a family will have early exposure. Some ways to get an early start is to play melodious carnatic tunes as lullabies, experiment with various kinds (vocal, instrumental,  carnatic-based bhajans) to find out what attracts the child the most. When the child is a little older and starts showing interest, he/she can be encouraged to identify ragas, play the beat along, making sure that these are enjoyable games and not exercises.

In many cases, children take naturally to Carnatic music without any effort from the adults around them. They simply enjoy it and ask for more. In some other cases, the taste is acquired over a period of time.

If you are very particular about  creating a “carnatic sensitivity” early on, you can even shield the child from listening to too many other types of music, even though some people will surely attack me for suggesting such an extreme measure..I personally think that listening to other “lighter”  forms of music  such as Indian movie songs, or Western pop (what I call “easy music”, with reference to the ease with which it can influence the listener to crave more, particularly a young child with no prior exposure to Carnatic) will take away from the speed with which the child gets adapted to Carnatic music. The initial appeal of “easy music” is very strong and quick, whereas the appeal of Carnatic music is deep and long lasting. If anyone desires to pursue other forms of music later on, it only becomes easier with a Carnatic music background. I have heard this from a number of musicians. Perhaps, the vocal and intellectual training that Carnatic music demands enhances the ability to diversify later on.

The quality of music listened also plays an important part in the training. This is a subjective aspect and I do not wish to elaborate on this.

There is no comparison to the listening experience one gets from attending live concerts. One can feel the energy, and experience the interaction the musicians on the stage are having with each other. I still vividly remember the numerous concerts I attended as a young  girl in Palakkad, and attending those concerts have had a tremendous  influence in molding  my ability to appreciate good Carnatic music. While many have easy access to many live concerts on a regular basis, some others have to travel long distances on just a handful occasions during the year to listen to live concerts. But those sacrifices are well worth the effort.

While learning a new raga, or while trying to explore deeper into a raga already known,  it helps to get a flavor of that raga from various sources (various artists, various compositions). With the availability of a wide choice of recordings in the market, on the internet and in private collections, the modern day students are fortunate to have access to enormous amounts of music, so much that a lifetime may not be enough to listen to and enjoy all that!

I must conclude by saying that as with any classical music, appreciation of Carnatic music develops with some initial effort. For a serious student, it is of utmost importance to keep regular listening times (live or recorded music). Once you get hooked, there is no turning back. Happy listening!

In a class that I am attending at Princeton University's music department, we listen to something new at the beginning of every lecture. Today no one could identify the composer of what we listened to. Several attempts at identifying the composer as Bach, Vivaldi, Haydn etc failed. It was composed by a computer! David Cope, an author, composer, scientist and professor at UC Santa Cruz writes programs and algorithms that can analyze existing music and create new compositions in the style of the original input music. Fascinating. My immediate thoughts were whether we could do anything like this with Carnatic music.

Can we feed a bunch of existing music in Todi into a computer, feed in some basic rules, and let it recombine the music to produce a new composition in Todi? David Cope did exactly that. The results were uninteresting and unsatisfying to him initially, but by repeated experiments he was able to let the computer effectively (not randomly) recombine the music in order to produce elegant Western classical music of very high quality. This needs extensive musical analysis and very careful recombination techniques.

I couldn't leave without wondering whether we could achieve something similar in Carnatic music, with the help of Artificial intelligence, just for fun!

As a  musician living far away from the land of concert opportunities, I find it very difficult to do meaningful  sadhakam or practice. Something I never did before is record myself while practicing, a very useful tool. I love my new iPhone and the ease of recording, listening, and sharing using it. While singing Darbar the other day, I  had the idea of recording a raga every week. With it, I would sing a relatively rare kriti if possible and share the result. So, i started with a short Darbar alapana followed by Halasyanatham, a kriti composed by Muthuswami Dikshitar on Lord Halasyanatha or Siva of Madurai.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yi4BGgrdxj0

With crisis after crisis in the home front, I don't think I will be able to sing this week or the next. So, instead of the "Raga a week" project, I am reposting one of my older articles that I wrote for mycarnatic.org. I have made some minor changes towards the end. I hope to see your comments and suggestions for this relevant topic at this time of the year.

From the beginning of the last century, Chennai has been considered the seat of Carnatic music. Musicians had to move to Chennai in order to advance their career and establish their presence. This influx of many musicians of very high calibre led to the creation of numerous sabhas or organizations that promoted music concerts. This created many ardent rasikas, which in turn led to further growth in the number of artists and sabhas.

Today, Carnatic music is global. There is growth in quality and quantity all over the world. There is increased interest among the youth, which is a great sign for the future of Carnatic music. Many states outside Tamilnadu, Such as Kerala, Andhra and Karnataka have top class musicians living there. There are serious and dedicated musicians in every continent now. They teach, perform and help the music grow wherever they are. Technology has enabled very efficient communication, and hence teaching, research, discussion, and learning through modern media. This has revolutionized the field of Carnatic music in the last ten years.

With these changes, I can't help thinking why it is truly necessary for a Carnatic musician to establish his or her presence in Chennai in order to advance in their careers or to gain recognition? One might say that if you want to be a star in Hollywood, you've got to move to LA, and there are no two ways about it. But something tells me that there is an inherent flaw in the current system of climbing up the concert ladder. Is there something that we can do to help today's talented but unknown musicians to gain access to this formidable system?

Here is my perception of how things work today. To gain an entry level slot to perform in Chennai, one has to have one or more of the following qualifications:

1) Live in Chennai and have access to sabha secretaries

2) Know the sabha secretary in person

3) Be recommended by a famous musician

4) Come from an influential family

Irrespective of the talent level, if one does not have the initial push from one of the above factors, one cannot even think of entering the system. Gaining entry alone is not sufficient. In order to prove your worth, you have to prove your merit repeatedly, for which many other factors come into play. You need one or more of the following in order to climb up, in addition to merit:

1) Make sure that you get slots year after year, which is not an easy process, since the number of participants is very high.

2) Ensure that you have accompanying artists of matching or higher merit.

3) Try to get better time slots every year so that your level in the system gets better.

4) Keep in constant touch with the sabha organizers, which is one of the most painful processes in building up one’s career.

5) Make sure you get noticed by newspaper reviewers. I am not sure of the basis upon which the reviewers select certain sabhas/artists to review. Getting consistently positive reviews by the same reviewer has worked wonders for some.

6) Get someone to do all of the above for you.

I would love to hear stories of successful artists who have come up without any of the above, getting noticed just by their sheer merit. I am not implying that there aren't any.

The very high volume of concerts packed into a single month renders it impossible for someone to notice a newcomer who is very highly qualified. There are three thousand concerts during the season alone, and attendance for most concerts is poor. It takes several years (five to ten) of patience and diligence to work through the process and get somewhere. This is probably eased to a certain extent by relocating to Chennai, which is not possible for all artists. This should also explain the fact that for each successful musician in Chennai today, there are several such talented musicians outside Chennai.

The other factor is the screening of merit. There is a pressing need for quality control and merit screening by sabhas to select the artists, to match them up with appropriate accompanying artists, and to assign the time slots. Some suggestions are:

1) Each sabha can come up with its own method of talent selection. Create a formal application process. The selection process must be transparent.

2) Applicants must be required to submit a recording of their performance, which must be screened by a qualified musician. Repeatedly assigning the same known musicians is the current format, which leads to hundreds of applications to be thrown in trash, without being given any consideration.

3) The sabha organizer/s must attend concerts. There are horror stories of musicians sitting in empty halls, ready to perform, and getting up at the end of their time slots without having presented a single item!

4) Have a method of getting feedback from audience and/or qualified musicians at the end of each concert, so that a decision can be made whether or not the artists can be promoted to a better time slot in the future.

5) Continue the screening process from scratch every year so that artists who were not selected earlier can improve, come back and get considered again.

6) Why not create an electronic medium (a "sabha app" ?) where upcoming musicians can post their work and this can be the uniform source of information for sabha secretaries for the selection process for various slots. With some of the newer "concert apps" that I have noticed this year, this process should not be so difficult to put in place by next ear.

7) Some musicians who have performed consistently well over the last five years are still waiting to gain entry into the higher slots, and are denied this, but some of the less experienced ones are getting ahead. This could also be eliminated by careful consideration of some uniform benchmarks.

If some methods of quality control are in place, the system would at least be fair, transparent, and accessible to the deserving artists and lead to further positive growth. There is still need for hard work, dedication and persistence, as in any art form, for anyone to be successful.

All this may sound idealistic, but if even some of the above steps are taken, Carnatic music is bound to benefit.