Section Synopsis (JULY 2007)

NEWS & NOTES

SIFA’s Spring Music Festival - K.S. SRINIVASAN

The Bay Area celebrated the annual Spring Music and Dance Festival on 21st and 22nd April in San Jose, California, U.S.A., under the auspices of South India Fine Arts (SIFA). The festival followed on the heels of the Cleveland Tyagaraja Aradhana. The sponsors, patrons and ardent fans of Carnatic music were treated to a variety of music concerts including a violin duet by vidwan M. Chandrasekharan and Bharathi Gopal, and Bharatanatyam by Chitra Visweswaran. The event attracted rasika-s from as far as Sacramento, CA, which is located about 150 miles from San Jose.

The festival started with a vocal recital by H.V. Srivatsan, the Bay Area’s senior vocal artist and disciple of violin vidwan Anoor Ramakrishna (Bangalore) and Palakkad K.V. Narayanaswamy. He was accompanied by Nishanth Chandran (disciple of A. Kanya­kumari) on the violin and the Bay Area’s well known mridanga vidwan Narayanan. Srivatsan took the opportunity to present a variety of compositions — from Tyagaraja to Patnam Subramania Iyer.

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Sunday means many things to many people but, for Bharatiya Sangeeta Vaibhavam (BSV), “an organisation for promotion, preservation and propa­gation of Carnatic music”, Sunday the 8th of April, was a day to pay homage to the great Carnatic composer Muthuswami Dikshitar.

A twelve-hour ‘akhandam’ was organised from 9 am to 9 pm, in which a number of renowned musicians presented many Dikshitar kriti-s, some of which were rare. The packed audience at the Kasturi Srinivasan Hall of the Music Academy, Chennai, was most appreciative, enjoying the richness of the kriti-s.

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Ganesa Natyalaya and the Central Sangeet Natak Akademi jointly organised a meeting in New Delhi on 8th April to pay tribute to some eminent personalities in the field of performing arts who passed away recently. References were made to the contribution of Subbudu (critic), Padmanabhan Nair (Kathakali guru), Narmadha and Kubernath Tanjorekar (Bharata­natyam guru-s), T. Muktha and Tiruvengadu Jayaraman (Carnatic musicians), all of them SNA awardees, and also to R. Yagnaraman (sabhanayaka).

At the outset, Jayant Kastuar, Secretary, SNA, made a general reference to the calibre and services of those mentioned above and recalled his personal and close interaction with some of them like Padmanabhan Nair.

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Just to look at the chairs, neatly set out, row upon row, makes you feel good, a reassuring intimation of orderliness, before the big show. Aruna Sayeeram is going to sing. As she moves up to the stage, the place is already packed solid, with more people trooping in to fill up the peripheral nooks and corners. They listen in rapt silence as she launches into the concert, singing to them, at them.

Obviously, they like what they hear and the applause is generous. But, hey! Is it all a mite too good to be true? Would it have been the same before a meagre audience, lean and hungry and demanding? In the early twentieth century, Reinhold Niebuhr wrote a book about the qualitative difference between individual and crowd behaviour. Nehru read it in prison and refers to it in his autobiography. But let that digression pass. The listening crowd here is well-dressed, orderly, certainly not a mob. It is the big, emerging, middle-class of India on its best behaviour. Our sort of people.

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COVER STORY

-G. DWARAKANATH


There are a number of kriti-s in which Tyagaraja directly or indirectly explains many facets of music. Semmangudi Srinivasa Iyer once described Tyagaraja’s Sankarabharanam raga kriti, Swara raga sudharasa, as a super-potent multivitamin capsule for musicians. From this kriti we can learn what is good music and bad, what are the secrets of great music, how mishandling can spoil or even destroy good music, the innate beauty of music, how to fuse rhythm, sahitya and raga and so on. The more we learn from this kriti, the more seems to remain to be learnt. The song runs as follows.

Pallavi
Swara raaga sudhaarasayuta bhakti swargaapavargamuraa, O manasaa!

Anupallavi
Paramaanandamane kamalamupai bakabhekamu chelagiyemi? O manasaa!

Charanam
Moolaadhaaraja naadamerugute mudamagu mokshamuraa,

Kolaaahala saptaswara grihamula gurutey mokshamuraa,

O manasaa!

Bahujanmamulaku paini gnaaniyai baraguta mokshamuraa,

Sahaja bhaktito raagagnaana sahitudu muktuduraa,

O manasaa!

Maddala taala gatulu teliyakaney marddinchuta sukhamaa?

Suddha manasu leka pooja jeyuta sookara vrittira!

O manasaa!

Rajata gireesudu Nagajaku delpu Swaraarnava marmamulu

Vijayamugala Tyaagaraajuderugey Viswasinchi delusuko!

O manasaa!

The pallavi explains how we can produce ‘sudha rasa’ and how that leads to God experience. The anupallavi explains how bad music can destroy good and great music.

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Brinda and Muktha had a thousand songs in their repertoire. The popular and the rare kriti-s of Tyagaraja and Dikshitar, the gems of Syama Sastry and Subbaraya Sastri, Anai-Ayya, Gopalakrishna Bharati, Arunachala Kavi, Subbarama Dikshitar, Ponnayya Pillai, Kshetrayya, Mysore Sadasiva Rao, Subbarama Dikshitar, besides innumerable javali-s were all in their possession.

Karubaru, a grand Tyagaraja song in Mukhari was their favourite. Today this song has become famous. Similarly Elavataramu in the same raga was a grand edifice of pure and deep melody. So was Sangeeta sastra gnanamu, again in Mukhari. In Todi, they knew many Tyagaraja songs including Tappi bratiki, Kotinadulu, Emi jesitenemi, Enduku dayaradura, Endu daginado, Kadatera rada, Munnu ravana, and Proddu poyenu. Manasu swadheenamai and Emi neramu in Sankarabharanam, Mundu venuka in Darbar, Nee bhajana gana in Nayaki, Seetavara sangeeta gnanamu in Devagandhari, Mummurtulu and E papamu in Athana were some of the other major pieces of Tyagaraja that received excellent treatment by Brinda-Muktha.

Most of the above mentioned pieces were sung by them in vilamba kala, the slow tempo. The kriti-s sounded so different, so ravishing, that it gave the lie to the theory that Tyagaraja kriti-s were all in madhyama kala. They had a number of short, delightful Tyagaraja compositions in rare raga-s in their repertoire. Tolinenu jesina in Kokiladhwani, Tanameedane in Bhooshavali, Vinave O manasa and Manasa manasaamarthyamemi in Vivardhini and Varasikhi vahana in Supradeepam are some of them. Muktha had the habit of singing these short pieces to put her daughter, nephews and nieces to sleep.

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If the English alphabet were to be taught to children with words in Carnatic music, H would always stand for Harikesanallur.

Muthiah Bhgavatar put Harikesa-nallur on the map and yet, if there is a place where he is least remembered it must be his hometown. Papanasam Sivan visited Harikesanallur in 1912 in the company of Konerirajapuram Vaidyanatha Iyer. This description of the town is from his reminiscences published as Enathu Ninaivu-k-Kadal, written in 1968..

My memories of attending the skanda shashti festival organised by Muthiah Bhagavatar at Harikesa-nallur are fresh and clear despite 55 years having gone by. Two carri-ages had been reserved from Tiruchi junction and we arrived the day before the event. Like us, the vidwans, bhagavatar-s and rasika-s had come from many places. Muthiah Bhagavatar had no enemy in the arts. There was consequently no politics and it was not surprising to see musicians from all over south India. It appeared as though the entire village had donned its best by way of hospitality and we were received with love and warmth. Accommodation had been arranged in various houses.

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On February 28 this year, we lost Dr. Prof. Sumati Mutatkar (10-9-1916 to 28-2-2007), the terminal light of the galaxy of eminent music scholars in Hindustani music. She was an authentic musicologist, and a competent artist well versed in almost every genre of classical Hindustani vocal music, She served for long as a distinguished teacher, and as supervisor of multiform researches in the art of music at the University of Delhi.

Sumati Mutatkar was liked as much by musicians in general as by colleagues and students. Her own academic growth, scholarly contribu­tion, and her efforts to make our music better known in foreign lands, merit recalling in detail.



R. Yagnaraman MANNA SRINIVASAN

When the 21st century dawned many of the epoch-makers who had distinguished themselves in their chosen vocations during the last century, and were in their eighties and nineties, were still with us; we could meet and talk to them.

Suddenly there has been a marked change in the situation, over the past couple of months. In quick succession, many stalwarts have departed, making us feel the passing of an era.





P.V. Subramaniam ‘Subbudu’ MANNA SRINIVASAN
P.V. Subramaniam, popularly known as Subbudu, one of the most colourful personalities in the field of music and dance criticism in the twentieth century, passed away on the evening of 29th March 2007 at his residence in Delhi. He had completed 90 years just two days earlier.

With a penchant for paan and pun, Subbudu was piercingly precise with his vitriolic pen, spicing the criticism with pungent comments as strong as the tobacco in his paan. He was a pioneer of sorts, establishing a new, exciting style of review writing, going much beyond the usual reporting style of listing the items in a concert. He often referred to the advice of his mentor, ‘Kalki’ Krishnamurthy, that “the review should be remembered and talked about more than the performance itself”. He believed in the power of the media and would often point out that the number of people reading the review was always much larger than those listening to the programme or witnessing the dance.



The Subbudu story

Sometime in the mid-nineties, Sruti arranged for B.M. SUNDARAM to interview Subbudu when he came to Chennai. Unfortunately this was filed away and lost sight of. After the official biography of Subbudu by Guruden Lada Singh was published, this interview was brought to light, but its publication was again delayed. Sruti is deeply regretful that it was not possible to publish it during Subbudu’s lifetime. We are now publishing it along with Manna Srinivasan’s article, as a tribute to Subbudu. The remarks in the interview bring out Subbudu as he was — aggressive and hard hitting. Modesty obviously did not rank high in Subbudu’s list of virtues.

We belong to the lineage of the Puri Sankaracharya. My father Padi Venkatarama Iyer of Kancheepuram (headquarters of the Sankaracharya Math) was a rasika and friend of Naina Pillai. In fact, it was on the recommendation of Naina Pillai that my father got a job as a clerk in the local Taluk office. As my maternal grandfather was a Tahsildar in a Telugu district of the then Madras Province, my mother acquired a fair knowledge of Telugu and could sing the compositions of Bhadrachala Ramadasa

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