The Sound of Carnatic Music: Tradition, Controversy and Meaning

Sound – of music? of fury? of sense?  

All of a sudden, there was a lot of flutter around the sound of Carnatic music during the recently concluded season. T.M. Krishna, at his concert at the Music Academy, announced that his concert would consist solely of Muthuswami Dikshitar’s compositions to mark the 250^th year of the great composer. This was received with thunderous applause. He then quickly clarified: “It is not just about the composer or his works.  It is the sound of the period that we want to explore.”

The audience was intrigued. Why was the word ‘sound’ used in this context? Why would a Carnatic musician be preoccupied with sound? Was it to veer away from the word naadam which might bear on bhakti (Naada thanu manisam Sankaram…) which, according to Krishna and perhaps some others, need not embody Carnatic music?  In any event, it is unclear what was intended.

A mental picture of a perplexed Muthuswami Dikshitar arises. “Has all my life’s work, the gamut of compositions, explorations of ragas, my scholarship and knowledge of its associate disciplines and, above all, my deep-seated bhakti, with which I saw and communed with the Brahman in all deities and all temples, been reduced to mere ‘sound’? And how would anyone be able to hear or recreate this intangible sound after
two-and-a-half centuries?”

The puzzlement around the reference to sound deepened when vidwan Arun Prakash felicitated his colleague
and Sangita Kalanidhi designate
R.K. Shriramkumar (both longtime friends and frequent accompanists to T.M. Krishna over the years) at the annual Sadas of the Music Academy. He said of him: “The amount of knowledge that he has in Carnatic sound, in my opinion, nobody else has.”

A subsequent discussion with Arun Prakash solved the mystery and threw light on the context in which the word ‘sound’ was used. He had used it some years earlier, in order to allude to the classicism of Carnatic music. It was a term borrowed from Western music, where the sounding of instruments and voices are scrutinised and modified to enhance harmony. He had discussed the concept over the years with his musical colleagues to formulate what constituted the authentic Carnatic timbre or tone. So, happily, they were all on the same page when it came to the ‘sound’ of Carnatic music.

Still, perhaps poor Dikshitar need not have been reduced to mere sound.

There is an interesting story by Thi. Janakiraman about a tambura maker, which distinguishes the poetic from the prose in a common workaday conversation. A tambura is complete
in all respects, polished, strung and tuned. Enter an old, experienced craftsman. He plays the strings, bringing the instrument to life. He then ties a string to the top, holds it a few inches above the ground and drops it vertically on the hard floor. The onlooker’s heart misses a beat. The old man strums the strings again. This time, the resonance and depth are magical, filling the room. He explains that the drop would cause minute cracks inside the round, hollow bottom of the tambura, enhancing the quality of resonance.

An urchin observing this exclaims, “Bollunu pooththu varudhe sattham!” (“The sound swells out like a spray of flowers.”) The expert raps his head, “You started poetically and ended prosaic, with sattham (sound). Call it naadam.”

Sound sense?

(The author is a writer, musician and dance scholar)