Pathfinder of Carnatic Music
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ARIYAKUDI 125 Pathfinder of Carnatic music Alepey Venkatesan riyakudi Ramanuja Iyengar (19 May 1890 - 23 guru Manambuchavadi Venkatasubba Iyer was a disciple Jan 1967) was the doyen of Carnatic music and of Tyagaraja. the leading vocalist of the 20th century whose A Ramanathapuram Srinivasa Iyengar was often accompanied 125th birth anniversary was celebrated on 19 May 2015. He developed a unique style of his own; it represented by Tirukodikaval Krishna Iyer on the violin. Young a drastic, epoch-making departure from the prevailing Ramanujam playing the tambura at these concerts was concert in both form and content. The architect of the greatly attracted by Krishna Iyer’s style, which was one of modern concert format, he was a source of inspiration and the profound influences in shaping the Ariyakudi bani. Other a role model to great musicians after him. His concerts important influences were Veena Dhanammal, Malaikottai used to great advantage the skills of three generations of Govindaswamy Pillai, Sarabha Sastri and Sakharama the greatest accompanists. Rao among others. From Dhanammal he learnt not only padams and javalis, but the sense His music was a compendium of visranti and an awareness of of diverse but quintessential gamakas with which he tempered features of sound, tradition-based the racy style of Poochi Iyengar Carnatic music. These included to fashion the Ariyakudi style. a rich and choiceful repertoire Such close association with the of the compositions of a wide great masters of his time, helped array of composers, with central evolve a unique, distinct style of importance accorded in the his own, judiciously synthesising concert to the inspired creations of the aesthetic graces in the music of the Trinity; the central role of the his gurus and other inspiring role madhyama kala; the primacy of models. gamakas, the lifeblood of Carnatic music; an intelligent voice culture The concert scenario which kept the voice consistently In the early years of the 20th musical; facile modulations of the century, music sabhas and other voice (thick gliding seamlessly to institutions featuring Carnatic thin without making a laboured music concerts were few and point of it) facilitating blending far between. Carnatic music with the sruti without the shouting thrived mainly on the patronage effect, especially in the tara of the kings of the princely sthayi; the scrupulous avoidance SAMUDRI ARCHIVES States, notably Mysore and of all ugly and unseemly mannerisms; the importance of Travancore, as well as the zamindars of various finesse in enunciation with just the right amount of stress principalities of south India. Concerts were infrequent, so as to be intelligible but never so harsh as to degenerate audiences small and general level of awareness of nuances into speech and mar the musical continuity; the vital role low. The gurukula system was exploitative of disciples of laya, not as mere finger-counting arithmetic but as the and generally frowned upon youthful enthusiasm and very sheet anchor on which to mount the lilt and majesty aspirations as presumptuous and upstartish. Even at age 20, of the melodies; the knack of drawing the best out of the one was not considered concert material. accompanists, be they stalwarts or beginners; the antenna Such was the music scene that Ariyakudi took by storm in for assessing the expectations and absorption level of the the second decade of the 20th century. It is noteworthy that audience almost like a mind reader; and last but not the he started performing only in 1909. least, the hallmark of true mastery – the fine art of making the difficult seem deceptively simple. The pre-Ariyakudi format When Ariyakudi became a disciple of Ramanathapuram Typically, the concert lasted rarely less than four hours, “Poochi” Srinivasa Iyengar, he acquired the privilege of often stretching to 5 or 5-1/2 hours. Strangely, this format belonging to the sishya parampara of saint Tyagaraja. accommodated only a varnam, 4 or 5 kritis and a ragam- Poochi Iyengar’s guru was Patnam Subramania Iyer, whose tanam-pallavi. The reasons were twofold. In the first 27 l SRUTI June 2015 ARIYAKUDI 125 place, raga alapana, niraval and kalpana swara tended to such a request came, the concert time would automatically be lengthy, repetitive, sometimes boring and monotonous. get extended, enough to do justice to a small pallavi. Secondly, there were at least two percussion interludes, All these measures freed up a substantial chunk of time. He each taking up 30 to 45 minutes. Such was the concert utilised it in two ways. In the first place, he could present format which Ariyakudi revolutionised and transformed many more ragas and kritis in each concert than would have into the “modern concert format”, which has stood the test been feasible under the previous dispensation. Secondly, of time and is still going strong, with minor modifications he made the tail-end miscellany longer, far more varied and dictated by the march of time and changing lifestyles of interesting. the rasikas. The first and most obvious effect of his format was that Ariyakudi’s concert format there was no ennui in an Ariyakudi concert. With one The most challenging part of the task, which he executed stroke, he transformed desultory, bored, yawns into joyous with consummate skill, consisted in drastically reducing enthusiasm, keen interest and edge-of-the-seat anticipation. the length of raga alapanas. The raga essay had to be The listeners were delighted to be treated to a wide variety brief, but without leaving the rasika dissatisfied or with a of songs of different composers in many more ragas than sense of incompleteness. Ariyakudi was the very man for had been in vogue in concerts. It also helped that he sang in this mission; for, he had both the fecundity of ideas and Sanskrit and in all the south Indian languages as well as a the fluency of voice to take us through a major raga like few bhajans in Hindi and Gujarati. Sankarabharanam or Todi in a matter of four minutes, Secondly, he brought a striking novelty, variety and and amazingly, give the listener a sense of wholesome popular appeal to the post-pallavi miscellany segment of experience of the raga. the concert. His famed concerts at Gokhale Hall, Madras in Having done that, he successfully prevailed upon the 1920s and 1930s used to start at 4.15 pm on Sundays. his violinists never to exceed his own duration of At 8 pm, he would launch the miscellaneous fare, by which raga alapana, even if the violinist happened to be a senior time the hall was overflowing with college students, ready artist like Malaikottai Govindaswamy Pillai. Too, he did not to raucously shout for an encore on every item. He used countenance the persussionists hogging a disproportionate to present javalis, Tiruppavai, Tiruvembavai, Tiruppugazh, part of the concert time. He quietly asserted the Arunachala Kavi’s Rama Natakam, (he was the tunesmith primacy of the singer and his prerogative as to time for most of these), nationalist/patriotic songs inspired by management for the success of the concert. His charisma the Freedom Movement in different languages. The young and leadership were such that even senior accompanists men who came in droves to listen to this light fare later came had to fall in line. to the earlier part of his concerts and learnt to appreciate his ragas, kritis, niraval, swaras and even ragam-tanam-pallavi. When he reduced the length of the alapana, his innate sense In this manner, Ariyakudi educated at least two generations of proportion led him to suitably prune the time spent on of music lovers, by gradually raising their awareness and niraval and kalpana swara. For example, if he sang a raga levels of appreciation. for 3 minutes and the violinist would play for 2- ½ minutes, the kriti was rendered in 4 minutes, he would sing kalpana But the most significant consequence of the concert format swara for no more than about 4 minutes. If niraval was Ariyakudi created and perfected was this. But for such a sung, that might take another 4 minutes or so. Contrast this format which accommodated several songs even in a 2-1/2 with what we often find even in 2-1/2 hour concerts. The hour concert, many great and precious compositions of the musician goes on with a single suite (raga, kriti, niraval Trinity and other great vaggeyakaras might have gone out and swaras) for almost an hour, and as a result, is forced of currency and been lost to us. to make short shrift of the ragam-tanam-pallavi in under Salient features of his music 15 minutes. Such intelligent apportionment of concert time as he practised is more relevant today, since the concert Ariyakudi was a past master of gamakas. Even so, he duration has shrunk to less than half. rightly rejected the notion that gamaka richness implies indiscriminate oscillation of every note to the point of Though he sang many scholarly, complicated pallavis, he distortion. He recognised that certain ragas, if deprived of also composed an array of short, entertaining pallavis, to the plain note or two required for their sustenance, sound be deployed according to the time available for the pallavi withered. Aesthetic discrimination was the keynote of his in a particular concert. This usually happened in concerts artistry. in which he had not planned to sing a pallavi but a belated request cropped up. As a policy, he would not turn down Even as the bowing/blowing/fingering technique rasika’s requests, even if the timing was not too good. Once determines the character of instrumental music, 28 l SRUTI June 2015 ARIYAKUDI 125 pronunciation determines the character of vocal music.