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Sruti 400
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VISWA KALA SANGAMA FESTIVEL
19thAnniversary Music Festival
SWAMI HARIDAS SANGEET SAMAROH-2017
On Saturday the 20th January 2018
At 6.00 pm
Viswa Kala Puraskar 2017 to
1. Dr.Tadepalli Lokanadha Sharma (Carnatic)
2. Pt. Dr. Nagaraj Rao Havaldar (Hindustani)
At 6.30 pm
(dedicated to Padma Vibhushan Smt Kishori Amonkar)
Pt. Dr. Nagaraj Rao Havaldar - Vocal
(Disciple of Pt. Madhava Gudi)
Sri. Omkarnath Havaldar - Vocal
Sri.Sameer Havaldar - Harmonium
Sri. Kedarnath Havaldar - Tabla
On Sunday the 21th January 2018
At 9.30 am
(dedicated to Padma Vibhushan Dr.M.Balamurali krishna)
Sri.Ragavan Manian - Hindustani Flute
Disciple of Dr.M. Balamurali Krishna
Pt.Chandru - Tabla
Disciple of Dr.M. Balamurali Krishna
Pt.Chandru - Tabla
At 10.30 am
Sri.Samarth Nagarkar - Vocal
Disciple of Pandit Ulhas Kashalkar
and Pandit Dinkar Kaikini.
and Pandit Dinkar Kaikini.
Sri.Sameer Havaldar - Harmonium
Sri. Kedarnath Havaldar - Tabla
Sri Krishna Gana Sabha Mini Hall
T.Nagar, Chennai – 600017.
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Kumbakonam Bhanumathi
Birthdays & Anniversaries
To read full story, visit sruti.com and buy Sruti 99-100
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| 29.12.1922 - 2.9.2006 |
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SRUTI PATTABHI RAMAN MEMORIAL CONCERTS
31 DECEMBER 2017
AT SASTRI HALL, LUZ, CHENNAI 4
Bhaskar Ramamurthi, Director - IIT Madras, welcomes the guests
4.30 pm: Aditya Prakash (vocal)
Nishanth Chandran (violin)
R Sankaranarayanan (mridangam)
6.30 pm: V Navaneet Krishnan (vocal)
VV Ravi (violin)
Trichur Narendran (mridangam)
Papanasam Sethuraman (khanjira)
Co-presented by Chennai Fine Arts and the N Pattabhi Raman family
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Pudukkottai Dakshinamurthy Pillai
Birthdays & Anniversaries
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| 30.12.1875 |
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Mohan Khokar
Birthdays & Anniversaries
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| Add caption |
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Mallikarjun Mansur
Birthdays & Anniversaries
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| 31.12.1910 - 12.09.1992 |
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Rhadha
Birthdays & Anniversaries
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A. Kanyakumari
Birthdays & Anniversaries
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T Chowdiah
Birthdays & Anniversaries
Only a few Carnatic musicians have managed to have a long, consistent and glamorous record of stardom. Mysore T. Chowdiah (1894- 1967) was one of them. A violinist of top rank, he had a glowing career spanning five decades and he commanded the respect of the lay public, the connoisseurs and his peers in the performing arts. It was a ride on a rainbow.
A contemporary of such other violin greats as Dwaram Venkataswamy Naidu and Kumbakonam Rajamanickam Pillai, Chowdiah assumed many roles in the music world. Besides being a concert artist, he was an innovator, a teacher, an organiser, a composer and a thespian—he donned grease paint and acted in a movie titled VanL But his role par excellence rested squarely on his incomparable skills in providing violin accompaniment. He not only embellished the music of his principal, but himself played delightful music when his turn came, according to Chembai Vaidyanatha Bhagavatar. With him as sideman, there was never a dull moment. He induced and stimulated the main artist's creativity and played a significant part in the overall success of the concert. To every concert he took part in, he brought his vast experience and always served a sumptuous fare. He zealously guarded him as accompanist could not fail.
To read full story, visit sruti.com and buy Sruti 30
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S.N. Ratanjankar
Birthdays & Anniversaries
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Balakrushna Dash
Birthdays & Anniversaries
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| 2.1.1928 - 12.11.1993 |
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Radha Mami
A sishya's tribute
By V Navaneet Krishnan
It is with a heavy heart that I bid adieu to the mortal coils of my guru Smt. Radha Viswanathan. She led an exemplary life, filled with music of the highest standards and wonderful associations with giants from all walks of life. She was one of the most warm and affectionate people I have ever come to know. She was always very concerned about the well-being of all her disciples. After every class, without a fail she will ask me to have lunch and only then leave. On special occasions she would ask her cook to prepare special sweets just for me, and if I happened to miss going to her place, she would call and insist that I come over. She was an affectionate and generous guru; she taught me several rare compositions without even a hint of hesitation. Even though I was not ready to assimilate some of the more complicated compositions back then, she would patiently teach me, ensuring that I understood the nuances. She was the first person to suggest that I join Smt. Padma Narayanaswamy as a disciple, seeing how passionate I was about the KVN style.
Mami, you have enriched my life through my association with you. I will cherish our special bond for eternity! My shaashtaanga pranams at your feet! My deepest, most heart-felt condolences to Shrinivasan Ceinu anna, Aishwarya and the rest of the family.
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G. N. Balasubramaniam
Birthdays & Anniversaries
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| 6.1.1910-1965 |
He was among the most imitated vocalists in Carnatic music. Not only did some of his students start out, understandably, as carbon copies, many young musicians to this day try to mimic his inimitable style. India’s midnight’s children and younger citizens are unfortunately too young to have heard him live extensively, but some retain a few vivid images from childhood, and remember being exhilarated by his wonderful voice. Much of what we present here of Gudalur Narayanaswami Balasubramaniam, we owe Sruti’s articles and the GNB workshop, a brilliantly original effort in late 1992. Lalitha Ram, a die-hard fan and biographer of GNB, and a commemorative volume being brought out by the GNB family (with important contributions from several musicians, critics and rasika-s) have been other valuable sources.
Born to G.V. Narayanaswami Iyer and Visalakshi on 6 January 1910, Balasubramaniam, called Mani at home, studied at the Hindu High School, Triplicane, Madras, Madras Christian College (where he completed his B.A. Honours in English), and briefly at Annamalai University. (A detailed biography is being serialised in Sruti, this issue carrying the fourth instalment of the story). GNB was eager to pursue a career in music, while his schoolmaster and music enthusiast father wanted him to take up a proper job. Mani had a natural flair for music and did not undergo rigorous gurukulavasam, though he did have lessons from Madurai Subramania Iyer and Karur Chinnaswami Iyer. Both his parents were musically talented and had many opportunities of listening to giants like Fiddle Tirukkodikaval Krishna Iyer, Flute Sarabha Sastri, Nagaswaram Tirumarugal Natesa Pillai and Harikatha expert Tiruppayanam Panchapakesa Sastrigal. When GVN, as Narayanaswami Iyer was often called, became a maths teacher at the Hindu High School, and became involved in the Sri Parthasarathi Swami Sabha, he came into close contact with great musicians. GNB recalled in a 1967 article, “Violinist Karur Chinnaswami Iyer lived next door to us in Triplicane. I lived in an atmosphere drenched in music and this helped me to nurture, develop and sustain my ardour for music.” His kelvi gnanam was sharp and inspired, enabling him to learn the more advanced aspects of music without the help of a guru. In his own words, “Without so much as any basic training, I acquired swara gnana which I humbly feel was due to the benediction of elders and savants. Whenever I listened to good music, I had an inner feeling that I could visualise it in the imagery of swara-s. What my ears would be hearing would be picturised in my mind’s eye in swara forms.”
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Ajoy Chakrabarty
Birthdays & Anniversaries
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| 7.1.1953 |
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Vijay Tendulkar
Birthdays & Anniversaries
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| 7.1.1928 - 19.5.2008 |
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Kelucharan Mohapatra
Birthdays & Anniversaries
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| 8.1.1926 - 7.4.2004 |
Guru Kelucharan Mohapatra to think of Odissi without the one who has been its guiding light for the last half a century and more, is like thinking of Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark. The life of the boy from Raghurajpur village in Puri v district, born to a humble Patachitra painter Chintamani Mohapatra and his wife Siri Nani, growing up to straddle the world of Odissi like a colossus, reads like a fairy story. Not born to any traditional dance family, Kelucharan did not aspire to gurudom. The mantle fell on him as an earned right with his immeasurable contribution to Odissi.
The turning point in Odissi history came in 1945 when Pankaj Charan Das engaged as the dance teacher by Annapurna B Theatre Group, came into contact with the young Kelucharan Mohapatra, hired as a percussionist by the same theatre group on a monthly salary of fifteen rupees. In an attempt to lure larger audiences, a dance sequence, Mohini Bhasmasura, was choreographed by Guru Pankaj Charan for the play Benami, with the guru himself in the role of the demon, young Laxmipriya the actress who was later on to become the wife of Guru Kelucharan Mohapatra as Mohini and Kelucharan as Siva. This landmark event was to burgeon into an entire movement ushering in a whole new superstructure of Odissi erected on the very scanty remains of what had survived history, involving all the main players in the field like Pankaj Charan Das, Debaprasad Das, Raghunath Dutta, Mayadhar Raut, Kelucharan Mohapatra and Dhiren Patnaik.
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Chennai Fine Arts Award
Gotuvadyam Narayana Iyengar Award presented to Shri. VV Subramanyam and the winners of the mangala isai music competition who received prizes on the inaugural day of the Chennai Fine Arts Annual Music Festival.
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Amir Khan and the South II
By Thomas W. Ross
Grape, banana, and coconut
Because the goddess Saraswatī holds both the book and the vīṇā, we are encouraged to summon both mind and heart in the pursuit of any
learning.
This apparent contradiction has guises such as left brain/right brain, Apollo/Dionysus, and many more. It’s handy for sketches of the familiar: Herbie Hancock/Wynton Kelly, Béla Bartók/Aaron Copland, or Steely Dan/Justin Bieber.
But Indians seem to acknowledge a middle ground between these extremes: the triumvirate of South Indian composers, Tyāgarāja (1767–1847), Śyāma Śāstri (1762–1827), and Muttusvāmi Dīkṣitar (1775–1835), are likened to the grape, banana, and coconut. The first you pop in your mouth immediately. The second has to be peeled. And the third has a shell protecting its alabaster treasure.
The three are vaggeyakaras, ill-translated as composers: the term implies an equal mastery of book and vīṇā, of words and music. Dīkṣitar, for one, came from an illustrious line of musician-scholars whose formidable pieces betray a poet’s knowledge of Sanskrit.
Viswa told me that he first learned Dīkṣitar’s highbrow, gnarly, big-design coconut pieces, to the neglect of the other two composer-saints. Such august fare earned his early performances the gossip of being one-sided, so he added Tyāgarāja (the ultimate bhakti popularizer) and Śyāma Śāstri (a middle-ground) pieces as an appeasement. Same with swara kalpana, improvised solfege: they joined his concerts as a nod to mainstream Karnatak orthodoxy.
Dīkṣitar’s semi-legendary life has striking parallels to the eclectic and sombre Amir Khan’s. The vīṇā -playing devotee of Siva visited tirthsthans (pilgrimage sites) all over India, including a stint in Banaras. His interaction with the glacial-tempoed dhrupad singers and bīnkars of that music-drenched town (when indeed the Hindustani and the Karnatak weren’t so far apart as today) seem to me likely to have had a profound effect on his compositions.
The Word and the Lute, the Sword and the Flute. Amir Khan was an alert and thoughtful gatherer of influences that he came to call the Indore gharānā or school. A common cultural memory of Mughal/Rajput, worldly and ascetic, resonated between the disparate worlds of a Muslim animus in the North and a Hindu anima of the South. Khansahab admittedly could be downright ponderous in the slowest of his Jhumra (14-beat) renditions. I’m not the first to nod off with him occasionally. But his rāgas were leavened later in a performance by astonishing flights of tān melismas, even while retaining their bhava or particular flavor.
The Balasaraswati family style also championed the leisurely and architectonic together with the sensual and the pyrotechnic, both by their renderings of the Dīkṣitar repertoire and in the sultry seriousness of the padams with which Bala ended her concerts. This musician’s musician’s milieu was Amir Khan’s during his visits, where the admiration went both ways. It’s a good guess that the impossibly slow tempi of his opening khayāls were encouraged, if not by direct influence, by a common taste for gravity.
In the Balasaraswati style, here’s Muktamma’s version of Dīkṣitar’s devastatingly gorgeous Vina pustaka dharini (we were taught it in Jhampa tāla, a slow 10 beats, 7 + 3). Like Ahīr Bhairav in the North, the rāga Vegavahini (also called Chakravakam) is 1 ��2 3 4 5 6 ��7.
Borrowed and stolen
Amateurs borrow, professionals steal. (Variously attributed)
Two Dīkṣitar pieces have recently been given amateur or professional treatments by the North, I’m thinking: Vatapi Ganapatim and Anandamritavarshini. From the latter, I hope to shed light on a mystery rāga by Amir Khan, sometimes called Amirkhani.
I was taught Vatapi, the closest to a potboiler that Dīkṣitar ever wrote, by S. Ramanathan at Wesleyan in 1963. The kṛiti, in the sunny rāga Hamsadhvani, is the icing on a serious composerly cake, albeit well-wrought:
Later I learned its Northern offshoot in the same rāga, starting with the words Lagi lagana. The little khayāl appropriates, as it were, the first two lines of a famous poem (and no more) without acknowledging it’s by someone called Robert Frost. This in turn has recently spawned its own grotesquerie in an army of high school-level sitārists fronted by dark-skinned ringers from the South:
Amir Khan’s quick khayāls in Hamsadhvani retain some of the rāga’s lightheartedness. Its smile is wider than a major scale. In this rendition, he keeps Lagi lagana’s basic melody but abandons the brief Brjbhasha text, transforming Dīkṣitar’s saṅgati variations into a brisk drum-syllable tarānā:
But what of this mystery rāga? One of the last recordings Khansahab made, at a Calcutta gathering, featured an unknown rāga that he treated with his characteristic introspection. It combines the optimism of the kalyan family with a lowered 7th degree: 1 3 #4 5 ��7. Any effort so far to parse it points South, either as an arcane offshoot of the Vachaspati family or, I’m guessing, as an ingenious twist on the rāga to Dīkṣitar’s most famous and accessible tune, Anandamritavarshini. It differs from the mystery rāga only in its 7th degree, and given the preference in Bala’s household for Dīkṣitar’s music, I think Khansahab lowered the 7th degree of Amritavarshini for what’s now called Amirkhani:
Although we must be thankful for all of Khansahab’s contributions, this last caps a career which included an openness to anything musical transpiring in the Madras home of his hosts, the Balasaraswati family.
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Darshana Jhaveri
Birthdays & Anniversaries
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| 9.1.1939 |
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