Adding seasoning to the Season

The Music Season is upon us. It arrives with metronomic regularity around mid-

November, works up a nice head of steam as it moves inexorably into December

and reaches its apogee towards the latter half of the month as the Kalyanis and

Bhairavis pour in torrents over Chennai’s music halls. As we ring in the new

year in January, music lovers experience a sense of anti-climactic desolation as

they head home feeling bereft. So, what else is new? To keep music lovers

cheerfully engaged, columnists are invited to think out of the box. And there’s

the rub, as Hamlet said.

Over the years, every possible subject under the sun concerning the Chennai

music season has been covered by assiduous scribes. Sabha canteens and their

lip-smacking menus have been done to death, not to mention the idiosyncratic

quirks and biases of music lovers, the predictable NRI wave swarming the

sabhas in their Chicago Bulls and Taylor Swift outfits, newbies on the music

scene, crystal ball gazing on future stars, hagiographic concert reviews that

deaden our senses while social media goes berserk with an overdose of video

clips and promos, buttressed by comments - crass, inane and anodyne. The

announcement in advance of the Sangita Kalanidhi awardee by the Music

Academy is reason enough to fill several columns with interviews, intimate

profiles and reactions from all and sundry. At times the awardee-elect can

generate a storm in a filter coffee tumbler and even the judiciary is approached

to weigh in with their wisdom!

I am, therefore, left scratching my head groping for stray, stream-of-

consciousness thoughts as they float into my brain, dredged up from my

hippocampus and cerebral cortex, known collectively as the memory bank. I am

also painfully reminded of French Nobel Laureate André Gide’s pithy

observation, ‘Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But since

no one was listening, everything must be said again.’ Not being of the same

cynical bent of mind as Monsieur Gide, I write in hopes that some of what I

have to say sounds fresh.

Take the drone, for instance. I am referring to the tambura, and not the intrusive,

high-tech spy drone we have become accustomed to at wedding receptions and

aerial shots in films. The tambura is a majestic instrument which only calls upon

a person to ceaselessly run his or her fingers over its four strings. As we all

know, it is tuned to the scale or sruti with which the main artist is aligned. The

vocalist may sometimes go off-scale (apaswaram) as the audience screws up its

eyes in pain, but that is not the fault of the instrument. Occasionally, during a

performance, the artist will peremptorily grab the tambura from its designated

player and make an elaborate fuss over ‘re-tuning’ it. Which is akin to shooting

the messenger. This could take up to five minutes of lost time, effectively

ruining the tempo of the concert. This has led to artists using all manner of

electronic, fail-proof gizmos (iTanpura, anyone?) that are rapidly replacing the

old-world, tall tamburas. They come in different shapes and sizes. Some are flat

and horizontal, others stunted, dwarf-like versions of the traditional, vertical

tambura. Some artists employ two tamburas which is appealing aurally and

optically. However, this can be problematic. It is challenging enough to tune one

tambura to the performer’s scale, two seems ostentatious and needlessly tilting

at windmills. Next time you see a Carnatic musician at the airport, wandering

around with a compact, faux leather-cased satchel slung over his shoulder, it is

not a laptop but a mini tambura he is carrying. A far cry from Tyagaraja’s

devotional tribute to his inseparable companion, cEkoni tambura from his

monumental Todi composition, Koluvamare gadA.

One issue that unfailingly gets my goat is the plethora of brand promotion stalls

that the sabhas contract for display at their corridors in an unattractive,

higgledy-piggledy fashion. To say nothing of the unsightly, fluttering

advertising banners festooned all around the compound walls. Expensive digital

messages are equally an eyesore. As a former advertising professional, I fully

appreciate that, in these straitened times, the additional revenue these corporate

houses generate to the music halls is not to be sneezed at. However, every time

one steps out of the hall to proceed to the canteen or to answer an urgent

nature’s call, one is accosted by wandering sales representatives pressing a

brochure to your face to interest you in an upcoming block of flats, a newly

launched mutual fund or a swank automotive brand offering a free test drive.

Your patience is tested to the limits as your bladder is sending alarm signals and

the tani avartanam could conclude any minute. Lest I offend the percussion

brigade, I hasten to add that I enjoy the brilliant rhythmic exchanges but needs

must and this forced break, especially for geriatrics, is almost a time-honoured

tradition. It is what it is. From there to the canteen is but a quick hop, step and

jump.

There you have it. My random perambulations on the Music Season have come

full circle. When (and if) I am invited again to contribute to this page, I should

find myself in the same quandary that Andre Gide so forcefully articulated. As a

more contemporary columnist Ian Jack wrote, ‘Most British papers now have

more columns than the Acropolis.’ It will be a challenge to find fresh things to

say about Chennai’s Music Season, but I hope to rise to it. Meanwhile, the

Ragam Tanam Pallavi awaits as I wend my way back to my seat.