When Baluswami Dikshitar (1786-1858), disciple and younger brother of the saint-composer Muttuswami Dikshitar, adapted the western violin as an instrument in Carnatic music, he did something epoch making, something that would today be termed as a game-changer. Vadivelu, a member of the famed Tanjore Quartet of musicians, also played a major part in popularising the instrument in south India.
The violin has since then been integral to Carnatic music concerts as an accompaniment to vocal (and other instrumental) music for well nigh a century. Some of south India’s violinists have earned the approval and admiration of leading western musicians and critics, Yehudi Menuhin, one of the most celebrated of them, going so far as to rate a couple of them the greatest violinists in the world. From the 1950s to the 1970s, some of them, especially Lalgudi Jayaraman, TN Krishnan and MS Gopalakrishnan were superstars on a par with the great vocalists of the time. The violin is no longer even considered a foreign instrument. There were brief instances of the viola being employed in south Indian classical music, for instance by the versatile prodigy turned maestro M Balamuralikrishna, but it has now vanished from the scene.
Essentially a western music ensemble, the Madras String Quartet led by violinists VS Narasimhan has recently become a force to reckon with in the way it renders the great Carnatic music compositions in its own style, without the percussion support common to Indian music.
Some other instruments like the clarionet (obviously part of English bands), mandolin and harmonium soon became part of Indian music ensembles, though not necessarily classical music. Out of these, the clarionet became a kind of imitation of the nagaswaram, the pipe that is an essential component of temple music, towards the mid-20th century and there have been great clarionet players, one of them, AKC Natarajan, actually earning the highest title of Sangita Kalanidhi in Carnatic music. Greater success has been achieved by another wind instrument common to jazz and rock — the saxophone. The first musician to turn the sax into a powerful Carnatic instrument was Kadri Gopalnath, now a cult figure in the field, especially after the success of Duet, a Tamil film featuring a saxophonist and his vocalist friend. Today more south Indian musicians are taking to the saxophone.
The mandolin did not become a Carnatic music concert instrument until the advent of U Shrinivas who took the world of music by storm in the late 1970s when barely 11 years old. He has exploited the potential of this hardly audible instrument magnificently, creating many followers after him. The number of mandolin players on the Carnatic music stage is steadily growing now.
Sukumar Prasad in the 1980s and Prasanna, still going strong, have been guitarists to introduce their instrument to Carnatic music. Coincidentally, both are alumni of IIT Madras, and both have been brilliant musicians. Prasanna went to study jazz composition at Berklee College of Music, Boston, and is now known internationally in fusion and world music circles.
In a sort of reverse musical migration, Indian instrumentalists have frequently figured in fusion concerts and albums in the West, starting from the late Ravi Shankar, posthumously awarded a lifetime Grammy, his daughter Anoushka Shankar, Zakir Husain, L Shankar and L Subramanian, Grammy winners Vikku Vinayakram (with his humble claypot, the ghatam) and Viswa Mohan Bhatt, Prasanna and a number of others.
Playing the piano, with its discrete notes, totally unsuited to Carnatic music with its accent on gamaka or ornamental grace notes, has still been attempted by some Carnatic musicians, notably Sister Linnet Antony of Kerala, a performing musician. Anil Srinivasan, trained in Western classical music, has made several successful forays into experimentation with traditional Carnatic musicians, both vocal and instrumental.
With tremendous interchanges taking between Indian and Western musicians and the power of technology and the Internet, the day may not be far off when new Western instruments are added to the Carnatic music repertoire. In the long run, however, only the fittest will survive.
By V Ramnarayan
A Carnatic music concertCarnatic music is the classical or art music of south India. Originating as temple music and nurtured by royal patronage, today Carnatic music is performed on the secular stage. All the songs are based on ragas or individual expansions of the seven notes sa to ni analogous to do to te in Western music and microtones in between totalling 12, each raga characterised by specific melodic norms in the ascent and descent. The typical Carnatic music concert is of approximately two and a half hours' duration. A vocal concert — the most common performance — has a singer, male or female, or sometimes a duo of singers, accompanied by a violinist seated to his or her left and one or more percussionists to his or her right. The most common percussion instrument is a cylindrical drum called the mridangam placed horizontally in front of the drummer. The ghatam, a mud pot, and a khanjira, a circular hand held tambourine-like instrument, complete the ensemble. There can be more or fewer instruments on stage, but the mridangam is mandatory, so that the standard minimum team is voice-violin-mridangam. All the musicians sit cross-legged on a mat on the floor of the stage. A concert comprises both composed and improvised music, with every musician on stage getting to showcase his or her creativity at appropriate times. A typical present-day concert has mostly songs of devotional or spiritual content in the ancient pan-Indian language Sanskrit or one of the south Indian languages, predominantly Telugu. Every one of these songs is likely to contain improvisational elements, including wordless elaboration of the raga, variations on a single line of lyric or repeated combinations of the solfa syllables. |