The renowned Carnatic musician and author TM Krishna will attend Goa Arts + Literary Festival 2014 (December 4-7, goaartlitfest.com)
A spectacular, iconic vocalist, TM Krishna draws huge audiences to every performance. "...for the seasoned listener he came in to the concert scene bringing back memories of the legends, and for the young he is a phenomenon who holds their interest with his passion and flamboyance" http://www.thehindu.com/features/friday-review/music/a-southern-music/article5809926.ece This revolutionary young musician has now written one of the most significant and controversial books on Indian music ever, his 'A Southern Music: The Karnatic Story' is described by Amartya Sen as "one of the best books I've ever read". A Southern Music: The Karnatic Story was the subject of this superb (and also controversial) review essay in Caravan magazine by Samanth Subramaniam: http://www.caravanmagazine.in/books/modern-classical An excerpt: Krishna is always a magnetic performer. His voice is strong and sure, his diction is cleaver-sharp, and his energy is boundless. On stage, he does not request your attention, he demands it. During those three hours, Krishna was in particularly splendid fettle. In the years that followed, I often wondered if the concert imprinted itself upon me so deeply only because it was my first. Then I found a recording of it, played it back with some trepidation, and reassured myself of just how marvellous it was. Slowly and meditatively, Krishna sang a song in the raga Kedaram, and then another in Devagandhari, his voice bending to his every thought. He gave us an alapana—an improvisatory essay—of the raga Harikambhoji, so sweet and clean that it still defines the raga for me. Two or three times over the course of the concert, he let loose his trademark sallies of improvised swaras, individual notes that tumbled after each other in a torrent, as if some mighty dam had been breached. There was even a flare of his famed irascibility. Just as he began on the mangalam, the standard finale, some members in the audience rose to leave. This is, unfortunately, common practice in most concerts, but Krishna interrupted himself. “The mangalam will take 30 seconds,” he scolded in Tamil. “I don’t think anybody is in that much of a hurry to leave. Sit down! Thank you.” Everybody sat back down. I couldn’t have known it at the time, but I had caught Krishna, then 29, on the cusp of a great creative restlessness. His music over the next few years increasingly manifested this disquiet. For a while, in his alapanas, he took to testing the nimbleness of his voice, pushing it as far up as it could go, a full octave or more above his median range, and then pulling it equivalently below so that he was practically growling. He studied Subbarama Dikshitar’s Sangita Sampradaya Pradarshini, published in 1904, a text of dense musicology that prescribes singing some ragas in a manner very different to how they are sung today. As a fascinating academic exercise, he released albums of songs and alapanas sung according to this text, and on occasion he even followed its strictures in live concerts. He dispensed with the practice of beginning his performances with the short, brisk composition called the varnam, but he did sometimes drop one into the middle of the concert. Singers had done this before, but memories are short, so a terrific kerfuffle ensued when, within the hallowed halls of the Madras Music Academy in December 2010, Krishna built his concert around an hour-long exploration of a grand varnam in the raga Bhairavi. Since then, Krishna has deconstructed the conventional concert structure even further. An alapana in Thodi, say, need not be followed by a song in Thodi, as has been the norm for decades. Instead, Krishna may render another alapana in Hamsadhwani, and then a song in Khamas. He may ask his percussionists to perform their solo in a tala—a beat cycle—utterly different from the one in which he is singing. His first piece might last half an hour; he may sing only five pieces in three hours, compared to the near-dozen in the regulation thin-at-the-edges, thick-in-the-middle concerts. He may, as he did a month ago, sing a lovely Yamuna Kalyani alapana, listen to his violinist’s responding alapana, and generously say: “I can’t follow that. You should just go ahead and play the song yourself.” In a TM Krishna concert today, a Bhairavi will still sound wondrous and disciplined and pure—“classical”, to use a term he despises—but most other bets are off. None of these departures from the norm have affected Krishna’s box-office appeal; I don’t think I’ve ever attended a performance of his where the auditorium has been anything less than three-quarters full. Nevertheless, within the staid circles of the Carnatic music world, Krishna has stirred plenty of consternation. The least charitable of his critics have scorned these “innovations”—the double-quotes theirs, not mine—as gimmicks employed by a showman who has plumbed his creative well and suddenly found it dry. Another theory asks if Krishna is merely bored, if it has not all come too easily to him: the Music Academy debut at the age of 12; the supple, powerful voice and the agile mind; the awards; the popular success. I’m inclined to think that Krishna is genuinely wrestling with two important questions. How should this particular classical art respond to the modern age? And in this process of realignment, what are the responsibilities of the artist, towards her art but also towards her audience? Krishna’s hefty new book, A Southern Music: The Karnatik Story (HarperCollins India, 588 pages, Rs 799) can be read as a fresh attempt at thinking through what amounts to an existential crisis.
