Re: [arr] God of score
Is it available anywhere in U.A.E or online buy? AR Rahman - His music for ears for years From: $ Pavan Kumar $ pawancum...@yahoo.com To: arrahmanfans@yahoogroups.com Sent: Friday, August 14, 2009 6:42:08 AM Subject: [arr] God of score http://www.thenatio nal.ae/apps/ pbcs.dll/ article?AID= /20090814/ REVIEW/708139983 /1007 God of score * Last Updated: August 13. 2009 12:36PM UAE / August 13. 2009 8:36AM GMT Jai ho! Rahman holds his Slumdog Millionare Oscars (Best Score and Best Original Song) at a post-award party in Los Angeles this February. Mario Anzuoni / Reuters In less than 20 years, AR Rahman has come to dominate Indian popular music by breaking all of its borders. S Subramanian reads a new biography of Bollywood’s great assimilator. AR Rahman: The Musical Storm Kamini Mathai Penguin India Dh38 The Indian composer AR Rahman, recent winner of a pair of Academy Awards for his jaunty songs in Slumdog Millionaire, has over the years demonstrated a keen talent for reaching new, rapidly appreciative audiences. This talent is typically discussed in reference to his work outside India, which began early this century when he collaborated with Andrew Lloyd Webber on the saccharine West End confection Bombay Dreams, pairing reworked versions of some of his most outstanding songs from the 1990s with some of his worst original music. Since then, his work has featured on Broadway and in Chinese and Hollywood films. All this, particularly the Slumdog Oscars, has made Rahman the first Indian composer to find substantial audiences beyond the already large world of his country’s film industry. But Rahman’s first, more impressive feat of border-crossing occurred much earlier, when he became the first Indian composer with a pan-Indian audience. So often is Bollywood used as a symbol of the entire Indian film industry that it is easy to overlook the country’s diversity of other regional cinema. Outside Mumbai, other sizeable film industries operate like self-contained planets, producing movies in the languages of Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam and Bengali. The borders between the four south Indian cinemas are, for actors, directors and composers, particularly fluid; the border between south Indian cinema and Hindi cinema has, because of deeper linguistic differences, traditionally been far less permeable. Even music, that much-vaunted universal language, sat for long in decidedly regional compartments. The music of the Bollywood and Tamil film industries may have shared roots in the Indian seven-note scale, for instance, but they long ago developed into entirely different sensibilities. In their default modes, they leaned in different directions: Bollywood toward plaintive romantic or existential ballads; Tamil music toward raga-based classical or rhythm-heavy indigenous folk. They used different instruments: the harmonium would have sounded as odd in Tamil music as the veena in Bollywood. The gulf separating these genres was a wide one, spanned only by the occasional work of the occasional composer. Perhaps work on the bridge that now connects them had tentatively begun in the years before Rahman, but only after he brought power cranes to the job, completed its construction, and made a few sorties back and forth did other composers feel consistently comfortable doing the same. Rahman’s debut soundtrack, Roja, released in 1992, provides a classic example of how his music functions. A song will start simply, with a spare melody and vocals with power but no apparent ambition to blow the listener away. Within seconds, that all changes. The melody might enter a dense burst of orchestration, or yield to a solo by an unexpected instrument, or somehow reveal itself to be based on a highly classical raga. The vocals might shift colour, from modest to epic, or from normal singing to Rahman’s own free-spirited yodels, or from pristine enunciation to humming. The rhythm can come out of wood blocks, or steel drums, or something that sounds distinctly like a brass pot being hit with a bunched fist. Mixed together, this reminds you of reggae one minute, Tamil folk the next, then electronica, then south Indian classical – all together in one alluring whole. Nearly 20 years after that debut, Rahman’s music still sparks interesting (albeit well-worn) debates among music-lovers. What exactly is Rahman’s genius? Does it lie in his arrangements, his meticulous layering of sounds and voices as if they were sheets of phyllo? Or in his generous accommodation of styles, or in his industrious production of catchy hooks? In other words: is he “simply” a technically savvy producer of commercial music? Or do arrangement, stylistic flexibility and hook-production fall legitimately under the rubric of musical artistry, and is Rahman exactly what his legions of devoted fans say he is: a straight-up compositional genius?
Re: [arr] God of score
Thanks for this Pavan! It was an excellent read!! On Fri, Aug 14, 2009 at 8:12 AM, $ Pavan Kumar $ pawancum...@yahoo.comwrote: http://www.thenational.ae/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20090814/REVIEW/708139983/1007 God of score - Last Updated: August 13. 2009 12:36PM UAE / August 13. 2009 8:36AM GMT Jai ho! Rahman holds his Slumdog Millionare Oscars (Best Score and Best Original Song) at a post-award party in Los Angeles this February. Mario Anzuoni / Reuters *In less than 20 years, AR Rahman has come to dominate Indian popular music by breaking all of its borders.* *S Subramanian** reads a new biography of Bollywood’s great assimilator.* *AR Rahman: The Musical Storm * Kamini Mathai Penguin India Dh38 The Indian composer AR Rahman, recent winner of a pair of Academy Awards for his jaunty songs in Slumdog Millionaire, has over the years demonstrated a keen talent for reaching new, rapidly appreciative audiences. This talent is typically discussed in reference to his work outside India, which began early this century when he collaborated with Andrew Lloyd Webber on the saccharine West End confection Bombay Dreams, pairing reworked versions of some of his most outstanding songs from the 1990s with some of his worst original music. Since then, his work has featured on Broadway and in Chinese and Hollywood films. All this, particularly the Slumdog Oscars, has made Rahman the first Indian composer to find substantial audiences beyond the already large world of his country’s film industry. But Rahman’s first, more impressive feat of border-crossing occurred much earlier, when he became the first Indian composer with a pan-Indian audience. So often is Bollywood used as a symbol of the entire Indian film industry that it is easy to overlook the country’s diversity of other regional cinema. Outside Mumbai, other sizeable film industries operate like self-contained planets, producing movies in the languages of Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam and Bengali. The borders between the four south Indian cinemas are, for actors, directors and composers, particularly fluid; the border between south Indian cinema and Hindi cinema has, because of deeper linguistic differences, traditionally been far less permeable. Even music, that much-vaunted universal language, sat for long in decidedly regional compartments. The music of the Bollywood and Tamil film industries may have shared roots in the Indian seven-note scale, for instance, but they long ago developed into entirely different sensibilities. In their default modes, they leaned in different directions: Bollywood toward plaintive romantic or existential ballads; Tamil music toward raga-based classical or rhythm-heavy indigenous folk. They used different instruments: the harmonium would have sounded as odd in Tamil music as the veena in Bollywood. The gulf separating these genres was a wide one, spanned only by the occasional work of the occasional composer. Perhaps work on the bridge that now connects them had tentatively begun in the years before Rahman, but only after he brought power cranes to the job, completed its construction, and made a few sorties back and forth did other composers feel consistently comfortable doing the same. Rahman’s debut soundtrack, Roja, released in 1992, provides a classic example of how his music functions. A song will start simply, with a spare melody and vocals with power but no apparent ambition to blow the listener away. Within seconds, that all changes. The melody might enter a dense burst of orchestration, or yield to a solo by an unexpected instrument, or somehow reveal itself to be based on a highly classical raga. The vocals might shift colour, from modest to epic, or from normal singing to Rahman’s own free-spirited yodels, or from pristine enunciation to humming. The rhythm can come out of wood blocks, or steel drums, or something that sounds distinctly like a brass pot being hit with a bunched fist. Mixed together, this reminds you of reggae one minute, Tamil folk the next, then electronica, then south Indian classical – all together in one alluring whole. Nearly 20 years after that debut, Rahman’s music still sparks interesting (albeit well-worn) debates among music-lovers. What exactly is Rahman’s genius? Does it lie in his arrangements, his meticulous layering of sounds and voices as if they were sheets of phyllo? Or in his generous accommodation of styles, or in his industrious production of catchy hooks? In other words: is he “simply” a technically savvy producer of commercial music? Or do arrangement, stylistic flexibility and hook-production fall legitimately under the rubric of musical artistry, and is Rahman exactly what his legions of devoted fans say he is: a straight-up compositional genius? Kamini Mathai’s AR Rahman: The Musical Storm refuses to engage Rahman’s influence or the music that underpins it, which makes this
