De-familiarisation

I hadn't heard much about Ramesh Vinayagam till last evening - I only knew that he composed the music for Nala Damayanthi and was doing some research on gamakas in Carnatic music. I met him about the latter - an interview-article on his study is on the cards - at Ram's place, and the topic of conversation invariably turned to cricket.

Something about musicians from Madras makes them passionate cricketers or cricket fans - most Carnatic musicians worth their salt can reel off Test match statistics like the names of the 72-melakartas. I have a theory - that the temperament required for Carnatic music and Test cricket is similar. In both forms of art, the action unfolds layer-by-layer requiring patience, the thrill is latent, so latent that obviousness is derided upon, the subtleties miss untrained eyes and ears, and the excitement is in the pulse of the drama and not the spectacle of it.

When the meeting was ending, Ram said, "I am now going to ask Ramesh to perform my favourite trick... This is what I show him off with."

Ramesh smirked, and took out his cell phone. I wondered if he was going to do some kind of magic. He pressed some buttons, scrolled up and down a menu, until he zeroed in on something. The drone of a tambura emanated from the phone. He cleared his throat with a sa-pa, and I followed, unconsciously.

Now I was curious - what is this trick that involves a tambura drone?

He hummed a few phrases of a raga I didn't immediately identify, and launched into a Tamil song. The raga unfolded in the strangest of ways - my mind found both madhyamas, the sadharana gandhara, the chatusruti rishabha (rendered plainly), a nishada, a daivata... But the notes didn't define the raga, that was not it. It was one of those phrase-based ragas, and this had the most eclectic collection of phrases - a little like Kapi, a little like Keeravani, a bit of Simhendramadhyamam here, something else somewhere else, a flash of something that sounded like Neelambari even!

It was a beautiful song, a beautiful raga. But the word used was 'trick'. Was the raga the trick? Or would he do something with it? I wondered if he would change the tambura drone and show me how this was some raga I knew, but rendered in a different drone, it sounded so unfamiliar. I spent one verse trying to remove the drone from the music, and listening to the tune for familiarity. Nothing.

The verses came in the same frolicking pattern, in rhythmic cycles of three, still in that same raga, still bound by those phrasal boundaries, exploring little nooks within them.

Now I knew the trick was in the song itself. He wasn't going to do anything with it - he was already tricking me, somewhere, somehow.

In the last pallavi, a phrase of curious familiarity suddenly lodged itself in my head. A sa-da-pa-ma... I had heard this somewhere, definitely! I thought of the phrase just before it - ri-ga-ma-pa. Then it struck me, the ingeniousness of this trick, and the image of an Aquaguard flashed in my mind. I followed the tune until I could predict it - it was just a tune so removed from its familiar contours and Carnatic-ised that it had me fooled!

When he finished, he turned to me with the obvious question.
I said, "I think I've figured it out! It's that Western Classical tune - Fur elise?"

He smiled, impressed, "Yes. The raga is called Beethovenapriya!" And he went on to sing a few more phrases of the raga - a sketch of its geography.

A raga isn't a scale, you know, that is the English language's worst deformation of Carnatic music. A raga is something that has rules, yes, but the rules don't come from outside, they come from within it. Ask Janaranjani, Begada, Sahana - all ragas that seem like a random collection of swaras and phrases - they have a logic to them, a feel, if you like, a meaning. You can find within them an infinite universe.

Ask Beethovenapriya, and she'll tell you the same.