5 posts tagged “music”
For the uninitiated, December is "music season" in Chennai. A time when hundreds of concerts are held in various auditoriums across the city (mainly around the Mylapore-T.Nagar area), a literal heaven for music lovers. The music is 99% Carnatic with a few others thrown in for variety occasionally.
If I find a Caucasian singing Carnatic impressive, this one just blew me away
The reason it amazes me is that it is very difficult for a person trained in Carnatic music to sing hymns, because of the constant microtones (gamakam/briha) that would creep in due to the training. Heck, I don't call myself a carnatic musician by a long shot, but with the little CM that I learnt, Mrs. Alice, my high school choir conductor, would beg me with tears in her eyes to stop singing carols "with a Shankarabaranam flavour".
In this piece, if you ignore the accent, you'd never believe that this hymn was sung by our very own M.S. She sounds like a soprano in a Church choir. And I thought Sri Ilayaraja was the pioneer.
Shakti is 2 years old. She can't talk too well yet. She sings Varaveena to near-perfection.
Perfect shruthi, perfect kaalapramaanam. Eyes welled up.
Hats off.
My little daughter just listened to Bach's Barndenburg Concerto 6 and refuses to accept that it is anything but Little Einstein that she watches on the computer, that features the piece.
That is the risk of incorporating profound pieces into banal everyday events, however educative.