New Mansions For Music

Performance, Pedagogy and Criticism

Lakshmi Subramanian

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351383127
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

The essays in New Mansions for Music: Performance, Pedagogy and Criticism look at one of the most ancient and rigorous classical musical traditions of India, the Karnatik music system, and the kind of changes it underwent once it was relocated from traditional spaces of temples and salons to the public domain. Nineteenth-century Madras led the way in the transformation that Karnatik music underwent as it encountered the forces of modernization and standardization. This study also contributes to our understanding of the experience of modernity in India through the prism of music. The role of Madras city as patron and custodian of the performing arts, especially classical music offers an invaluable perspective on the larger processes of modernization in India. As the title suggests, the areas of classical music, which were most influenced by these developments were pedagogy or modes of musical transmission, performance conventions and criticism or music appreciation. Once the urban elite demanded the widening of the teaching of classical music, traditional modes of music instruction underwent a major change involving a breakdown of the gurushishya parampara or the tradition wherein the teacher imparted knowledge to a chosen few. Caste and kinship were important determining factors for the selection of these shishyas or students, but in modern institutions like the universities these boundaries had to be demolished. Simultaneously, the public staging of music brought the performer into a new relationship with his audience, especially as the art form became subject to validation and criticism by the newly emerging music critic. In an immensely readable book peppered with anecdotes and conversations with leading musicians and critics of the day, as well as humorous visual representations, part caricature, part satirical, the author describes a rapidly changing society and its new look in early twentieth century Madras.

1	The Katcheri A Living Laboratory or Enchanted Space?

IN A RECENT INTERVIEW, K.S.MAHADEVAN¹ A NOTED MUSIC CRITIC GAVE a detailed account of a typical music concert in Chennai in the late 1920s when music concerts or katcheris were becoming an integral part of the entertainment scene. By this time, the city boasted of a number of sabhas that undertook the arrangement of music concerts and music related shows, including kathakalakshepam or musical discourses that combined song, scriptures and dramatized storytelling. With the steady flow of musicians and performers from the districts of Tanjore and Tirunelveli to Madras, the city elite had access to a reasonable pool of musical talent they could invite to perform. The performers, on their part, drew their inspiration and sustenance from a pre-existing performance tradition and repertoire that had been configured within the precincts of temple and court and subsequently expanded in the wake of an emerging modern theatre tradition. This valued, in a major way, an emphasis on rhythm, on the performer’s ability to display his virtuosity in complex rhythmic exercises in a time cycle through the vehicle of what is described as swara singing, along with a detailed and elaborate exposition of melody or raga through the Ragam Tanam Pallavi, which seems to have been the central and most prized section of a concert. The display element was emphasized further by a complete accompaniment ensemble—the full bench, as it was known, and it required a performer of rare merit to hold his own before such an assembly. Describing the performance of Naina Pillai, a formidable musician, organized by the Mylapore Sangeeta Sabha in 1926, Mahadevan reminisced on the formidable artistes list thus: ‘Naina Pillai (Vocal), Malaikottai Govindaswami Pillai (Violin), Dakshinamurti Pillai (Khanjira), Alaganambi Pillai (Mridangam), Sitaramiah (Morsing), Sundaram Iyer (Ghatam) and the inimitable Kanpur Pakkiri (Konnakkol).’ What struck him, as he observed, was ‘the priority in the seating arrangement—how well I visualize the scene! Naina Pillai in the centre, Govindaswami Pillai on the left, and on the right, Pakkiriappa Pillai in front facing the violinist. Just behind him, Dakshinamurti Pillai, behind whom sat Alaganambi Pillai with the Ghatam, and the Morsing further back. The experience was similar to facing a thunderclap with lightning thrown in everywhere. There was no mike (microphones had still not made their entry). The concert, which started at 4.20 pm on a terribly hot Sunday, went on till 10 pm. It had to be so, because just after an hour, there was a full laya session of singing kalpanaswaras, starting from the Mridangam, till it went on to Pakkiri. Giving at least 5 minutes per round, you will surely understand the long duration of this concert. One could surely call it a ‘Laya concert’ with giants of their fields all playing.’²

The Pleasure of Performing, a Concert in Progress. Drawing by Mali

Courtesy: Roja Muthiah Research Library, Madras

Rhythm, Ritual and Performance

The privileging of rhythm and the celebration of the Lala katcheri, it may be surmised, was part of an older logic of performance that accompanied temple worship and court ceremonial. In a situation where melam music, (the orchestra accompanying the ritual worship of a deity in a temple) was an important part of both ritual and acoustic expectations, where performance encompassed a large range of percussion instruments and organized around the idea of a competitive display, the expectations of the audience were informed by notions of religious fervour and identification as well as by the affective potential of rhythm that was stimulating and carried the potential of awe akin to that of modern sport challenging the limits of human endeavour. Contemporary accounts describing the musical entertainment organized by temples reveal these tendencies at work. Here we are fortunate in having the personal memoirs of an expressive writer who by birth, location and sensibility enjoyed very close access to the traditional world of Tamil scholarship and music, and recorded his awe and appreciation of contemporary musical assemblies and well-known artistes, some of whom were family members. U.V. Swaminatha Iyer, for instance, who as mentioned earlier was singularly responsible for collecting and bringing to light several, Tamil classics, belonged to a family of eminent musicians and was closely associated with important temple endowments that organized musical assemblies. Many of these events find reflection in his writings that bring out both musical features as well as the social context of performance.

The concerts organized by temples and their endowments tended to be around festive occasions that brought musicians, scholars and artistes together in a common space of shared religious experience. Evidently in this domain of performance organized around specific festive dates in a calendar, the emphasis was on sacred songs and ritual chants that captivated the minds of listeners who responded to the ritual ambience of the setting. There was, however, an additional performance space that was more in the nature of a musical display that was organized by a specific individual patron. This was the traditional sadas or musical gathering organized by important members of society, who were also acknowledged connoisseurs. These events, by and large, tended to assume the form of a contest between musicians; with an adjudicator who would give the final verdict for the performer with greater virtuosity, knowledge and technical perfection. In these gatherings, there was scope for a different kind of display and for a different set of intentions; besides the obvious benefits of patronage, there was the element of one-upmanship, which brought to the fore ideas of skill, refinement and other categories of musical standards. This element is brought out in U.V. Swaminatha Iyer’s biographies of senior musicians also—Ghanam Krishna Iyer (1790–1854) and Maha Vaidyanatha Iyer (1844–93) both of whom were exemplary performers and enjoyed immense influence in their days among patrons and contemporary musicians.

Given the context of ritual and display, it was not surprising that performances, for the most part, tended to be in the nature of a spectacle appealing to a larger collective and structured around conceptions of sound and musicality that valorised competence in rhythm control on the one hand and elaborate delineation of raga or melody on the other, through what we have described as pallavi singing. The anecdotes that we have in circulation about the incredible speed of Shatkala Govinda Marar or the proficiency of pallavi artistes would suggest that these were considerably valued elements in performance and continued in some form even after the social context for performance changed after its relocation to Madras. In fact the obsession with rhythm became an important and recurrent critique of the new reform discourse on music in the first half of the twentieth century.

The growth of public performances on a commercial basis became pervasive in Madras by the end of the nineteenth century and was ordered around a different kind of ritual, namely that of a musicalcum-narration art form that took on religious themes but performed in a secular setting. This was the Kathakalakshepam³ developed by musicians from Tanjore, who drew on their musical training and knowledge of the epics to develop a form that amalgamated storytelling with music and dramatic interpretation and who brought it to the city of Madras, where it gained immense popularity in a very short period of time. Credit for this went to a number of remarkable and talented artistes whose acting skills as well as musical training made a profound impression on listeners and helped disseminate a broader musical taste among the urban audience. The form became a conduit for transmitting music to a wider audience who were treated to familiar stories drawn from epics and scriptures, and to songs and tunes that created a growing taste for music. The music in the harikathas did not have to conform to the specifications that court music demanded and it may be surmised that this drew from more familiar congregational music practice and from shorter and simpler melodic lines easier to follow and equally easy to recall and sing. The form also made use of several accompanying instruments, which enabled to enhance the ambient sound and thereby, to create the right atmosphere for a dramatic narration. The popularity of harikathas was unprecedented in Madras, where the idea of public musical entertainment began to strike deep roots from the closing decades of the nineteenth century, and music sabhas or associations proliferated primarily with the intention to provide musical entertainment on a commercial basis. Within a matter of a few decades, the city witnessed a proliferation of sabhas and a huge expansion of music related entertainment riding the wave of popular appreciation of what was a novel medium of consumption. The enjoyment of listening to music in a public space that was not within the precincts of a temple or within an intimate private circle, became a major factor in the rapid popularity of sabhas and the music concerts they sponsored. The life experiences of E. Krishna Iyer, a senior Congress leader and an important reformer who was largely instrumental in reviving classical dance, bear this out clearly. As a student of Madras Christian College, he was a regular theatre-goer developing an enormous interest in music and dance. Trained on the violin, he attended all music concerts of note to absorb the finer points.⁴ C.S. Iyer’s experiences were similar as he combined his initial training with long periods of listening to established artistes.⁵

There was however a flip side to this development—especially as the self-appointed custodians of culture among the elite began to feel the need to mark off a distinct set of musical practices and repertoire as classical, and to distance it from musical theatre that was deemed popular and light, and the kathakalakshepam, which as an art form was only marginally musical. It was in this context that a discourse of criticism emerged and the idea of a perfect concert format was considered as a means of defining and validating the classical style as well as a space where the audience and the performer could come and identify with the larger psychological experience of emotional identification with the music. At the same time, the reformers had to consider the challenges of public demand and to cater to a growing audience which had to be educated in the niceties of classical music so that they could distinguish it from popular fare, which however attractive, could not be treated at par with the former. So the order of the day was to design and structure a music concert that would satisfy the growing audience without compromising any of the features of classicism that the reforming elite wished to uphold. It was this double movement, the constant attempt to balance a complex and rigorous version of musical practice with a lighter and entertaining musical mode that made the project appear inconsistent and ambivalent.

The initial experiments were not immediately successful. A careful reading of the available material would suggest that individual vocalists had to compete with a strong and aggressive accompanying ensemble with the result that there was a tendency either to indulge in acrobatics expressed in the form of very rapid swara singing⁶ or concede more time to the accompanists. The proliferation of the sabhas did not help—in fact the overtly commercial profile of the sabhas meant that audiences had to be kept satisfied even if it meant compromising the art form. The performer had to concede to the demands of his audience—a development that was viewed extremely unfavourably by senior musicians as well as publicists. Rangaramanuja Ayyangar, probably the most eloquent in his times was especially critical; as he wrote later about his experiences in the 1920s in his memoirs,

My association with the Egmore Sabha brought me face to face with a new generation of musicians quite different from those I had known. They had no idealism or dedication. They lacked a zest for study, research and growth. They had a poor understanding of them dimensions of Carnatic music. Closed minds, arrested growth, sophistication, showmanship and an avid desire to get on in life stamped every one of them with a cramped vision, craze for boost and publicity and a sense of insecurity due to growing numbers and competition. To add to this, entrepreneurs, innocent of music, stepped into the arena. With their eye on the box office, they patronized musicians who were idols of the masses. Surging crowds and thundering applause determined a musician’s status and career.⁷

Ayyangar was not the only voice of dissent. Contemporary observations of the music scene in Madras give us a reasonable idea of the early sabha concerts, which by and large reflected the prevailing taste. A fascination for technical virtuosity, which in practical terms, came to mean the performer’s ability to execute complex swara singing and to engage in competitive bouts with the accompanying percussion ensemble seems to have captivated public imagination. Alongside there was a growing interest in Tamil songs and padams that had been popularized by harikatha performers and padam singers, mostly devadasi women. The Ragam Tanam Pallavi,⁸ which had been the core item in the older repertoire, lost its primacy partly because concert time did not permit the same expansive space for the performer. In 1929, in fact, a battle raged in the Madras newspapers over reclaiming a place for the pallavi. Senior musicologists, connoisseurs and critics wrote scathingly about the absurdity of providing the man on the street with an average concert with no scholarly merit. As one of them wrote, it was absurd to characterize the pallavi as a ‘monstrosity’, simply because some musicians had been unable to execute it with finesse and because the audience had not had the good fortune of listening to superior pallavi singing. Under such a circumstance, were the critics of the pallavi right in condemning it in entirety and setting a time limit to it? P. Sambamoorthy, an emerging musicologist of note and with an astute musical sense, reiterated this position and wrote, ‘of late it has become the fashion for some people to argue that the pallavi has no place in a modern musical performance’ and that while ‘the principal cause for all the crusade against the pallavi is to be attributed to utter ignorance of the great beauties underlying this branch of musical art, to condemn the pallavi as a whole was the height of musical unwisdom’.⁹ On the other hand E. Krishna Iyer, a major figure in the city’s musical circles, argued forcefully against the inclusion of the pallavi in the concert format, pointing out that few people had the expertise to execute it and that most often the form was mechanically produced.

It is in this context of debate and deliberation over what should constitute the concert repertoire that Naina Pillai’s interventions have to be understood as articulating a definite aesthetic position. Pillai consciously set out to make a mark as a solo vocalist who could hold his own on the concert stage and establish the idea of the soloist’s primacy. His forte was mastery over rhythm and his experiments in this department were important for they would seem to have represented that moment when the vocalist was, in fact, responding to the challenge that the accompanyi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. The Katcheri: A Living Laboratory or Enchanted Space?
• 2. Articulating an Aesthetic: The Emergence of the Music Critic in Modern South India
• 3. From the Gurukula to the University: Initiatives in Music Education
• 4. The Lighter Side of Entertainment
• 5. On the History of Music: A Bibliographical Essay
• Glossary
• Index