Musical Memories - An Introduction

 

 

This is an introduction to a series of short posts about incidents I remember from music concerts.

 

I have been an avid listener of music – Karnatak classical, Hindustani, Hindi film music (older the better), western classical, rock and jazz – perhaps in that order in terms of the amount of time I have spent and my familiarity with them. Also, thanks to my parents, I am an avid concert goer. I started attending concerts around five or six years of age. I will recount some tales of my experiences. Almost all of them are about the musicians and not about me, except the first one. I have referred to all the musicians with just their names with no honorifics such as vidwan, vidushi or ustad preceding their names. Though I have great admiration and respect for all the artists I mention, I have chosen to drop the honorifics because I want these to be like a personal conversation during which I would not use them.

1 Mangala

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It was M D Ramanathan’s concert at Budaram Krishnappa’s Ramamandira. When he came to the end of the concert and started singing the Mangala - the last item of all Karnatak music concerts - as usual, people started getting up. He shushed them all and waved his hands to command them to stay seated and said that one should not get up during Mangala. It is sung for the welfare (the literal meaning of Mangala) of everyone including the musicians. So no one should get up. Everyone sat back. Whereas Mangala is normally sung perfunctorily for a couple of minutes in Madhyama kala, he went on to sing an elaborate mangala with raga surati and madhyamavati for nearly twenty minutes in vilamba kaala. What a treat it was!

2 The Heart of the Matter

 

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It was 1986 and I was in Kharagpur. SPICMACAY had organised a concert and discussion with the flute maestro Hari Prasad Chaurasia. It was large hall and there were carpets on the floor. Chaurasia sat at the centre of the hall and the audience was all around him. After a couple of hours of music, during which the audience steadily thinned, there were only about a fifty of us left.

One student asked, “They say that playing the flute affects the heart. What do you say?”

Chaurasia calmly took his flute, took a deep breath and played a single note, after ten seconds or so I timed him. He held that note for at least one and a half minutes. More like one minute and forty-five seconds.

He then kept the flute down and in a conversational tone asked, “What was that?” Someone said “breath control”. He asked, “What is prANAyAm?” The answer to that too was breath control. He asked, “If prANAyAm can be good for the heart how can this be bad for the heart?” and rested his case.

3 What Religion is This?

 

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SPICMACAY had organised a morning concert of the great “Shahnai Nawaz, Khan Saheb Ustad Bismillah Khan” – that is an announcement before one of his concerts I had heard on All India Radio and it has got lodged in my brain.

 The hall was full and the maestro wove his legendary magic. In the middle of a raag, when everyone was listening mesmerised, he suddenly stopped and asked, in Hindi, “What religion is this?” Then went on, “This is music. It has no language, no religion, no caste . . .  Then he pointed to the plaques hanging from the wall all around the hall, look at them, they are all equal, they all seek the same thing. We are all human beings and we are all together and we should live in peace together.”

 He was pointing at the plaques because each plaque on the wall had a symbol of a religion. And they were beautiful wood inlay works. He found that close to his heart. The audience, mainly students, clapped and cheered.