One of the advantages of living in the bay area is the significant local population that is interested in South Indian Classical music.
We have two organizations that have memberships and have a concert(Kutchery) series announced early enough. The main one is SIFA or South India Fine Arts and the other one is Sankrirthi Laya. Then there are the other one off concerts where you buy direct tickets for artists who do just one or two concerts!
This spring concert season in bay area starts when all the artists have done performing in Chennai and Mumbai and they migrate to the bay area when the temperatures just start to be manageable compared to Chennai. They end up starting in California and go east as the weather warms up there.
Have been treated to a wonderful concert list. Most of these concerts are on Sunday, some being on Saturday. It is almost a concert every weekend for 12 weeks. Made it a point to attend almost all of the vocal or instrumental ones. Skipped the dance programs.
Given my knee was already hurting and inflamed for most of spring, sitting in one place for 4 hours for each concert, not to mention the lines to get seated.. the carpooling with friends back and forth to venue, each concert was a 5 1/2 to 6 hour commit. Given the interest with my friends, we went as a group! The group is 5 ladies and me. Apparently only one person in each of those families manages to sit in one place for 4 hours! Given the ladies color coordinated their Sari's for every concert, they would even publish the color in our whatsapp group and where possible I would even wear a T-shirt in their color of choice. All said and done, I had a lot of fun attending the concerts.
Most of them were amazing, some were like "meh" and one we left 30 minutes before concert ended as one of the carpoolers had to take care of an urgent issue at home. Somehow we were all okay leaving that one early.
Here is the list that I attended in the order
Violin concert by Lalgudi siblings
Vocal by Kalyanapuram S. Aravind
Vocal by Sudha Raghunathan (this was not through the memberships but a concert organized for fund raising for OPEN education).. she did more of a lec dem than a traditional concert
Vocal by Saketaraman
Vocal by Abhishek Raghuram
Vocal by Malladi Brothers
A special "carnatic'y concert based on Ilayaraja songs by RaGa (Ranjani Gaythri) which had discounted tickets thanks to SIFA! Added bonus was that I got to take Jr. who had just landed from college the previous day!
Vocal by Amrutha Venkatesh
Vocal by Gayathri Venkataraghavan
This pretty much wrapped up Spring season. Fall season begins in September!
When you get to listen to all these artists and their accompaniment artiss on voilin, mrudhangam, tabla, ghatam, kanjira .. you are in for a treat in every concert.
Listening to the different styles, the way the artists express themselves in each piece, their mastery of their craft and in some cases the amazing syncronization between two artists, gives you a subconsicous understanding of what these ragas make you feel. Going to concerts is also a good learning experience, when you and your friends are chatting on the whatsapp group trying to race to identify the raga for the song or the concept being tried. We discuss the concert on the way home! Sometimes my friends and the jokes pre or post concert add more to the experience than the concert itself.
When I get to write more, will key in my thoughts on each of these concerts and the special lightbulb moments!
The good thing in these concerts was the number of parents who managed to get their kids to sit and listen. Sometimes it is tough to keep them in one place. For the most part the kids sat, listened, guessed ragams, sang along in places and their smiling faces in the audience made it all the more interesting. Carnatic music wil definitely survive another generation at least based on the audience stats!
The regular memberships for SIFA is 160 USD for a year and Sankritilaya is 75 USD. You get ~12 and ~8 concerts for that a year! If you get to attend most of the concerts, you get your monies worth! Trick is in clearing your weekend calendar and prioritizing this over other events. My family has been extremely supportive in letting me disappear all evening for this many days! They do it because I come home with a song on my lips and have a happy high for a day or two post concert! That means they have to deal with regular me only for 5 days a week.. Given a choice they would send to a concert every three days.
They say "katradhu kai mann alavu, kallaadhadhu ulagalavu!" (what you have learned so far is comparable to a fist full of sand, what you are yet to learn is as vast as the earth). Even though we familiarize ourselves with as many ragas as possible, in every concert we learned a new ragam and what it sounds and feels like!
The listening continues, as does the learning!
If you are a bay area parent trying to get your kids interested in learning Carnatic or South Indian classical music, do avail yourself of these memberships in the organizations and give your kids a chance to hear these wonderful artists. They will definitely enjoy and take an interest!
My film song singing definitely improves over time as my Carnatic singing progresses. Given time constraints and the knee issues, have not been singing movie songs to the extent I used to. That will pick up in the next three months!
Started writing this post last year, same time.. but it kept getting revised as time went by to the extent that it never made it out.
Sometimes a journey takes you through so many intermediate sights worth seeing that if you start waiting to post till you reach your final destination, all those posts just don't make it.. that is if your final destination is mind blowing.
When it comes to the music learning journey, have no final destination planned. So it would be ridiculous to wait for some special moment to finish this post. So here goes. . . while this post definitely gets the "publish" button today, the music learning will keep going.
The previous posts in this blog tab tell you everything that got me to this point. I became a "student" yet again, trying to sing movie songs better than the average bathroom singer. (I am pretty quiet in the bathroom as the showers are always 2-4 minutes maximum. Keep pushing my family to take shorter baths to conserve hot water and the associated electricity bill!). The singing happens in the car when no one else is present.
After joining Paadarivom Padipparivom as a student, I got a chance to be a mentee in a live show. Got a call from my teacher and he asked if I am free on a weekend morning at 5:30 AM. Told him I will obviously be free, but singing with the family is asleep will be a challenge. Was also not ready for this! They knew I was a beginner. What were they thinking ? Putting me up in a live show to learn in front of everyone? My teacher (as for some strange reason like all my other teachers) had more faith in me than I had in myself. Maybe that is a common trait for all teachers? Or maybe I just luck out finding teachers like this? One has to be very lucky to find the right teachers, for any subject! He said "you will do just fine! it is better for everyone to see how you learn from this experience as a beginner!"
There I was sitting on my meditation pillow on the floor in front of the now familiar "manja suvaru" or "yellow wall" at 5AM testing out audio and video. It was one of my favorite songs "Mounamana Neram" and I had been warned by family not to touch songs like this so as to keep SPB's memory alive. The fact that a million others are butchering SPB song's even as I type this post somehow didn't seem to matter to the family! At least I was being taught the song by a teacher, word by word!
The instruction 5 days ahead of this live experience was simple. Listen to this song on a loop 20-30 times. Listen to it and not just hear it. Pay attention to little details as you listen. So I went and did just that, or thought I did! This was also the first time the format of this teaching episode was changing to have two teachers teach two students at the same time. Male teacher teaches male mentee and female teacher teaches the female mentee. The female mentee was a quiet down to earth "pro". She was as tense as me as it was her first time being live, but later I learned that her hubby was her pillar of strength and was giving her a tutorial class at home. Me?! No such luck, as my family was trying to not get involved in this process at all. Gandhiji would have learned a thing or two to speed up the "Quit India" movement, if he had watched my family quit me that week. I sat through that live teaching show and learned one thing. Listening to a song 100 times didn't do shit for my ability to sing it. The little nuances I thought I had understood, all nonsense! What was I even listening to?
Then came the harder part. Having to put out a song invite within 36 hours. There were two lines that I simply could not deliver! I got voicenotes from both teachers giving me a lot of confidence. The female teacher gave me slow motion notes on how to sing the thing and I still was struggling to sing it at regular speed. At one point, they took pity on me and said "this will do!" for the invite. It reminded me of "that will do Pig!" dialog from Babe! A few people were nice enough to join my invite. I could have definitely done a lot better and have done better, since then. Given that moment in time when a zillion lightbulb moments happened in two days with respect to learning something, having a time crunch to deliver <100 words in a 4 minute song to near perfection and knowing I failed in 80% of the words, it was gut wrenching!
I am not just a student. I am also a yogi. If there is one thing my yoga gurus have taught me, it is that "falling down is human but getting back up and trying again, now that is a yogi!"
Dusted myself up after that debacle and decided that I will do better every week compared to the previous week. Whatever that experience taught me, I was going to internalize it and improve on it every week. Was not going to give up on singing because I made a fool of myself on a live teaching show. If anything, this was like getting into an arranged marriage. You like or don't like something about her? It doesn't matter because you are already married to the girl. Just figure it out! Had already embarassed myself in front of the all the teachers and students in the music group, not to mention all my friends and family. This was like rock bottom. There was only one way to go from there! Improve week on week!
My teachers however, were talking as though they had struck gold with me. They were very happy with my sincerity and my ability to pick up at least half of what they were saying. One thing was also clear to me a month after this experience. I had to pick up the pieces and start learning Carnatic music at the earliest to be able to sing film songs better. My ability to place a note where it needs to be was pathetic.
Given most of the teachers in Paadarivom Padipparivom were classical music teachers, I decided to start learning Carnatic (South Indian classical) music as well on the auspicious Vijayadasami day last year. My teacher(Koushik) is a patient man in his early forties with a lot of experience in teaching folks of all age groups. In the very first class he told me "I am not here to teach you knack. Will teach you hacks instead". Will never forget the way he said it. He was in the business of teaching old dogs new tricks and he meant it. Classical music is learned by kids in south India at the age of 4 or 5 and they pick it up over time with a lot of practice over two decades. I was almost 50 trying to start from scratch again!
This needed a different curriculum and syllabus. One designed to keep a middle aged man interested enough to keep going and still make slow and steady progress. Koushik has managed to do it so far. It has been 14 months since my first Classical music class (which is once a week for 50 minutes) and I can in all sincerity say that every class has had at least one lightbulb moment and every class has built on the incremental progress from the previous classes. We have finished a full book of songs in 14 months. Given that there was no planned schedule to get anywhere at anytime, at least from my side, it was suprising that he got me this far.
He always reminds me of the four stages in the learning curve:
1. Unconscious incompetence : I don't even realize what it is supposed to sound like
2. Conscious incompetence : I realize what the thing is supposed to be like but don't how how to do it yet
3. Conscious competence : Know what is required but still a work in progress. all it takes is practice at this point and hard work.. the understanding is there.. but it is a struggle
4. Unconscious competence : can sing it with eyes closed and practiced ease.. no need to think about it!
By the time the mentee experience was done, was going from stage 1 to glimpses of 2. Now after 14 months of learning Classical music and singing one movie song a week with a systematic approach, have gotten to start seeing stage 3 in the horizon.
It is my sincere hope that in a few years, will get to 3 and eventually on to step 4!
In 2022, have sang 36 songs and submit them for reviews and have recevied valuable feedback from the teachers on every one of those songs! Have definitely improved as a singer in the last 12 months. Have also learned to appreciate what I am listening to, thanks to the improved awareness! Also know why some of my fellow students are a class apart from the rest.
The highlight of 2022 singing was this.
Very happy to have music back in my life now! Also extremely happy to have found this community of singers at different levels who really encourage each other and bring out the best that everyone has to offer muscially!
If you are someone who wants to improve your singing no matter what your level is, would definitely suggest joining this community!
The systematic approach to singing one movie song a week is an unfinished post as well. Will post that soon, as it will definitely benefit other learners!
Given I have been singing a lot recently, thought of sharing my contact points with music in the blog. Things got to a point where this needed its own section in the blog. So after many years, opening a new tab, just for music!
To understand why I am where I am, it might not be a bad idea to explain things from the past.
My grandmother, who is in her nineties, is a great Carnatic music singer. She had a lot of promise as a youngster and was noticed by many talent scouts (or whatever they were called in those days in Chennai). She got married young, had my mom at 15 and then her kids kept her busy. She still tried to sing after her kids grew up. Then I was born! At some point she became grandma daycare center and singing took a hit. There would always be whispers about how somehow my arrival had something to do with her singing expectations ending.
My grandmother never mentioned anything to me ever. She always sang to me and would say "edhavadhu vadhyam vaasikka kaththuko.. ungamma appavala moonu kuzhandhaiya Engligh medium schoolukku anupparadhe periya vishayam. Ippo illattiyum ennikkaavadhu sandharpam kidaichcha, kaththuko!"
(learn to play some instrument.. it is a big deal for your mom and dad to send three kids to English medium schools. Even if not now, someday when you get the opportunity, learn an instrument!"). I remember it like yesterday.
Given my impatience, I rolled on the floor, cried, threw a trantrum and got enrolled in a Violin class at Shringeri mutt. It was a 1 hour group class in a small room in the office building attached to the Saradhambaal temple, near what is now Mandaiveli Rail station, and the monthly fees was 5 Rupees! However, there was no violin at home! I got to learn there and the teacher, a very old Iyengar thatha would let me stay back and practice for 30 minutes. Managed to learn the very basics, and did Sarali and Jantai Varisai there over a few months. Then things changed, school got busy and that was that!
Then I ended up in Varanasi. My classmate found out that the music department under Dr. N. Rajam had a beginners one hour violin class every Saturday. The teacher, yet another old Iyengar thatha, would teach four of us students and none of us had a violin! All three of us would practice the finger positions without a violin and play there on Saturday. It was also hard given Saturday noon was feast in the mess halls and this class would be at 2PM. We would fight the "undamyakkam" and try to concentrate in class.
On top of that, it went swimmingly well as this thatha told me "You have to undo everything from the past and re-learn the right way". So over 5 months, I went from scratch (Sa-Pa-Sa) to Alankarams. Then the teacher got sick and the classes stopped. We became third year students and memorizing new English words on the Baron's GRE guide took priority over any other attempt to pursue learning Violin in Banaras!
In the last two months before leaving for the US, my moms school violin teacher taught me two geethams. Still no violin, but I did practice with her violin for a few days. She was a really great teacher. None of the "Undo this and redo that.." business. She smiled and encouraged me to adapt as she was teaching me. Then I came to the US and given the two suitcases where my packing would have rivaled that of astronauts, it was amazing that the music book made it! Later I learned that my own sister was a student of the school from the very man who wrote that book! She sings well, but sticks to Carnatic music in select functions. Have not heard her sing otherwise or share recordings.
A few months into grad school, our senior and guide Vish Vadari organized a music class for a bunch of interested grad students and post docs. This was also a once a week, evening class on campus, where we would block a room and learn from a local teacher. She did something interesting. She taught us the basics (from Sa-Pa-Sa to Alankarams again) but also taught us music appreciation (as we were all adults) by teaching us Rama Nama Sankeerthanams by Thyagaraja. These are songs we have all heard in social functions like weddings etc. We even went as a group and sang at a local Thyagaraja aaradhana in New Jersey in a Church converted to a temple. This was my first attempt at singing carnatic music!
Two years in, I moved schools and as a farewell gift, my grad school buddies all pooled in and bought me an antique violin! It was beautiful. They had it refurbed, new strings and all. Started practicing on my own whenever the mood hit me. It was always the sarali varisai to Alankarams. The one finger stuff Kalyani teacher had taught me before coming to US, was sadly forgotten.
It is around the same time that I started dancing and the music I played was almost always dance music. A heavy Latin influence to the point that my PhD thesis was dedicated to Julio Iglesias and Carlos Gardel. The only songs that came out of my mouth were in Spanish.
Eventually ended up in the bay area. Got married, stopped dancing and tried to sing again after my wife encouraged me to go find a teacher and learn. The one place which was the go to music school in those times was in Fremont, a good 45 minute drive. Used to drive 45 minutes one way for a 45 minute music class.. Again from Sa-Pa-Sa.. unlearn.. relearn.. this time again, there were some small songs, taught occasionally.
Then jr. was almost on her way into this world and she became my music.
When Jr. was in elementary school, I started to learn the guitar. That went great for a year, till my accident where my right arm was pretty much out of commission. It almost felt like there was some divine intervention that stopped me from learning music every time I crossed a six month period! If it happened once, it is a fluke, but this happened over and over again.
This time wanted to keep at it. Once my hand healed, thanks to yoga and another surgery, continued with the guitar. Learned for almost four years till my teacher said "You have graduated and I have taught you everything I could. The rest is up to you to practice and perfect!" . Then my job changed and ended going to Austin every alternate week and eventually to China and Taiwan every third week.
The guitar gently weeps.. still.. (here are some old videos from the blog!)
this video pretty much sums up my attempts at playing anything at home.. "Appppaaaa" would come the scream!
While I paint this as a bleak picture of me never getting to stick to music and being in the wrong place at the wrong time, truth is I was always close to music.
Here is the upside..
As a kid, I was always listening to my grandmother sing to me. My fathers elder sister was also an amazing singer and she used to sing whenever we used to meet or spend time together. She would tell me "Murali, unakku kural nalla irukku! Nee paatu kaththuko!" (Murali, you have a nice voice. You should learn to sing!) . Have never heard my mom or her siblings sing though, during my childhood.
Here are my dads older sister and my maternal grandma doing the aarati and singing. They would always be the ones to sing in any family function! (that grainy photo is from my Poonal)
My dad decided to splurge and get a Phillips gramaphone record player when I was around 4. We had only 5 records early on and we used to play it at bedtime almost every day in rotation. They were and I kid you not..
- Soundtrack of Ayappan movie
- Soundtrack of Adi Sankara movie
- MS Balaji Pancharatnamala
- Ayigiri Nandini by Anantharama deekshadhar
- MLV hits
Then my dad got a three disk MS set which had a black ODEON sticker in the middle. There were like 30 songs in those. A year later my uncle got a tape recorder after he came back from his first trip as a new employee. The whole family would be around this tape recorder. Tapes were becoming cheaper and more tapes were available. We could also "record" what we heard on All India Radio and our own voices. My grandmas voice was on a tape! My voice was on a tape somewhere!
We used to listen to music on a Phillips Transistor radio that had an antenna that went across the entire room. It was a copper coated mesh, that much I remember. We had it always set to AIR and listened to concerts and some film music. That was largely thanks to my last three aunts who were the younger generation and were fans of the movies that were emerging. This was the time where Rajni and Kamal were replacing Sivaji and MGR at the box office. Ilayaraja took over the airwaves. ( you can see that radio in the top shelf.. the TV was the first TV that we got. Doordarshan was our only channel and we would mostly listen to Carnatic concerts and the odd Hindi and Tamil movie they would play on Saturday and Sunday nights).
When I was in 5th grade and suffered from severe Jaundice or when I had a skin infection and missed out on school for three months, would listen to whatever was playing on a small pocket transistor radio all afternoon with my eyes closed. That was my only solace during a miserable period.
When I was going to college, my dad got me a Sony walkman from Burma Bazaar. I would spend most of my college days listening to all kinds of music on it. My collegemates, gave me a window to pop music which was also interesting!
The first thing I got after coming to the US was an RCA tape player and radio. Music was there in the lab all the time. On the plus side, I never had stage fright. Somewhere, there is a photo of me holding a mic on stage and singing at a TAGDV (Tamil Association of Greater Delaware Valley) Tamil New Year funtion. There was also another picture of me singing on stage at the Thiagaraja aradhana in NJ with hippie hairdo and all. Sadly, I cannot find those photos. Spent a day searching!! This is a photo of the Carnatic music group! Still in touch with Vish and Vatsan. The rest, I have no clue.. Hope they are all still singing!
Then the RCA player just started playing a different language. The feet were always moving, the heart was just beating to a new rythm!
As a dad, would sing to both kids at bedtime. There was a nightly quiz for them called the "Tamil Mirugam Raagam", which was questions about Tamil translations, a quiz about animals and identifying Carnatic music Ragas. Had to practice a little bit, just to make sure they did a good job of identifying.
Jr. would guess about 20 ragas and the little one about four or five. This was when Jr. was ~5 and the little one was ~2. Still remember how the little ones answer to all clues were always "Is it Shanmukhapriya?" and when I would actually hum that, she will say something else!
We would play music on the radio or CD's all the time with the kids.. Learned to sing the entire collection of Rafi songs thanks to Jr. and the little one. The Boowah and Koala collection, Barney and Friends, Elmo hits. The musical taste just changed a lot. Wish there was a recording of my rendition of "down by the bay" or "baby beluga"! You would be proud of my effort!
Music was always there, in the periphery, just not in a way I could sing and get better.
As the kids grew older, everytime I would start singing in the car, or sing along to something on the radio, the instant response would be "Appa, can you please shut up?!" . They would say "Please" before the shut up.
Jr. learned to become a really good Saxophone player and the little one learned to play Western classical Violin. We wanted the kids to have music in their life. The amount of time I spent driving them to their class, sitting outside their class, hearing them learn and play, went by fast. Watched Jr. learn music for a few years, then decide to dance instead and do her Arangetram. There was a lot of music. The blog has videos of their journey with music and dance over the years! So we were surrounded by music and again it was just a different type of music.
The antique violin still is in good shape. I just haven't gone to it regularly!
In the last 10 years or so, I had not opened my mouth to sing anything for fear of the "please shut up!" shout from the wife and kids. So shut up it was!
Monday, May 22, 2023 at 11:28PM ;)
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