I heard a lecdem By Rama Varma at the Music Academy recently. Not surprisingly on MDR. Easily the very first love of his life. I have to admit that I am not really a MDR fan. And not for lack of trying. Almost twenty years back RV tried to get me enthused about MDR's music. And I tried. But it did not take. I went back and in my brutally honest way informed him that he just sounded drunk. Since I have always felt that there is nothing more hypocritical than pretending to love something in any art form unless it is real for you. What can I say? MDR, like the greatest single malts, is an acquired taste. Though I absolutely loved all the MDR compositions we learnt from him like Gajavadana( Hamsadhwani), Sagarashayana, Manasa( Bowli) and of course Hariyum Haranum.
But something happened this last week when I listened to Tera tIyaga rAda. Of course, there is this incredibly sonorous baritone which is quite distinctive. But there was something else. It was as if his singing was timeless and not in the way the word is normally used. It was outside of time. He bent time to accommodate his concept of the composition. And as I heard it again and again over the past few days I realised my mind was getting quieter and maybe my breathing was becoming slower. And that brings us to the receptivity of the listener. Ultimately every performance is a one-to-one dialogue between two individuals. What a listener will get depends totally on his mind set, his receptivity, his world view at any point in time. And I sat and thought " I have read and heard so much about banis and the music of a Dhannamal and a Ramnad Krishnan or even a MMI?" So what is it? What is the characteristic of this? What draws aficionados to MDR? And somehow, the answer that kept coming back to me was that firstly he seemed to encapsulate a total conviction in his world view on what music was. And what was this world view? As I see it firstly everything is there in the composition. There is no need for any extraneous gimmicks, ornamentation etc. There can be incredible beauty in the deceptively simple rendering of a phrase. There is no hurry. Nowhere to go, nothing to get. The singing of a composition is a simple dialogue between you and the composer or the Divine. That is all it has to be. Nothing more. Nothing less. And if one does that authentically for one composition once in your lifetime that is enough. But that is what I got. But I know I have to listen to way more MDR. Also never knew about his Navagraha chittaswarams , which I need to now track down.
But ofcourse this lecdem also raised a query in my mind? What was this prati madhyamam doing here? Wasn't this a janya of 15? So what was going on? And of course I went to Ramya Narsimhan, my go-to on anything musical. And I learnt about many Madhyamas. Ofcourse I knew about sudha madhyama and prati madhyama and the varali madhyama which is almost panchamam. I will eventually upload her demoing the various madhyamams . But to quote her. There are actually four madhyamams: the sudha madhyamam, the tivra sudha madhyamam, the prati madhyamam and the Chyuta Panchama( or Varali) madhyamam in that order. Apparently there is no sudha madhyamam in Gowlipantu. It uses only the tivra sudha and the prati madhyamam. Thyagaraja has used both the tivra sudha and the prati whereas Dikshithar has used only the tivra sudha. Of course that makes me wonder why it is classified under 15 and not 51( Kamavardhini)?
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