A minor article about a major subject that requires (and
deserves) a book-length treatise, takes a look at the violin in Ilayaraja’s
music...
Baradwaj Rangan
For someone so steeped in the idiom of Western classical
music, it’s no surprise that Ilayaraja’s songs feature so much of the violin,
most notably in the symphonic cascades of string music – either in the preludes
and interludes of songs, or in the background tracks underscoring scenes.
What’s remarkable, though, is how differently, how unusually the instrument has
been put to use. Take Endrendrum Aanandhame from Kadal Meengal, and erase from
your mind the visions of Suman in a butterfly bow-tie. Fashion, unlike music,
don’t transcend their time. The song, though, is a beauty – and one you don’t
expect to have much use for a violin. Yes, a violin , a solitary instrument.
What might it be doing in a composition designed for a disco-club kind of
scenario? The synthesizer we can see a place for, just as we recognise, in this
universe, the legitimacy of drums and distorted guitar effects. But a violin?
But it’s there, and it announces itself midway through the
prelude by striking a long, sustained note and then several shorter
microtone-like bursts. By the latter half of the prelude it has completely
taken over, almost essaying phrases from a raga, and the other instruments have
receded to the background, doing what the violin usually does in a Carnatic
concert. It’s such a burst of unusual colour that the song is thrust into an
entirely different dimension – not just disco, but something beyond, something
that no one, those days, knew enough about to categorise as “fusion”. That
label is often slapped on arrangements that simply fuse an instrument from the
East with one (or many) from the West, but this is the fusing of two universes,
Carnatic music outlining the contours of a disco number. And not in a gimmicky
way, but in a manner that’s so organic that it seems to rise from the red earth
of this musical landscape.
The prelude ends, and so does the sound of the violin. We
don’t hear it till the first interlude, echoing a passage played by the synth,
except that it ends on a lower note. That, in itself, is sharp relief, for the
sound of a violin, strident and soft all at once, is so distinctive that it’s
impossible to listen to anything else – at least, any other instrument – while
it’s being played. And if there had been no more of the violin, the song, this
interlude, would have still stood out as unique, different from all the other
disco songs of the time. But, of course, that’s not all. After frilly flute
passages, and a guitar that rises to a near-crescendo, the violin, ever the
diva, elbows its way to the foreground again, grabbing our attention with four
lines of melody that end on the note at which the singer takes off in order to
render the first stanza.
In the first stanza, the violin is used to add a splash of
colour to the line endings, as if playing tag with the singer. And then,
silence – until it takes over the opening of the second interlude, with
furiously bowed passages. It makes way for other instruments, and then returns
to shadow the glorious conclusion. And all along, we realise, perhaps only after
the song comes to an end, that a genre that’s known and celebrated for its
exuberance has been tinged with an air of melancholy. The fusion isn’t just of
genres and instruments, but of mood. Ilayaraja liked to do that. The justly
famous Poonkathave, from Nizhalgal, comes to mind, another song that opens with
the sad strains of a solo violin cresting above an upbeat bank of violins being
played in unison. It’s a love song, a happy song, but again, in the second
interlude, this solo violin makes its sorrow heard.
If I seem to have spent an inordinate amount of space
describing a single song, with a cursory nod to another, it’s because of two
reasons. The first is academic. As the poem tells us, little drops of water
make up the mighty ocean, and it is through the specific that we approach the
general. Singular instances of violin use in individual songs add up to a
grand, overarching statement about Ilayaraja’s use of the violin.
But this reason, though true, is also something of a copout.
Because, more importantly, a writer is handicapped when given a word count to
write about this subject, which can fill a book, several books, given
Ilayaraja’s output and the number of genres in which he’s put the violin to
use. Put differently, it’s impossible, with this constraint, to arrive at that
grand, overarching statement, and all we can do is analyse and appreciate the
singular instances.
Like the four ascending violin lines that hand over the
baton to the flute in the prelude of
Sendhoorapoove, from 16 Vayadhinile. Or the solo violin that sets up Pothi
Vacha Malligai Mottu from Mann Vaasanai, another instance of a joyful duet
being etched with a semblance of sadness. Or the great numbers of violins, in
the prelude of Sundari from Thalapathy, that, instead of outlining a tune,
appear to vibrate at an atomic level, functioning as the atmosphere from which
the flute draws its breath. Or the violin concerto in Raajapaarvai, half
Carnatic, half Western, and fully magical, the moment of transition between
genres one of the most electric among all film music. Or the entirely
violin-free opening of Unnai Nenachen, the terribly downbeat song from Aboorva
Sagotharargal that a different music director would have festooned with
solo-violin passages, right from the get-go. Sometimes, even the absence of an
instrument can make a loud statement about its showcasing by the hands of a
master.
The writer is a National Award-winning film critic and the author of Conversations With Mani Ratnam. He is currently the Deputy Editor of The Hindu
Brilliant..!!!
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