Forgive the levity; the world of Carnatic music has no place for the pranksters and dilettantes. To be a vidwan, one needs to be extremely sincere and dedicated and shouldn’t mind turning up in public platforms in a pantomime parody of gaudy attire and hideous make-up.

It’s obvious that many people don’t venture anywhere near Carnatic music due to the misgiving that their knowledge to appreciate its finer points is inadequate. This is patently a wrong strategy. For instance, I have not let my total ignorance of the many intricacies of Carnatic music to come in the way off this piece.

Few lines of caution: Some of terms that you encounter below may sound too technical to some of you. Some of it may not make much sense to you. But don’t let that worry you. Because the whole purpose of the article is just that.

Few more lines of caution: The smart among you would have found the previous paragraph and the one preceding that to be similar in overall meaning. Well, you are the true ones made for Carnatic music, which, if you get down to it, is all about doing the same thing in assumed differentiation.

Alapanai

This is the freelance prelude to the actual song wherein the singer attempts to croon it in a manner as if he were dumb or at least laid low by a sudden paralysis to the face —- that is basically incapable of articulating even a single word normally.

For the uninitiated, an alapanai may seem a strange cross between a child’s incoherent blubber and a drunk’s indecipherable drawl. During the alapanai section, a singer employs, mostly, either of the vowels ‘a’ or ‘e’ and proceeds to disembowel it in a clinical manner through a convoluted process of stretching, chopping, mincing, mixing and, yes, blabbering.

Many lay fans may also wonder why the vidwan doesn’t come out straight and begin attempting the lyrics of the number. But this is just not on, because the whole idea of the alapanai section is to musically plot the barebones-contours of the ragam and thereby smother even the elementary chance of the listener figuring out what that ragam is by at least the song. Guessing the song and ragam (and mostly getting it wrong) is technically one of the highpoints of any Carnatic concert.

Krithi

Every song in a concert is a krithi, and they are so called because it’s in the tradition of Carnatic music to make things complicated for everyone.

One of the complaints laid against Carnatic music is that it’s filled with songs whose language is not understandable to both the performer and the listener. But top musicians have provided a fitting answer to such misplaced criticism by vocalizing in a manner that all the remnants of any identifiable language in the lyrics are butchered beyond recognition. In a Carnatic concert, ‘Oye, V channel’ may be the rough version of ‘Odi Vilayadu Pappa’.

Ragam

This provides the song with all its unique personality traits, which the performers go ahead and suffocate and strangle out with their own unique personality traits. The rule of the game is simple: No two performers shall thresh out the same ragam in an identifiably similar vein. This has been laid down with the explicit intent of keeping the audience awake, and in a state of suspended animation, also classically defined as utter confusion.

In a typical concert, it is not uncommon to go through sustained periods wherein no one in the auditorium, many times this certainly includes the performers too, having a clue as to what ragam is being attempted at that moment.

Sometimes the difference between two ragams can be so nuanced, like for example between Dwajavanthi and Sahana, that the variation becomes apparent only when an extremely skilful person is performing their names in writing, that too in English.

Thalam

The special beauty of rhythms and the staccato backdrop in Carnatic music is that you can pretty much manage a concert without it. For most of a typical concert, the accompanists are seen to just sit around the main performer, not unlike the yawning slip fielders in a cricket match, doing little work, which is technically even lesser than that of the vice-president, whose main job technically is to physically occupy a chair.

Many singers go about banging their thigh in a simulation of the thalam pattern, but in their ferocious enthusiasm they more or less drown out the accompanying percussionists.

Niraval

We now move into one of the finer aspects of Carnatic music, and begin to contemplate a situation wherein the musician, for some inexplicable reason, is struck with a single phrase or motif of the song and is unable to move beyond that.

If in the alapanai part, the performer loses the skill of articulation, then during the niraval session, he seems to suffer Ghajini-like a short-term memory loss, absolutely incapable of recollecting the rest of the words that make up the song. To hide the desperation and embarrassment, he or she then attempts the same line in different riffs, lulling the listeners into believing that it’s all an organic part of the concert.

There seems to be some technical wizardry involved in this, but, all the same, niraval is simply exalting art to a new level of incomprehension and indecipherability.

Swaram

Swaram rendition, clustering in patterned profusion the welter of seven syllables that are deemed to make up all music, is an important aspect of Carnatic singing based on the belief that alapanai and niraval alone are not enough to confound the listeners.

The lattice of swarams for each ragam is unique and special, and is usually delivered at breakneck speeds so that they all fall on the ears of the listeners in a mangled heap of incoherent syllables.

Thani Avarthanam

In a typical auditorium concert, this is the period when the main performer screeches to a close the swaram part and the accompanying artistes, as represented by the canteen staff, take over.

With nobody around, the percussionists belt it out on their hapless instruments, feeling so low, thereby creating a misleading picture that it is a solo act (thani avarthanam). But even the face of such heightened commotion, the tanpura player sits stoically as if he has no connection with what is happening around. Look closely, he could be auditioning for the post of Governor. Or else, he could be the vice-president.

Tailpiece or Tukda

These are sung in the closing moments of a concert. But out of work post-modernists reckon that Tukda is the portmanteau short-form of Thool Pakoda that are so famous in Sabha canteens.

By all of this, it is clear that a cutcheri is more about canteen and less about concert. In other words, it is, ragam, thanam and ‘palvali’.

©2012 Crank's Corner. All Rights Reserved.

After being to several kutcheris this season, I have come to the inevitable conclusion —— you can quote me on this —— the most important talent to be construed a top-notch musician, more important perhaps than shruthi and laya alignment, has to be the dress and make-up alignment. And there ought to be a straight connection between silk and sangeetham.

Otherwise there is no other logical explanation to the way most musicians physically present themselves at the concerts. Some women vocalists in fact have so much silk on their sari that an entire generation of silkworms must have been wiped out to weave them.

Latter day environmentalists or anthropologists or whoever does research on such things, when they sit down to research on who made the silkworms totally endangered, will doubtless put Carnatic musicians on the top of their list.

As far as the musicians’ jewellery goes, let us put it this way, some of them are in danger of becoming walking bullion markets. Half of India’s annual sale of gold is gobbled up by Carnatic musicians, and the remaining half is presumably shared between film stunt personnel and Bappi Lahiri.

And the make-up of most women musicians should cost slightly more than what it did Kamal Haasan for his Dasavatharam, in which he hideously hid himself behind ten different roles.

If you think I am making exaggerated and sweeping generalisations, then can you recall at least one woman singer who has ever come to a concert in anything other than shimmering silk, shinier gold and a face that has more layers of talc and cream than there are layers around the earth . I bet you can’t.

But don’t for a moment think that glitter and glisten are suffice to make you a highly paid musician. Expressions and miming are also key to being accepted as a big performer.

Let me elaborate: Have you ever been to a Carnatic vocal concert? If yes, then read on. If you have not, then stop reading this and go to a concert forthwith. Okay, now that you are back, let me pose this to you: Did you not grimace at the facial expressions of the singer?

If you didn’t, then either your eye-sight is bad enough for you to be eligible for vison-challenged people quota or you did not venture anywhere beyond the canteen, which is, by the way, not a bad idea considering the fact that most sabhas these days take care to serve better adais than attanas, so to speak.

As I was saying, most vocalists contort their faces with a writhing tightness that is otherwise possible only if you are being wheeled into the delivery room with labour pains. While touching higher octaves, vocalists bend their neck and face at such an agonisingly acute and high angle that they either look like one trying to unhinge the cranial set-up from the rest of the body or someone struggling to cope up in an area where someone else had broken wind pretty badly.

And while negotiating a swara or neraval pattern, singer generally close their eyes tightly not dissimilarly to the reaction of an irritated patient when the doctor pushes a sharp needle into the veins. The vehement slapping of the thigh, though admittedly for the tala pattern, would doubtless fetch a double nelson at a wrestling bout.

A Carnatic music performance, if you  understand, is a class pantomime act. And to be a Carnatic vocalist you need to have not just supple vocal chords but suppler muscles too. It is not to be attempted if you are not a double-jointed contortionist, especially from above the waist.

The only beings who can come anywhere near matching this are the rasikas who take the music and themselves very seriously. When the singer touches the higher octaves which is frequently, these fans can be seen to throw their arms up with alacrity  as if someone had put a gun at their waist.

And when the singer tackles soft and mellifluous passages, these rasikas let go some friendly ‘tchoo, tchoo’ seemingly calling a recalcitrant doggie for a biscuit. When the singer rains copious swaras, these rasikas generally shake their heads, which attempted anywhere else would entail urgent treatment for epilepsy.

All in all, it is good fun. Good enough at least for me to manage one week of Crank’s Corner. And next week? Well, I’ll face the music then!

(This is an old column I wrote for the publication several years ago).

©2012 Crank's Corner. All Rights Reserved.