Abby V

A smiling young man opens the door to a beautiful house and sings 10-12 second snippets of 73 Indian classical rAga-s in quick succession when prompted, effortlessly and instantaneously, whilst casually walking around the home. The camera follows him around, shooting without any cuts, for the entire ~14 minutes. Abby…

Musicians engage listeners in novel ways

With time on their hands and normalcy nowhere in sight, Carnatic musicians are resorting to thought provoking, interesting and carefully curated video series’ to engage with others. This reflects a change from the first lockdown fourteen months ago which resulted in a surfeit of ad-hoc, generally poor-quality programming, in what…

Female Composers in Carnatic Music

From the 1st century CE Sangam period to the present day, there have been numerous female composers from the southern-most states. While some were revered as saints, most were ordinary women who straddled all household domestic responsibilities – some being closet-composers out of necessity. Under the auspices of Kala Prashala…

Bhagyalakshmi M. Krishna

Women in percussion are so few that their gender alone makes them the cynosure of attention. Bengaluru-based Bhagyalakshmi M. Krishna, however, has gone beyond that, earning respect for her skills on the morsing, the identical adjectives used by her fellow artistes serving as testament. She has shared the stage with…

Praveen Sparsh

Praveen Sparsh’s recent passion project, Unreserved, puts the mridangam in settings outside its traditional confines, and marries it with sounds he painstakingly recorded over the years on treks, at traffic signals, airports, rail and bus stations. To hear music, or the potential for music, in noise – or what the…

Legacy – a boon or a bane?

Semmangudi Srinivasa Iyer (SSI) strode Carnatic music like a colossus. However, none in his family followed in his footsteps. His eldest daughter, Santha Kasy Aiyar, explains, “My father was categorically against his family pursuing music professionally. He felt musicians were perceived as lower in the social ladder than those formally…

G. Guru Prasanna

After having performed concerts for many years, the 24-year-old student approached the new Guru. “You should not touch the mridangam for five years. I have to teach you new fingering.” G. Guru Prasanna, whose musical trajectory has seen him play multiple instruments initially, before settling on the kanjira, says, “I…

Anantha R. Krishnan

Most know Anantha R. Krishnan (Anantharaman Krishnan) as a skilled mridangist and the grandson of Sangita Kalanidhi Palghat R. Raghu. However, the Ivy League educated Anantha cannot be encapsulated in a single sentence. He is an artiste who looks at art itself with broad horizons – well beyond the mridangam…