Miniature Reproduction Of The 12 Music Stalwarts

Main Feature - Nagaaraj & Manjunath - Mysore Violinists On Centrestage

The silver jubilee in the career of a performing artist is indeed an important milestone. MysoreNagaraj, the tall, slim, handsome and polite violinist had thus much cause to celebrate as he crossed the milestone last year. An established and popular violinist in the front ranks of Carnatic musicians, he is still at an age at which looking back on his career so far only makes him look forward to future tasks and achievements. The ancestral place of Nagaraj is Mudigundam, a village in Kollegal taluk, previously in Coimbatore district before the reorganisation of the States in 1956 and now in Mysore district in Karnataka. His grandfather M.P. Subbappa used to play the harmonium in dramas that used to be staged in neighbouring villages and had come to be known as Harmonium Subbappa.

Whats Wrong With Hindustani Music?

The particular phenomenon that Vajpeyi appears to identify as the key 20th century change affecting Indian music is that it has become irrevocably middles class. There are two aspects to this. First, instead of being largely hereditary, most musicians are nowadays from middleclass, non-music-specialist families, and many are, as Vajpeyi puts it, unwilling to follow some archaic conventions of servitude in the gharana system; nor do they find it practical and necessary to live for a long time with the guru or ustad, thus imbibing not only skills but also a bit of the ethos in the timetested guru-sishya tradition. Second, the new middle-class audiences, quite large in number compared to the few who had access to classical music in feudal times, do not so much enjoy as consume. Music is no longer savoured with patience, it is devoured in a hurry. The slow pace, the reflective strain, the subtle nuance, the eloquent silence are all becoming rare, if not altogether extinct. The pace of music has quicken