Marghazi singing

Paadarivom Padipparivom has this wonderful idea to give a platform to students to sing one song each during Marghazi season. There is a lot of encouragement from this community for learning Carnatic music as well as Cine music.

Most of the fellow adult classical music students I have talked to, started learning in hopes that the knowledge here will improve their Cine music singing. It has been two years and two months since I started learning Carntic music again after a long break, from Koushik Ramchander.

He has been an epitome of patience!

For a novice like me, the support this group gives is just phenomenal. If there is one place where the Dunning Kruger effect is in full display, it is while learning Carnatic music or singing Tamil movie songs. 

When I started singing, my knowledge was very limited.. not that I could not identify ragas instantly or have a concept of what "right" sounded like. When my own voice was producing the output, my ears somehow selectively decided to be very forgiving when I was off. It takes a lot of "listening", very careful listening to understand that you are off. 

If a song had 600 notes total, I would be off on 400 of them two years go. Today I am off on 40 and going towards 4. My MIL has been my one constant judge and supporter while my mom has been my strongest critic. 

Two weeks ago, they agreed for the first time after hearing me sing a carnatic based movie song. My MIL told me my voice has finally adapted to sing SPB songs. My mom actually said this and I am saving this for posterity! She prefers if I stick to slokas and bhajans instead of movie songs, which is expected. 

My teachers at PP of course gave me honest feedback on every line of that song on where I was off in the notes, pronunciation and execution. The DK effect does play mind tricks, once you know finer details and appreciate what is actually required vs. where you are. You know what has to be done, but it needs a lot more effort to get there and it cannot be done in a week!

Not one for giving up, have been trying impatiently. That is the truth. 

Singing with just a Tanpura in background and your own hand to keep the beat was a lot more challenging than singing along with your teacher or fellow student on Smule with a familier fixed backround track! Almost came to the conculsion that Smule singing isn't singing and was downright depressed two weeks ago. This song is usually sung in the ragam Naatai (for most of the instances you find on Youtube). He taught it to me in Gowlai ragam. Asked my teacher why he thought I could do this and he said "You can do this Sundar! you already sang every line after me very well in class. you just have to do it at a stretch and on your own!"

Thank god for teachers. They tell you to buckle up, keep your head high and get your confidence back, one step at a time. Koushik Sir as I call him has been my music shrink as much as my music teacher. When you start learning at 49, the psychological challenges in learning need to be fixed as much as the skill gap. What he says between singing notes and making me repeat is the other half of the lesson, probably the bigger lesson! After many attempts, voicenotes feedback on whatsapp, he finally gave me the equivalent of the Oliver Cromwell look.. that made my day!

A heartfelt thank you to this platform and the folks who make it great!  

Carnatic music folks (especially family), this will not meet your standards. The good news is that I am okay with where I am today and tomorrow WILL be better than today! 

Thanks again to PP for this experience! It feels good to participate in the Marghazi season remotely!

Plan all you want..

The post on attending the spring concert season is here.. 

This year both SIFA and Sankritilaya had an impressive series of performances lined up. Had planned to go to as many of these as possible, including some "double headers". It is one thing to listen to one 3 or 3 1/2 hour concert. Listening to back to back concerts with only a 30 minute break is a very immersive experience. 

It is like doing a hot yoga double. The first class is the warm up for the second class. You are more flexible in the second class but you don't have the same strength. Something along same lines happens at these double headers. You start to close your eyes and completely enjoy the second concert but you zone out too often. 

Got to hear one vocal concert outside of SIFA and Sankritilaya. It was our friends son's mridangam arangetram. He did us all proud. The vocal for his arangetram was by Ranjani Ravindrabharathy (his guru's daughter). She sang amazingly well. She is going to be a rock star in her own right. We got to attend her guru's daughters concert as well as part of the fall lineup! We hope to see our friends kid keep up his performance as well. 

The concerts I managed to go to this season..

Ashwath Narayanan

Ramakrishnan Murthy

Anahita and Apoorva

Trichur brothers

Vignesh Ishwar

Sriranjani Santhanagopalan

It is not just the main artists but all the supporting artists that were amazing. Charumathi Raghuraman and Vishvesh Chandrasekaran were just amazing! Look forward to them doing violin concerts in the near future. 

There are a few concerts I wanted to go to but missed. Yet again, missed a Sanjay Subramanyan concert. That was scheduled the exact week we had to go drop the kids in SoCal. We did not know that both our kids would end up in quarter system schools with a late start. Missed it.. maybe next year..

There is a concert today as well, but could not go. Hence the "closing post" for concert season. Hope my friends who made it are enjoying it right now.

A few pieces that stuck to my head for a full week before the next concert.. Vignesh did a RTP of Dikshidar's 14 raga masterpiece, Shri vishwanadham bajeham. First time hearing a Thanam for all 14 ragams, live. That was a standout. 

Sriranjani sang Vanchatonuna almost like a haunting melody. 

Ashwath sang a song called Shonaiyum kaathu nal aanaiyum kaathtu. Have never heard this before. The lyrics were just amazing and he sang this ragamalika so well. He also sang Karaharapriya for an hour and it was the best I heard in recent times. 

Thrichur brothers sang an RTP in Jog. Pat myself on the back for boldly guessing it was Jog when my friends were guessing it as closer south Indian popular ragas. All I had was one familiar phrase from Pramadhavanam (from His Highness Adbullah) to go with. Was so happy I guessed right! They also sang Bo Shambo with the audience participating. The crowd was dancing. The bros are on to something. Between them and RaGa, these are artists today that are trying to spread the reach of carnatic music and give it a mass appeal to reach a non technical audience. Sincerely commend their effort!

Anahita and Apoorva sang in Kalavathi. Had never heard this one before. They also sang Kaa vaa vaa extremely well. It stayed in my head..

Ramakrishnan Murthy was outstanding in every piece he sang. He may well and truly be the first US born kid to become a Sangeetha Kalanidhi. What a talent. He sang Chinnanjiru kiliye as a ragamalika, but with a twist. He used different ragams than the ones Bharathiyaar used. Some of us liked it. Everyone has heard that as a kid and the tunes just stick. Swithing to a different ragam and singing it so well is a challenge. It did cause a debate post concert.. especially with the older generation! 

It is good that the bay area gets to see these performances. Next year, plan to take jr. with me to some of these concerts whenever she happens to visit. 

Can't wait to see next year's lineup!

When the rug gets pulled under your feet...

The recent spring concerts I attended were not just a treat to the ears, but also a treasure trove when it came to learning new things. 

Not just talking about the new ragams that we got to hear and appreciate and add to our list of things to cross correlate for future raga identification, but the specific details and comments made by the singers during the concert. 

Two of these concerts had the same nugget of information presented in slightly different ways. When Sudha Raghunathan started explaining the concept of "graha bedam" (planetary shifts would be my literal translation or place changes a more amenable translation?) I was simply lost.

She started explaining it this way. We start with Madhyamavathi ragam and if we move the base Sa (imagine C in a C to C scale) to the next note in the raga, and we prounce the notes differently keeping the original frequencies, we end up with a new known raga. This type of note shifting on the same original scale gives you five ragas.. when you start with a five note raga like Madhyamavathi.. she asked the audience what happens when you make the "ri" into the "sa" and what happens when you make the "ga" into the "sa" and some audience members responded.. and as she kept asking the volume and number of answers dropped exponentially. It was funny to watch. For me, it was like my ground shifted!

Sitting there trying to grapple with what was happening, my head started hurting. I am a drawing board kind of guy who is a very visual learner. Made a mental note of this and came home and searched google for pictorial explanations of this. Did not find anything that clearly showed me this.. so made a chart to explain this. 

Before doing that though, wanted to make a list of five note ragas using the same style to try and pick from the raga list. There was a lot of time spent double checking this across multiple sites. In spite of that, there are possible mistakes in this. Some ragams have complex multiple descending sequences and that might not be same across sites. Some ragams are essentially the same notes, but the way the notes are used in select sequences to bring out the flavor of the raga (think catch phrases.. or literally "pakkad" in Hindustani terms) is just different. 

First a list of pure five note ragas that are common and where at least two songs are there to identify it. This one has the ascending scales listed and descending scales listed

Then there were ragas that had five notes in aarohanam (ascending sequence) but more than five notes inavarohanam (descending sequence). Made a table of that as well.. which came in handy after another concert!

Once this list was done, I did not even have to know what raga turned into what. Just go on a sequence of Sa to Sa to the next octave Sa. Type in the first ragam, see what the notes changed to, cross refernce with the first table.. and voila.. it was easy to see what she was talking about!

You can click on the images to get a large size version.

The idea is this, based on my limited understanding. If you start with Madhyamavathi, you make the "ri" the "sa" and move all corresponding notes in Madhyamavathi raga relatively on a keyboard (shift it by same number of keys), then you get the next ragam. It is the sound you make versus the syllable you say but the way this is done in a concert is simply masterful. You need total command over the placement of the notes in their respective frequencies to the point where saying something different consistently and shifting it and doing it all over again makes it sound natural. 

To a layman, it sounds like magic. I felt like that monkey in the youtube videos that is amazed by a magic trick! Only after doing all this notation, there was some understanding and an "aa-haa!" moment. Some folks have the natural ability to visualize this and it is easy for them as they are steeped in music. For other learners who need music aids, this might hopefully help!

Again, mistakes if any are mine. So advance apologies for them. If you read this and find ways to correct this, please drop a note.  

This same concept was done at a more advanced level by RaGa (Ranjani Gayathri sisters) in their Raaja by RaGa concert. They started with one raga and went to explore both five and six note ragas with this same shifting and covered it with songs composed by Ilayaraja in movies. It was done brilliantly. With each shift they covered a five and six note raga variation. 

There were many amazing nuggets of information and learnings across all concerts. Will share them over the next few weeks.

Until then, the learning continues..

Sometimes all you have to do... is listen!

One of the advantages of living in the bay area is the significant local population that is interested in South Indian Classical music. 

We have two organizations that have memberships and have a concert(Kutchery) series announced early enough. The main one is SIFA or South India Fine Arts and the other one is Sankrirthi Laya. Then there are the other one off concerts where you buy direct tickets for artists who do just one or two concerts!

This spring concert season in bay area starts when all the artists have done performing in Chennai and Mumbai and they migrate to the bay area when the temperatures just start to be manageable compared to Chennai. They end up starting in California and go east as the weather warms up there. 

Have been treated to a wonderful concert list. Most of these concerts are on Sunday, some being on Saturday. It is almost a concert every weekend for 12 weeks. Made it a point to attend almost all of the vocal or instrumental ones. Skipped the dance programs. 

Given my knee was already hurting and inflamed for most of spring, sitting in one place for 4 hours for each concert, not to mention the lines to get seated.. the carpooling with friends back and forth to venue, each concert was a 5 1/2 to 6 hour commit. Given the interest with my friends, we went as a group! The group is 5 ladies and me. Apparently only one person in each of those families manages to sit in one place for 4 hours! Given the ladies color coordinated their Sari's for every concert, they would even publish the color in our whatsapp group and where possible I would even wear a T-shirt in their color of choice. All said and done, I had a lot of fun attending the concerts. 

Most of them were amazing, some were like "meh" and one we left 30 minutes before concert ended as one of the carpoolers had to take care of an urgent issue at home. Somehow we were all okay leaving that one early. 

Here is the list that I attended in the order

Violin concert by Lalgudi siblings

Vocal by Kalyanapuram S. Aravind

Vocal by Sudha Raghunathan (this was not through the memberships but a concert organized for fund raising for OPEN education).. she did more of a lec dem than a traditional concert

Vocal by Saketaraman

Vocal by Abhishek Raghuram 

Vocal by Malladi Brothers

A special "carnatic'y concert based on Ilayaraja songs by RaGa (Ranjani Gaythri) which had discounted tickets thanks to SIFA! Added bonus was that I got to take Jr. who had just landed from college the previous day!

Vocal by Amrutha Venkatesh

Vocal by Gayathri Venkataraghavan 

This pretty much wrapped up Spring season. Fall season begins in September!

When you get to listen to all these artists and their accompaniment artiss on voilin, mrudhangam, tabla, ghatam, kanjira .. you are in for a treat in every concert. 

Listening to the different styles, the way the artists express themselves in each piece, their mastery of their craft and in some cases the amazing syncronization between two artists, gives you a subconsicous understanding of what these ragas make you feel. Going to concerts is also a good learning experience, when you and your friends are chatting on the whatsapp group trying to race to identify the raga for the song or the concept being tried. We discuss the concert on the way home! Sometimes my friends and the jokes pre or post concert add more to the experience than the concert itself. 

When I get to write more, will key in my thoughts on each of these concerts and the special lightbulb moments!

The good thing in these concerts was the number of parents who managed to get their kids to sit and listen. Sometimes it is tough to keep them in one place. For the most part the kids sat, listened, guessed ragams, sang along in places and their smiling faces in the audience made it all the more interesting. Carnatic music wil definitely survive another generation at least based on the audience stats!

The regular memberships for SIFA is 160 USD for a year and Sankritilaya is 75 USD. You get ~12 and ~8 concerts for that a year! If you get to attend most of the concerts, you get your monies worth! Trick is in clearing your weekend calendar and prioritizing this over other events.  My family has been extremely supportive in letting me disappear all evening for this many days! They do it because I come home with a song on my lips and have a happy high for a day or two post concert! That means they have to deal with regular me only for 5 days a week.. Given a choice they would send to a concert every three days. 

They say "katradhu kai mann alavu, kallaadhadhu ulagalavu!" (what you have learned so far is comparable to a fist full of sand, what you are yet to learn is as vast as the earth). Even though we familiarize ourselves with as many ragas as possible, in every concert we learned a new ragam and what it sounds and feels like! 

The listening continues, as does the learning!

If you are a bay area parent trying to get your kids interested in learning Carnatic or South Indian classical music, do avail yourself of these memberships in the organizations and give your kids a chance to hear these wonderful artists. They will definitely enjoy and take an interest!

My film song singing definitely improves over time as my Carnatic singing progresses. Given time constraints and the knee issues, have not been singing movie songs to the extent I used to. That will pick up in the next three months!

Here's to more music listening!

Learning the hard way

Started writing this post last year, same time.. but it kept getting revised as time went by to the extent that it never made it out.

Sometimes a journey takes you through so many intermediate sights worth seeing that if you start waiting to post till you reach your final destination, all those posts just don't make it.. that is if your final destination is mind blowing. 

When it comes to the music learning journey, have no final destination planned. So it would be ridiculous to wait for some special moment to finish this post. So here goes. . . while this post definitely gets the "publish" button today, the music learning will keep going.

The previous posts in this blog tab tell you everything that got me to this point. I became a "student" yet again, trying to sing movie songs better than the average bathroom singer.  (I am pretty quiet in the bathroom as the showers are always 2-4 minutes maximum. Keep pushing my family to take shorter baths to conserve hot water and the associated electricity bill!). The singing happens in the car when no one else is present. 

After joining Paadarivom Padipparivom as a student, I got a chance to be a mentee in a live show. Got a call from my teacher and he asked if I am free on a weekend morning at 5:30 AM. Told him I will obviously be free, but singing with the family is asleep will be a challenge. Was also not ready for this! They knew I was a beginner. What were they thinking ? Putting me up in a live show to learn in front of everyone?  My teacher (as for some strange reason like all my other teachers) had more faith in me than I had in myself. Maybe that is a common trait for all teachers? Or maybe I just luck out finding teachers like this? One has to be very lucky to find the right teachers, for any subject! He said "you will do just fine! it is better for everyone to see how you learn from this experience as a beginner!"

There I was sitting on my meditation pillow on the floor in front of the now familiar "manja suvaru" or "yellow wall" at 5AM testing out audio and video. It was one of my favorite songs "Mounamana Neram" and I had been warned by family not to touch songs like this so as to keep SPB's memory alive. The fact that a million others are butchering SPB song's even as I type this post somehow didn't seem to matter to the family!  At least I was being taught the song by a teacher, word by word! 

The instruction 5 days ahead of this live experience was simple. Listen to this song on a loop 20-30 times. Listen to it and not just hear it. Pay attention to little details as you listen. So I went and did just that, or thought I did! This was also the first time the format of this teaching episode was changing to have two teachers teach two students at the same time. Male teacher teaches male mentee and female teacher teaches the female mentee. The female mentee was a quiet down to earth "pro". She was as tense as me as it was her first time being live, but later I learned that her hubby was her pillar of strength and was giving her a tutorial class at home. Me?! No such luck, as my family was trying to not get involved in this process at all. Gandhiji would have learned a thing or two to speed up the "Quit India" movement, if he had watched my family quit me that week.  I sat through that live teaching show and learned one thing. Listening to a song 100 times didn't do shit for my ability to sing it. The little nuances I thought I had understood, all nonsense! What was I even listening to?

Then came the harder part. Having to put out a song invite within 36 hours. There were two lines that I simply could not deliver! I got voicenotes from both teachers giving me a lot of confidence. The female teacher gave me slow motion notes on how to sing the thing and I still was struggling to sing it at regular speed. At one point, they took pity on me and said "this will do!" for the invite.  It reminded me of "that will do Pig!" dialog from Babe! A few people were nice enough to join my invite. I could have definitely done a lot better and have done better, since then. Given that moment in time when a zillion lightbulb moments happened in two days with respect to learning something, having a time crunch to deliver <100 words in a 4 minute song to near perfection and knowing I failed in 80% of the words, it was gut wrenching!

I am not just a student. I am also a yogi. If there is one thing my yoga gurus have taught me, it is that "falling down is human but getting back up and trying again, now that is a yogi!" 

Dusted myself up after that debacle and decided that I will do better every week compared to the previous week. Whatever that experience taught me, I was going to internalize it and improve on it every week. Was not going to give up on singing because I made a fool of myself on a live teaching show. If anything, this was like getting into an arranged marriage. You like or don't like something about her? It doesn't matter because you are already married to the girl. Just figure it out! Had already embarassed myself in front of the all the teachers and students in the music group, not to mention all my friends and family. This was like rock bottom. There was only one way to go from there! Improve week on week!

My teachers however, were talking as though they had struck gold with me. They were very happy with my sincerity and my ability to pick up at least half of what they were saying. One thing was also clear to me a month after this experience. I had to pick up the pieces and start learning Carnatic music at the earliest to be able to sing film songs better. My ability to place a note where it needs to be was pathetic. 

Given most of the teachers in Paadarivom Padipparivom were classical music teachers, I decided to start learning Carnatic (South Indian classical) music as well on the auspicious Vijayadasami day last year. My teacher(Koushik) is a patient man in his early forties with a lot of experience in teaching folks of all age groups. In  the very first class he told me "I am not here to teach you knack. Will teach you hacks instead". Will never forget the way he said it. He was in the business of teaching old dogs new tricks and he meant it. Classical music is learned by kids in south India at the age of 4 or 5 and they pick it up over time with a lot of practice over two decades. I was almost 50 trying to start from scratch again!

This needed a different curriculum and syllabus. One designed to keep a middle aged man interested enough to keep going and still make slow and steady progress. Koushik has managed to do it so far. It has been 14 months since my first Classical music class (which is once a week for 50 minutes) and I can in all sincerity say that every class has had at least one lightbulb moment and every class has built on the incremental progress from the previous classes. We have finished a full book of songs in 14 months. Given that there was no planned schedule to get anywhere at anytime, at least from my side, it was suprising that he got me this far.

He always reminds me of the four stages in the learning curve:

1. Unconscious incompetence : I don't even realize what it is supposed to sound like

2. Conscious incompetence : I realize what the thing is supposed to be like but don't how how to do it yet

3. Conscious competence : Know what is required but still a work in progress. all it takes is practice at this point and hard work.. the understanding is there.. but it is a struggle

4. Unconscious competence : can sing it with eyes closed and practiced ease.. no need to think about it! 

By the time the mentee experience was done, was going from stage 1 to glimpses of 2. Now after 14 months of learning Classical music and singing one movie song a week with a systematic approach, have gotten to start seeing stage 3 in the horizon.  

It is my sincere hope that in a few years, will get to 3 and eventually on to step 4!

In 2022, have sang 36 songs and submit them for reviews and have recevied valuable feedback from the teachers on every one of those songs! Have definitely improved as a singer in the last 12 months. Have also learned to appreciate what I am listening to, thanks to the improved awareness! Also know why some of my fellow students are a class apart from the rest. 

The highlight of 2022 singing was this.

Very happy to have music back in my life now! Also extremely happy to have found this community of singers at different levels who really encourage each other and bring out the best that everyone has to offer muscially!

If you are someone who wants to improve your singing no matter what your level is, would definitely suggest joining this community!  

The systematic approach to singing one movie song a week is an unfinished post as well. Will post that soon, as it will definitely benefit other learners!