The heart of the KM Music Conservatory in Chennai is a large, quite bare room on its first floor. There's a couch lurking by one wall, and a smattering of chairs, but the room's focus is a piano floating off-centre. On or near this piano, the Conservatory's students rehearse through the day, the music flowing up and into the building's arteries—its air-conditioning ducts—like warm, life-giving blood.
Sitting in a little office off that central room, Joshua Pollock hears the music and smiles. "It's like that almost all day," he says. "I'll walk by at 9pm and I'll see people playing, or helping each other out. I've never seen anything like it in the West." Pollock is the Conservatory's violin instructor, one of the six startlingly young, freshly graduated teachers who have been recruited from music schools overseas to fulfil a long-harboured yen of A. R. Rahman. "To start a conservatory like this has been his dream for close to 10 years now," says V. Selvakumar, managing director of the KM Music Conservatory (what the initials "KM" stand for is Rahman's own secret. "He won't even tell me!" Selvakumar says). The Conservatory aims to offer (for the first time in India, its brochure claims) training courses of collegiate intensity in not only Western classical music but also in music technology and audio engineering—which is where Selvakumar comes in. Dream come true: Rahman has been wanting to start a conservatory like this for close to 10 years. For five years, Selvakumar has owned and operated Audio Media Education, India's first Apple-authorized training centre for digital music production. When I first meet him, he has just finished teaching a 2-hour class in an impressively equipped studio. Just outside the classroom, in a non-air-conditioned lobby, he proceeds to light and rapidly smoke four cigarettes in a row. "People today still think that it's risky to be a professional musician, so there's very little advanced training available at a wide level," Selvakumar says. "The Trinity College courses are there, but only up to a level that students in the West attain even while they're in school." As a result of that, and also because of the increasingly electronic nature of most compositions, Rahman sensed a decline in the quality of live music. "Every good violinist around today, for example, is from his dad's generation," Selvakumar says. "The culture of the classical orchestra has declined in India. Maybe Zubin Mehta could have revived it, but he has orchestras abroad," Rahman says. "People have started thinking that the synthesizer can take over for the orchestra. But that's just not true." It seems like an odd observation from Rahman, the man who pushed Indian film music into the electronic age, and who once said that the electronic synthesizer was his favourite instrument. His scores are characteristically as layered as bebinca, with a dozen different sounds baked seamlessly together in the oven of technology. -- regards, Vithur
