The renowned Carnatic musician and author TM Krishna will attend Goa
Arts + Literary Festival 2014 (December 4-7, goaartlitfest.com)

A spectacular, iconic vocalist, TM Krishna draws huge audiences to
every performance. "...for the seasoned listener he came in to the
concert scene bringing back memories of the legends, and for the young
he is a phenomenon who holds their interest with his passion and
flamboyance" 
http://www.thehindu.com/features/friday-review/music/a-southern-music/article5809926.ece

This revolutionary young musician has now written one of the most
significant and controversial books on Indian music ever, his 'A
Southern Music: The Karnatic Story' is described by Amartya Sen as
"one of the best books I've ever read".

A Southern Music: The Karnatic Story was the subject of this superb
(and also controversial) review essay in Caravan magazine by Samanth
Subramaniam: http://www.caravanmagazine.in/books/modern-classical

An excerpt:

Krishna is always a magnetic performer. His voice is strong and sure,
his diction is cleaver-sharp, and his energy is boundless. On stage,
he does not request your attention, he demands it. During those three
hours, Krishna was in particularly splendid fettle. In the years that
followed, I often wondered if the concert imprinted itself upon me so
deeply only because it was my first. Then I found a recording of it,
played it back with some trepidation, and reassured myself of just how
marvellous it was.

Slowly and meditatively, Krishna sang a song in the raga Kedaram, and
then another in Devagandhari, his voice bending to his every thought.
He gave us an alapana—an improvisatory essay—of the raga Harikambhoji,
so sweet and clean that it still defines the raga for me. Two or three
times over the course of the concert, he let loose his trademark
sallies of improvised swaras, individual notes that tumbled after each
other in a torrent, as if some mighty dam had been breached. There was
even a flare of his famed irascibility. Just as he began on the
mangalam, the standard finale, some members in the audience rose to
leave. This is, unfortunately, common practice in most concerts, but
Krishna interrupted himself. “The mangalam will take 30 seconds,” he
scolded in Tamil. “I don’t think anybody is in that much of a hurry to
leave. Sit down! Thank you.” Everybody sat back down.

I couldn’t have known it at the time, but I had caught Krishna, then
29, on the cusp of a great creative restlessness. His music over the
next few years increasingly manifested this disquiet. For a while, in
his alapanas, he took to testing the nimbleness of his voice, pushing
it as far up as it could go, a full octave or more above his median
range, and then pulling it equivalently below so that he was
practically growling. He studied Subbarama Dikshitar’s Sangita
Sampradaya Pradarshini, published in 1904, a text of dense musicology
that prescribes singing some ragas in a manner very different to how
they are sung today. As a fascinating academic exercise, he released
albums of songs and alapanas sung according to this text, and on
occasion he even followed its strictures in live concerts. He
dispensed with the practice of beginning his performances with the
short, brisk composition called the varnam, but he did sometimes drop
one into the middle of the concert. Singers had done this before, but
memories are short, so a terrific kerfuffle ensued when, within the
hallowed halls of the Madras Music Academy in December 2010, Krishna
built his concert around an hour-long exploration of a grand varnam in
the raga Bhairavi.

Since then, Krishna has deconstructed the conventional concert
structure even further. An alapana in Thodi, say, need not be followed
by a song in Thodi, as has been the norm for decades. Instead, Krishna
may render another alapana in Hamsadhwani, and then a song in Khamas.
He may ask his percussionists to perform their solo in a tala—a beat
cycle—utterly different from the one in which he is singing. His first
piece might last half an hour; he may sing only five pieces in three
hours, compared to the near-dozen in the regulation thin-at-the-edges,
thick-in-the-middle concerts. He may, as he did a month ago, sing a
lovely Yamuna Kalyani alapana, listen to his violinist’s responding
alapana, and generously say: “I can’t follow that. You should just go
ahead and play the song yourself.” In a TM Krishna concert today, a
Bhairavi will still sound wondrous and disciplined and
pure—“classical”, to use a term he despises—but most other bets are
off.

None of these departures from the norm have affected Krishna’s
box-office appeal; I don’t think I’ve ever attended a performance of
his where the auditorium has been anything less than three-quarters
full. Nevertheless, within the staid circles of the Carnatic music
world, Krishna has stirred plenty of consternation. The least
charitable of his critics have scorned these “innovations”—the
double-quotes theirs, not mine—as gimmicks employed by a showman who
has plumbed his creative well and suddenly found it dry. Another
theory asks if Krishna is merely bored, if it has not all come too
easily to him: the Music Academy debut at the age of 12; the supple,
powerful voice and the agile mind; the awards; the popular success.

I’m inclined to think that Krishna is genuinely wrestling with two
important questions. How should this particular classical art respond
to the modern age? And in this process of realignment, what are the
responsibilities of the artist, towards her art but also towards her
audience? Krishna’s hefty new book, A Southern Music: The Karnatik
Story (HarperCollins India, 588 pages, Rs 799) can be read as a fresh
attempt at thinking through what amounts to an existential crisis.

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