Dear Goanetters, I would like to share an email response from Madhav Chari to my post of "Jai Ho Rehman."
Madhav, Thanks for continuing to engage and point towards meaningful analogies. You succeeded in writing what we often talk about. My hope has often been that people will be able to leverage though laterally. So looking at calligraphy and say swordsmanship, music and management as you do so well in your seminars. Hope to see you soon. venantius +++++++ VJP, please see my comment on this and add this post to Goanet if you see fit. Dear Everyone, and music afficionados of all persuasions, First and foremost when people talk about actors like Shah Rukh or Rahman, as it is portrayed in the media, it is never about the quality of the acting or the music, it simply is a comment on the film or music industry. The Oscars are about the film industry, and no matter what anyone says, there are films that do not see the light of the Oscars that have good quality, and there are films that may happen to win awards that may have good quality. When Jagjit Singh goes on public record saying that Rahman does not know anything about ghazals, he is right. Sometimes though I feel that when this type of comment enters the public media I see it as a derogatory comment and it can come from some sort of jealousy: and in the end it is not counter productive. One fact you have to remember about film musicians, and I have interacted extensively with Loy Mendonca: film music in a sense does not require you to deliver musicianship in real time. That means as a live musician on the stage you have to deliver: no edits, no cut and paste jobs on the computer, and if you make a mistake you cannot go back and fix it. This is like live drama. Performing live takes a lot more effort than doing studio work in Mumbai no matter what these musicians may tell you. Take away their access to technology, give them a simple guitar or piano and see if they can deliver a live performance for 90 minutes without losing the audience: they will fail. In fact, many musicians have told me that their abilities as live musicians have dwindled since they entered the studio zone for ad world jingles and film scoring because they stopped playing live music (except a few times a year). Playing live is like a muscle: you don't use it you lose it. What these film musicians excel at is production for the specific goal of a film: they can take snippets of some flamenco guitar player and weave it as a background for some playback singer, do some orchestral backdrop (by the way I have met Rahman's orchestrator), each done separately and do an nice edit job and voila, you have a product. The film composer in this case is someone who is able to manage this job well with different people contributing to different tasks. He has what we can say is the "bigger vision". Also one interesting thing about Indian film scoring: the songs are recorded a lot of the time before the movie even begins shooting, so film composers do not even need (hypothetically) a detailed plot of the movie. They could in principle get moods from the director, some scenes from the director, number of songs, some cultural influences (say Rajasthan for example), and they go for it. The background score is done later when they watch the film, but when you buy the CD the main things are the catchy songs which have been composed beforehand. Rahman's orchestrator will be able to deliver work for the film, but he will not be able to compose a piece of one hour or 45 minutes that has integrity and complexity of structure of a modern classical master composer like Elliott Carter, and he does not even have the intellectual and musical skills to do that, and NOBODY in India nor Hollywood (including John Williams) is a composer at that level: but that is not at all necessary to function in the film world in India. Playback singers do not have to be at the voice training level of the best carnatic, dhrupad or Hindustani musicians, they are also not at the level of some of the Sufi musicians I saw from Rajasthan, and I suspect on a musical level (communicating a deep truth of music) they are not at the level of the mystical Baul singer from Bengal. Again deep spiritual truth of music is not what the film needs: it needs a singer to deliver the particular song in real time, and so long as it fulfills the needs of the film it is OK, time to move on to the next project. In my own experience, the detailed knowledge of many people working in the film world is pretty low, and they are also unable to extrapolate intelligently the capability of musicians or in other words the film composers do not necessarily have the ability to estimate the overall ability of musicians, but they will be able to make an assessment whether or not this particular musician can function for them within the context of the film score. That is expected because they are not musicians who perform live a lot of the time and have to carry an audience without too much technology or cut and paste jobs. In the world of spoken language, everyone first learns at least one language whether it be Tamil, Bengali, English, Konkani, Marathi, Gujarati, French etc. Even if they are multilingual, one language could end up being the dominant mode of expression where most communication is done in that language, or if one is a writer for example one chooses that language or one is most comfortable in that language in order to express. In order to communicate well verbally, one should at least have a good working knowldge of one language. In the world of music, when one looks at the history of music across the globe, and at musicians across the globe, musicians who have reached a very high level of musicianship have internalized at least ONE specific music form .... usually since the demands on musicianship are so high everywhere, one music form is usually enough for most musicians. I submit to you that most of the film composers in India have not really internalized one music form. To say that some film composer did the Trinity college exams is not a bona fide test of internalized knowledge in western classical music. And neither is the claim by a film composer in the press that he is an expert on carnatic, ghazals or whatever music form he chooses to talk about. If you say that a particular pianist performed a Mozart concerto with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, that gives a better picture, if you performed this with a not so well known orchestra it could also give a good picture depending on whether or not the classical music world knows of that orchestra. In short, judgement of the caliber of a musician in a specific music form is done within the world of that music form. So another example: if you are a jazz musician from India, and you impressed working jazz musicians in New York then that indicates that you are a jazz musician of caliber. If you did not impress New York musicians but Paris musicians thought you were OK, that only means that you are still a jazz musician with knowledge of jazz music, but by no means you are an exceptional jazz musician and even Paris musicians would agree with their New York counterparts. This is exactly the same as making a factual claim that one knows French. Well how do you test this: ask them to meet fluent French speakers, preferably from France or some Francophone country like Algeria or Senegal or Haiti, and those speakers will tell you clearly whether or not the person making the factual claim is exaggerating or not. Note I am not making a factual claim that people in France speak better French than their ex-colonies. It so happens in the case of jazz or western classical music New York is a primary center within the world, in the case of jazz THE primary center. >From this vantage point it is clear that most of the film composers within India (Rahman included) are not at all well versed in any one specific music form (folk or classical), to the point that they could be serious players within that form (look at their past track records). I don't have any reason to doubt Jagjit Singh's assessment since I am not familiar with ghazals. My carnatic and Hindustani music musicians (some are big names now in India) also tell me he knows little. In fact these gharana or guru-shisya based systems have a pretty good idea instinctively where you could be as a musician depending on your particular lineage: that is a fact, because you cannot learn the music at a high level any other way. Its analogous to someone becoming fluent in French without any prolonged personal contact with fluent French language speakers: it is simply cognitively impossible. You can check this out by looking at language learning processes from both the cognitive science and cultural viewpoints. From the viewpoint of jazz and blues, I can simply tell you which musician in India has the knowledge and which musician does not: there are not that many, and we all personally know or know of each other. Is film music within India a specific music form with its own set of in built codes that they have internalized outside of what I would call "music forms that involve a high degree of live performances". I suppose one could grant them that, and to be charitable lets just say that this is a specific music form that makes music for the secondary role of being the support for the movie. In which case this is another self contained universe that is connected in some sense to the live performance forms (only in that musicians from these live performance forms get to do studio work to generate money), however it will not in general impact the working processes of forms that mainly regenerate themselves through the performative act of live performances: and that includes the bulk of music forms across the world from jazz to Baul music to carnatic to western classical to Dhrupad to Sufi music from Rajasthan to Indonesian gamelan music to tango in Argentina to afro-Cuban folkloric music to various other forms ...Indian film composers do perform live their soundtracks, but that is secondary to their work in the studio: this is commonsense. In which case, it is pointless to even talk about the lack of ability of these musicians in music forms that emphasize live performance: they do not have the ability, and their success or failure in the world according to film or music industry will not impact these music forms much: the historical record has shown that music forms regenerate and survive primarily because there are dedicated musicians willing to perform the music, and has less to do with sociology/economics/specific cultural protocol, and sometimes musicians have been known to go against the grain. In the meantime those of us who work in music forms that emphasize live performance, lets go out there and play hard, play with passion, and energize people: the more we do that, the more they start listening to music outside of what I consider to be a very homogeneous film world that inculcates homogeneous thought processes no matter how many awards they obtain internationally or nationally, and slowly but surely we can change the music climate in our own way .....after all some of us believe that our music challenges people, it changes them and it increases their consciousness ... and for those who did not hear this music too bad ... Warmly, Madhav Chari Jazz Pianist and Composer
