Thoughts on Music


I have been teaching Kukubh Bilawal to my disciple, Prasanth, these last three or four days. It’s been a long time that I last sang it. Over these four days, the raga has been, to my own surprise, developing in many unpremeditated ways. The phrases come by themselves without my having to think or deliberate about them. I have been seriously thinking about this strange phenomenon. It has happened to me before in my previous Riyaz or while I am teaching my students. I guess at such times they......

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August 22, 2019

Shadja

No swara, for my father, exists by itself, not even the shadja. The shadja of a raga exists in relation to other swaras of the raga, especially to its nearest swaras, either in ascent or...


August 22, 2019

Religiosity

Most people, even those close to him, knew my father to have been a staunch Veerashaiva, flaunting his faith by wearing the three bhasma stripes chaste of this faith on his forehead and spending long...


August 22, 2019

Awards and Honours

Most artists indulge in artistic creativity generally to display their works in order to achieve fame and / or money. But great artists do so in order to please themselves by their self-expression. For these...


August 22, 2019

Concert Management

My father never took any concert casually. A concert for him was as serious a task as his pooja. One hour before the commencement of the concert, he would be ready and impatiently waiting for...


August 22, 2019

My Father and My Mother

We learned from our mother that in his twenties and thirties, my father was somewhat a hot tempered young man. Musically, these were the years when he was on the boil, imbibing the stern discipline...


October 01, 2017

A Good Guru protects his disciples from His Own Influences

On my one-line Facebook post “a good teacher protects his pupils from his own influence “, my disciple Chandrika Kamat commented “to incorporate and then transcend will require years of tutelage,Guruji”. This set me thinking...


September 06, 2017

A Raga should not mean but just be

Generally, when I sing an aprachalit raga, people ask me what are the constituent elements (in terms of ragas or angs involved) in it because they cannot understand it. You don’t have to understand a...


November 05, 2016

Passion Without Riyaz is no Passion for Music

Some say they have great passion for Music. They may either have passion for listening to music or for doing it religiously as though their being depended on pursuing music. I would like to say...


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