Audio India

You have heard them singing or playing music. You either loved or hated it and left your feedback with them. They have been entertaining you online for quite some time for no monetary benefits. And now is your chance to get to know the faces behind the voices.

Starting with the earliest music bloggers, Audio India is publishing a series of interviews with music bloggers. Our first guest is Murali Venkatraman who blogs at Manappathivu.

Tell us a bit about yourself.

I hail from Tirunelveli, Tamilnadu. My mom is a Tamilian born and brought up in Kerala and dad comes from Tirunelveli. I have a B.Tech in chemical engineering from CECRI, India and a PhD from University of South Carolina in Chemical Engineering. Singing, composing, song writing and poetry are my primary interests.

Did you have any formal training in music?

No I didn’t. And it is something I have always yearned for. Finally after all these years, I have become a student with Shrimati. Shobha Shekar of Melbourne who also happens to be blogger Rashmi Madhu’s former teacher and blogger Adithi Devarajan’s aunt.

You said that you have had no formal training in music, but you seem to identify the raagas when you hear a song. How does this happen?

My learning is random and undisciplined. I hear, read and discuss a lot of and about music which unfortunately is becoming a luxury these days due to lack of time. Much of the idea about ragas came from strong discussions with my learned friends like Sheela and Sindhuja of Bangalore in forums like TFMPAGE and from other friends like Raja Govindarajan, Vijayanand Rajagopalan and Sriram Lakshman from 1998. Apart from that, I have heard a lot of semi-classicals in all possible Indian languages in genres like Carnatic, hindustani, ghazal, raag pradhaan, Marathi Bhav geet etc. And I also taught myself some basic notations of classical music using a book. These, combined with a bit of singing and pattern recognition (along with keyboard playing) helps me identify ragams.

When did you start music blogging and what lead you to it?

The first music blog I created was towards the end of 2003 I believe. Cannot remember the exact date. In those times, there was neither blogger nor did the idea of having a music blog had any significance. Blogging was just picking up. However, there were many music directors like Srikanth Devarajan who had websites of their own producing and presenting music that they made. Since I was a graduate student with minimal resources which ruled out affording expensive bandwidth, I decided to go for a musicblog.

The musicblog I started in blog-city was basically to present some of my compositions and were initially uploaded in dhool.com – a web site jointly owned by me and friends. It was not strictly a music blog but a general blog with music peeping in occasionally and that is how I see my current blog too. Later when I lost the blog-city blog, I moved to blogger and had been there ever since. I have been composing from 2001 and this was a good platform to present some of my work without much of a a website building fuss.

You were among the very first few people from India who started music blogging. Can you write about how it has helped you compared to your musical life before music blogging?

The most beautiful aspects of a music blog are the one to one conversations with audience, their opinions and encouragement. Here as an artist, I had the chance to understand how different people viewed my art unbiasedly since most of the visitors were random and unrelated to start with. What however I did not anticipate was the avalanche of musicians interested in a similar concept and coming together for greater efforts. Blogswara album and aavarthana concerts were two such things. Musicblogging ensured that the musicians like me who were just spreading their wings on the web without much of a direction, would focus for efforts greater than just an individual karaoke rendition. It emphasized the importance of collaboration and also the need for critical evaluation from both the peers and the rest. It made me humbled and happy and taught me honest evaluation of my music and others’. In short, it helped me think about music more objectively without however losing the heart for the art itself.

Now my music life is not just about singing a karaoke track but has expanded a lot more and is more variegated and is about producing music, having conversations with my friends who collaborate extensively and I am enjoying every piece of it. It is sometimes hard to keep up with the pace of the blogging community because I try my hand at many different things. Sometimes a great voice like Meera Manohar or Pradip Somasundaran or Swati Kanitkar would inspire me to create songs specifically for them. Sometimes I get this urge to make a karaoke track for voices like Sindhuja Bhaktavatsalam or Tara Balakrishnan or Divya Menon just for the kicks. Sometimes, I may ask one of the good friends like Mux Narasimhan to orchestrate one of my tunes or sometimes I may choose to write lyrics for some. Or sometimes I may request one of my friends like Jo (!) to render a composition of mine without any orchestration !

The audio blogging and associated social life has expanded my musical domain enormously that sometimes I am spoilt for choices. All these wonderful performers I mentioned and scores of others who I have not, have become very good friends and have affectionately complied to my musical requests. This has made me feel more like being in the midst of friends all the time and ensured that I am not a musical loner.

What is the best thing that you like about music blogging?

Collaboration, music production and friends.

What do you dislike the most about music blogging?

Improper pointers and dishonest assessments of fellow artist’s/friend’s work. The commitment, in my humble opinion, must be towards the art and not towards the person. In fact if you are a very good friend of an artist, it is only useful if you are honest about their performance and talent. Of course, while presenting an evaluation one must also have a fair idea of his own ability and biases. If the artist is a good friend, he/she would cherish honest feedback given that you are making sense. If not, they sever the relation. The cause could be that either you were not sensible in the comments or the so called friend is so consumed about his own performance and his ego does not want to admit the reality. In the former case you are no use to the artist. In the latter case, neither you nor the artist is useful to the artist’s progress.

That said, it does not mean one has to be downright caustic in words. One can be polite and honest by choosing appropriate words.

That is a valid point you made. Have you got any breakthrough in the music industry or is there something in the pipeline?

I did get some offers. However nothing has materialized due to logistics. As regards future, I really don’t know whats in for me.

You are a singer as well as a wonderful composer. Which one do you enjoy the most? Singing or composing?

Undoubtedly composing. I think this is deeply connected to an artist’s ego. An artist’s ego is ecstatic when his creation gets recognized more than when he himself gets recognized. That is, an artist is happier at that moment when somebody praises his art rather than when somebody bestows an award on him. When I compose, I don the creator’s garb and when it gets recognized, my ( creative ) satisfaction doubles.

When I sing, it is probably my voice that gets recognized / commented upon. And my voice is something that I did not create and I am neither proud nor not not-proud of it. However, the style of singing is something I could work on. It would be my ‘creation’ partly so to say. If it gets recognized, I am part happy. Even that is limited since my voice is limited.

However, while composing, I have complete freedom. I am most free to experiment and I am technically at least not very much bound by parameters. I could dabble with any genre, work with anybody who is a good talent and come up with things which can surprise even me.

In short, my mind can expand infinitely more than my voice. It is this expansion that gives me the utmost satisfaction.

There are various methods one choose to compose. The traditional way has been to have lyrics first and then compose a tune to match to what the lyrics convey. Now it happens vice versa too. So which method do you prefer and why?

There is absolutely no standard recipe. In fact there should not be. If there is, then there is no creativity but only adjustments. To me language and music are two sides of the same coin. It may not be wrong if I say I am obsessed with the language and diction – not just in Tamil – but of any language that I associate my music with. I try not to settle for cliched expressions and metaphors in most of the songs that I compose and with expressive writers like Udhaya, I have hardly had any problem finding good lyrics for Tamil songs of mine.

It has worked both ways with him. I have tuned much of his abstract poetry into songs (to his surprise) and he has written lyrics for many songs, the tunes of which I have come up with in the first place. And we work through the nuances of both the song and language for long before we finalize a song which we feel is suitable to be called a song. Similarly when I write and compose some songs, sometimes I do them in tandem. There is no clear-cut methodology.

In fact, we did this over the internet for almost 8 years without ever having met once. And we finally met in Sep 2008 !

Interesting!

When you compose songs, do you specifically choose a raaga for the song? Or do you just give a tune that comes to you? If you pick up a raaga first, why is it so? Is there any advantage to this method?

Four sub-questions in a single big question ! My answer 1. Yes and no 2. Yes and no 3. Will explain 4. Yes and no.

Sometime, when I hear a particular raga I would like to experiment with it and create a new tune. At that time I deliberately sing the raga and keep playing with it until I discover “fresh phrases” which I can use for compositions. And sometimes, when I walk down a road thinking aimlessly and humming something unconsciously, I do come up with tunes with no raga in mind. I may record them and later find what raga I had actually sung it in, but I may not care about it at the time of conception itself.

It is very difficult to answer why I pick a raga, One of the ( stupid ) reasons is adventure. I would sometime want to takeup a raga and give it a twist in such a way it has not been used by any of the composers before. For example, say in a sampoorna ragam I make a song deliberately avoiding the panchamam as much as possible and only occasionally pepper the song with it. Then I am trying to create something new. This starts as more for the kicks which however may eventually by lot of smoothing out may look as if was ‘naturally’ constructed.

Secondly, there are some ragas which have an inherent emotion. For example, raga Shivaranjani have an inherent sadness. So I may want to compose a tune which has a sad face to it. However this is a cliched approach.

Thirdly, trying to infuse something new in a genre itself. For example there are ragas like Sahaana which do not find a place in say hindustani genre. I may want to see how sahaana sounded if it is used in a hindustani-ish fashion. For this I choose to experiment. So it is highly varied.

When one picks up a raga, he is limited by its lakshanam or prayog. This is both an advantage and a disadvantage. The advantage, for example in using mohanam is that, whatever you do with it will sound pleasant. The disadvantage is that it may force you to think cliched and hence be less innovative.

I generally do not limit myself in my compositions unless I have a specific task (like composing in a particular ragam)

What equipments do you use for home recording?

MOTIF-ES6 + MLAN

What kind of Music do you like?

Primarily any Indian melody irrespective of the language and genre.

Your favorite singer, music director, lyricist – and the reasons for you preferred them over the rest.

It is impossible to answer this question. However, if I am left alone in an island and were to choose only one of these for the rest of my life it would be

Singer : SPB
MD : MSV
Lyricist – Kannadhasan

Reasons : Creativity and Variety

What are your other hobbies/interests apart from music?

Well..writing is another important thing in my life. However, the inspiration for it comes only in fits and starts. Other than music, it is pretty much popular and intensive science that occupies my spare time if any.

Thank you Murali, for spending your time to answer our questions in detail. We appreciate it very much and keep going on with your music!

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