Tuesday, May 17, 2005

Elements of Modern Music - Fusion

One fine morning I was having a small dream as though I am speeding in my Mercedes car when the TV roared “Maha Ganapathim….” My dad had switched it on to watch a concert of late Maharajapuram Santhanam. (For those non followers of carnatic music late Maharajapuram Santhanam was one of the finest classical singers). Ah what crap early in the morning or so I thought. But then few hours later a song “Chennai Senthamizh…” (It is a song from a Tamil movie) was roaring loud in my own FM. And to be frank I liked the song even though both the songs were essentially same except that the latter contained a loop beat or rhythm, whatever u call it running all along.

Well I don’t have any formal training in music nor do I know to play any musical instrument. But then I do listen to lot of them and my spectrum of music is wide enough to do an analysis of Indian music. Here I just wanted to talk on fusion in Indian music.

Well if u thought fusion was just adding programmed loops to classical tunes… I am sorry you are only partial. Ok mixing of genres is definitely fusion but then there is lot more than that. Fusion can exist even at the instrument or the orchestra level. Dream Theater(a popular rock band) often use the keyboard in their compositions. I still remember one of their beautiful compositions ‘Home’ where the keyboard was used to produce sounds of a string instrument (it sounds similar to sitar) and slow percussions are embedded in the tune until finally the guitar takes over. A.R.Rahman once used a rhythm wherein the beat actually came from the mirdhungam but then it was accompanied by the bass part of tavil. (A rhytm instrument on the same lines of tabla and mirdhangam used mainly in festivals and marriages). In essence it meant that you are playing two instruments using one side of each but then they complement since the right side of the tavil produces the bass just as the right side of the mirdhangam. Frankly I am not an expert to recognize that by hearing the music but then when I came to know about this, I realised fusion is definitely more than mixing of genres. Other fusions I like include saxophone with drum pads (used extensively in the movie Duet) and flute with keyboard.

Fusion may also mean mixing of languages. I still remember the first time I heard Colonial Cousins (Hariharan & Leslie Louis) singing ‘Krishna ne begane...’ accompanied by some English lyrics. Now, so many songs have this skeleton where English lyrics are inserted in between the regional ones. The previous example was one where the genre of the song still remains the same. But there are others wherein the genre classification becomes an issue because of distinct genres being part of the same song. An example for this could be ‘Oh humdum suniyore’ from Saathiyaa where Blaaze raps in with some English lyrics (here we go…) followed by a classical type interlude (dheem theem thana na…). But even here each of the genres holds their linguistic originality. We do have a third classification where a genre is used in a language different from the parent language. Some of them are Blaaze and Apache Indian who rap in Hindi or other regional languages.

Finally to fusion of genres… few of which we discussed above. Some more examples I can give are fusion of sufi and techno (Noor un nala in meenaxi). So what about remixes?? Please I don’t want to associate fusion with something cheap as remixing. Remixes may sound good but then I believe its just few minutes work for somebody well versed in the Yamaha synthesizer. Ok in a way it’s a mix of old numbers with some trance-techno loops. Fusion of genres is something you can research your entire life but then I don’t want this blog to run into pages. Will meet you soon… next time I will talk more on loops and technology stuff in music.

4 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

hey! anonymous comments are allowed!

1:43 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

guruDEV v expect more blogs from u...keep it up. -- INCUBUS

2:47 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

v expect more logs from u. keep the blogging spirit high.

2:48 PM  
Blogger Lucas said...

watz the matter Makki? No blogs for a long time?

10:18 PM  

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