Season 2003 Snippets

This season has seen a litany of woes about the abysmal sound management at various sabhas. Faulty microphones, uneven & unbalanced sound levels across the hall, sleeping personnel, et al. The stories do not end here... during Sangita Kalanidhi Vedavalli's concert on Sunday morning, there was this unnerving sight of the mike man marching up to the podium, bang in the middle of a soulful Bhairavi alapana to replace Sumitra Vasudev's (Vedavalli's disciple) microphone. Sumitra, who was immersed in the alapana did not notice the guy initially and was visibly taken aback when a hand suddenly appeared in front of her and yanked the microphone, upsetting her rhythm. More followed... the replacement mike's power cord got entangled with the violinist's mike stand and V. L. Kumar had to actually STOP playing to get himself out of the mess. Can't these things be handled in a subtle and unobtrusive fashion?

Throw Chennai's unpredictable power supply system into this cauldron and the result is utter chaos. A recent afternoon concert was interrupted by three outages. The first time the lights came back on, the sound system was still dead. The next time, we had one speaker functioning. The third and last time, mercifully everything was intact and the concert was wound up without further ado.

Of Deep Freezers and Mobile Phones...

Sabhas and music organizers in Chennai seem to be very serious about the preservation of our great musical traditions. And what better way to do it than by putting musicians and rasikas in cold storage, literally! To believe it, one must experience first-hand, the sub-zero temperatures at many of the air-conditioned auditoriums in the city. At a recent awards function, a couple of the awardees were seen eagerly accepting the ponnadai ahead of the cash prize and the memento, and keeping it draped around themselves to ward off the shivers until all the long-winded "speechifying" by the dignitaries ended. Probably a basic mechanical engineering course should be made mandatory for auditorium housekeepers so that they can differentiate between Refrigeration and Air-Conditioning! Next time someone approaches you at a sabha and enquires about your well-being, think twice before saying, "I'm just chilling out..."

The mobile revolution has caught India by storm. And indeed, the storm is raging right throughout the music season as well, right on the stage too in some instances. There was this rather ungracious sight recently, of an awardee busily chattering into his mobile phone while his Award Citation was being read out by the compere. One can't wait for the day when a vocalist interrupts a soulful alapana to answer a spouse's insistent call. Another time, one of those ubiquitous pouch-bags of the kind carried by male musicians suddenly started vibrating in the middle of an intricate pallavi, thanks to the mobile phone lodged within. Mercifully, the musician had had the good sense to silence the ringtones prior to the concert and we were spared one of those insufferable Nokia melodies. As far as audience etiquette is concerned, the less said the better. Awareness about a mobile phone's "Silent Mode" capabilities seems to be totally non-existent. Thank your stars next time, if you are able to get through a 2-1/2 hour concert without having to overhear the guy sitting next to you loudly ordering his wife to keep his thayir saadam ready by 9 pm, i.e. the time he gets home if he walks out just when the tani avartanam starts!

Questions or comments? Send us E-mail.
Copyright: Srishti's Carnatica Private Limited