Wednesday, June 06, 2012

krishna nee begane baaro...

jun 6th, 2012 CE

yet another reason why i like karnataka: this song was composed at the great krishna temple in udupi.




and k s chitra sings a very good version of it. do you know a better one?

3 comments:

OverTheHill said...

Going backward in time, try
...Palghat K V Narayanaswamy (The man with the silken voice)
...M S Subbalakshmi (channeling the divine)
and, harking back to an almost forgotten era
...B S Raja Iyengar, who used to sing at in a voice that would go through the roof, a full octave higher than us lesser mortals, a sort of male soprano.
BTW if you visit Bangalore, watch the show dAsa vANI on Sankara Channel, it's all about PurandaradAsa and his compositions and done in a folksy conversational style by a first-rate expositor accompanied by a vocalist with violin and tabla/mridangam support.

nizhal yoddha said...

thank you, overthehill. i am, alas, totally ignorant about carnatic music, but as i age, i find it to be more appealing. i will try and find the versions from the great singers you have mentioned.

i wonder if rajan parrikar is reading this, and can give us some insight too.

ignorant as i am about classical music, i find that sometimes it is amazingly evocative. i once listened to a thumri, and i had never even heard the word thumri before, and it affected me greatly emotionally -- i suppose this is what 'rasa' means: the evocation of emotion in the viewer/listener.

i also find that certain saxophone riffs -- there is one in pink floyd 'shine on you crazy diamond part IX' and another in phil collins' 'one more time' -- affect me deeply.

OverTheHill said...

There's a lot of math in Carnatic music, so it should appeal to the comp scientist/elec engr in you.
The Katapayadi system of naming raagas is a neat example. (More generally the system uses letters to represent numbers and serves as both a mnemonic aid and a coding mechanism. Maadhava used it in his work.)
Here is a delightful corollary of its use in raaga naming: based on the system the raaga Simhendramadhyamam should really be written Sihmendramadhyamam- Fred Damerau redux.