Ilaiyaraaja turns 75 on Saturday. The maestro, who melded musical styles and carved a niche for himself, remains popular across generations. His compositions from the past and the present are favourites, especially in Tamil Nadu. In an interview with The Hindu, the veteran composer, who straddles films and classical symphonies, said music flows to him spontaneously.
Sitting at the studio where he began his career as a composer in Saligramam here, he spoke about his philosophy of music, the origins of his ideas of composition, the early training that put him on the road to stardom, and the universality and timelessness of music.
Ilaiyaraaja said that life experiences and learning have been the fount for his output, but he felt that some of his compositions transcended them, as if they were “the reflection of the efforts of past lives — mine, or those of other musical exponents.”
Wasn’t this similar to how mathematical genius Srinivasa Ramanujan attributed his inspiration and even formulae to divine thoughts conveyed by a goddess in his dreams? Ilaiyaraaja said that unlike Ramanujan, who felt a supernatural force guiding him, he always felt a moment of clarity when a composition came to his mind.
“It is as if I am the subject and the object of art at the same time when that happens,” he said. Music is timeless, he said, due to this spontaneity which is reached at a certain stage of a musician’s evolution. Of course, spontaneity isn’t enough for compositions. It requires a refined mind and a sensitivity to bring out ideas that have an aesthetic sense and then adding different elements — some complex such as various counterpoints and some relatively simple — to give it shape as a composition.
Sometimes, the veteran composer said, it took him long hours and a few days to compose musical bars based on modal counterpoints.
Unity of forms
To Ilaiyaraaja, who shot to fame with Annakkili in 1976, music is universal. He does not think that some of his music fuses Western and Indian classical elements — in fact, there is a oneness to various forms.
A composition is never complete without performance — the interplay of instruments and musicians playing them, he said. The challenge is to perfect this to provide a sense of freshness every time someone heard it. Today, musical compositions are often bereft of performance, as digital technologies help create songs as an outcome of various “mechanisms”.
The maestro said many of his own compositions were spurred by life experiences. Being part of a troupe led by his late brother Pavalar Varadarajan, a communist sympathiser, taught him to understand the pulse of the audience and the art of improvisation right from his teens. That his brother used M.S. Viswanathan’s tunes to reach out to people made him realise the importance of music composition, and inspired him. Ilaiyaraaja added that music has the potential to bring peace to a chaotic society, as learning music could enliven people and help them shun violence.
