There is a beautiful lullaby by Purandara Dasa in Anandabhairavi which goes “Jo Jo Yashodeya Nanda Mukundane.” You can find the recording on youtube.com. There is another song, also in Anandabhairavi, by Maharaja Swati Tirunal, “Smarasi Pura Guru Vanitha” from his opera on Kuchela, called “Kuchelopakhyanam.”
Both these songs use a particular phrase in Anthara Gandharam which is stunningly beautiful and very very unusual. Both these songs were set to tune during the 1990s. The same phrase was used around 100 years ago by a man from a tiny village called Gudimellanka in Andhra Pradesh, in his song “Varalakshmi Devi.”
This man was the creator of some of the sweetest songs ever composed, like ‘Rama Rama Ena Raada,’ ‘Bala Tripura Sundari,’ ‘Krishnamma,’ ‘Ramududbhavinchinadu’ and ‘Eme O Chitti: Prayaga Rangadasa.’
The person who used the same phrase a century later, was his celebrated grandson, Mangalampalli Balamuralikrishna. While there are many singers, poets and music composers, the title of ‘Vaggeyakara,’ an individual from whom both lyrics and music burst forth simultaneously as a single and inseparable unit.... can be applied only to a precious few. What others produce would come under craft rather than art.
Balamuralikrishna had that divine spark in abundance and the compositions poured out of him for more than 60 years.
On January 1, 2000, the Madras Music Academy gave him the Vaggeyakara Award. He made a characteristically short speech which encapsulated his thoughts. “I am very happy that I am a Vaggeyakara. I am very happy that I am living. And I am very happy to be the first person to receive this award... on the first day of the first year of the new millennium. Thank you.” That was Balamuralikrishna.
Words or musical ideas, one hardly ever found him fumbling. The notes that he sang... both the pure notes (“shuddha swarams” wrongly labelled ‘flat notes’ by those who can’t get them) as well as the gamakams or ornamentation, were crystal clear.
The two distinct approaches to vocalisation in Carnatic music are, the veena based one which is subtle and refined and that which is nagaswaram based - grand and majestic. Balamurali Sir was one of the few artists whose singing embodied both these approaches simultaneously.
While his renditions of Nagumomu, Devadi Deva, Endaro Mahanubhavulu, Samaja Vara Gamana, Pibare Rama Rasam and so on are guaranteed a place in posterity, a vast amount of his own compositions sadly remains more or less unexplored and undiscovered.
On a different note, few classical musicians seem to close their mouth properly while singing a syllable like “um.” A song like say, ‘Siddhi Vinayakam’ would often be sung to sound like ‘Siddhi Vinayakauu.’ Since Balamurali Sir was one of the few people who closed his mouth where necessary and enunciated the lyrics clearly. So much so that casual listeners dub this kind of rendering as an ‘imitation of Balamurali.’
Sruthi Shudham, Laya Shuddham, Swara Shuddham,Gamaka Shuddham, Akshara Shuddham - Balamurali fulfilled all of this.
“If we sing in sruti, people would call it Hindustani. If the lyrics are enunciated clearly, people call it Light,” he would observe. This also provoked him to state: “I am not singing Carnatic music. I sing Muraleegaanam!”
Only time will tell how much of the artistic values he represented and embodied will hold among future generations and how many would go that extra mile, to look beyond the artistic framework imposed by their immediate guru or bani and try to connect with the great Vaggeyakaras.
Call it Muraleegaanam, call it Sampradayam, eventually good music should triumph.
