From the time we wake up in the morning, till we retire for the day, we go through varied emotions, whether at work or at home, busy or idling. Lakshmi Bansi, the chairperson of ALL Madurai Performing Arts in Music, recently gave an hour-long presentation on how music impacts these emotions.
The event that hosted the recital and speech, the launch of the Madurai Music Chapter of All Ladies League (ALL), showed how music was a much bigger part of our lives than we realise. The programme, titled Alchemy of Music, featured Lakshmi, her guru Anandhi Poornachandran and three other members from Saptaswara, who train at the Rani Lady Meyyammai Achi Tamil Music College.
Music for all
Lakshmi says she came up with the idea and format to interest audiences who are not necessarily experts in Carnatic music.
The Force Behind: At the launch of ALL MAdurai Music Chapter (From left to right) Mamta Fomra, Vasantha Vaikunth and Lakshmi Bansi
With help from noted veena player, S Mallika, also the college principal, the team shortlisted 15 simple and popular ragas that define music as an expression of emotions. “People are usually passive listeners at kutcheris. But here, we engaged the audience, showing them slides, explaining every raga and the complementing emotion, asking them questions even as music continued to flow from our veenais ,” she says. As a result, the audience travelled with the musicians through a 24-hour routine of a person in 60 minutes, feeling and experiencing various moods. When the concert opened with the morning raga Bowli, a feeling of calm descended the auditorium. It was soon replaced with the faster Nattai, symbolising the morning rush when a person gets ready to leave for work. But before they do, they say their two minute-prayer or meditate and raga Kannada portrayed the feeling.
The musicians played each piece for three minutes with slides running in the background along with narration done by the musicians themselves. This was done either in the form of short speeches or as dialogues that occur while travelling to work or inside office cabins and canteens. Not for a moment that the fingers stopped stringing the veena.
Raga Attana was played to express two emotions in the same piece, one of an angry boss and the other of a soft-spoken employee, when the former admonishes the latter. From Neelamani (the tune of humiliation and depression), it then shifted to Sankarabharanam as a motivation when colleagues cheered. Likewise, raga Keeravani depicted harmony and team work followed by the racy Mohanakalyani Thillanawhen the boss appreciates the work done at the end of the day to Desh to symbolise happiness on the ride back home, the performance enthralled the audience. The chief guest Vasantha Vaikunth, classical dancer and singer, said she was inspired to return to playing the veena she had learnt as a child.
The peppy signature tune of ‘Come September’played to symbolise the metro ride in the evening had the audience grooving as did the popular Bharathiar song, ‘Chinnan chiru kiliyae’ to denote family time and unwinding after a day’s work. The bed time raga Nilambari ended on a gentle note reiterating the point that if music is an important ingredient of life, notes and tempo of ragas can alter emotions and affect people’s moods.
The audience appreciated the team’s innovative presentation. “It reached out to everyone and that is the purpose of music, to communicate and touch,” says Mamta Fomra, the chairperson of ALL Madurai Chapter, who launched the fashion chapter last month and drove the music chapter’s creation.
