Many people responded to my article on ‘mental illness and musicians’. I am happy to report that discussions are on to set up a helpline, thanks to my friends in the medical field. Let me start this week’s column by expressing my gratitude to those who have come forward to help.
The rest of my column is unfortunately not so positive. This is to do with three factors — all fallout of today’s hype-obsessed era.
The Music Season has just come to an end in Chennai and the social media is rife with self-congratulatory feeds such as ‘standing ovation’ and ‘housefull show’. The feeds, if true, augur well for classical arts. Numbers seem to set the bar for performances — number of likes, views, rasikas, tickets sold and the number of sponsors.
Often I see promising young musicians waste considerable time and money on creating videos of themselves and promote them heavily on social media. And what follows are a miasma of congratulatory posts and equally congratulatory responses. This almost ends every hope of improvement or correction in the musician, who begins to feels like an ‘achiever’ and revels in it too.
Which leads me to the next factor – criticism. Is it dead? What with the social and news media uniformly describing concerts in a positive tone, and even the lightest criticism being quickly dismissed or trolled. I believe we are living in an era of praise.
Nothing else will do, and nothing else seems to matter. All concerts have to be melodious, gloriousý rendered and rocking with rhythmic complexity. Where in all this will one measure original contribution or scholarship? From the time of the Upanishads or Socrates, arguments and counter-arguments have been the core of creating a body of knowledge. Critiques are as important to the discourse of art as the art itself.
The last factor revolves around a far more worrying question, which I will deal with in my next column.
To sum up. What truly is the purpose of so many platforms during the December festival in Chennai? Quite a few appear by November end, and silently fade away by January. Some of these outfits do little than to provide makeshift stages (in everyway) in acoustically gruesome places, cater to specific performers and audiences (Festival For Young Musicians from California being a prominent example).
Has reflection or the capacity of it truly died in this brave new world? Are we capable of cutting away the flotsam and jetsam and get to the crux of it all. There seems to be no time for critical discourse.
I am not dismissing efforts and initiatives taken by individual musicians from time to time. But the hype about performances and questionable promoters and motives leaves one wondering if the practice of music itself is being compromised.
The writer is a Chennai-based pianist and music educator
