I often run into people who are quite emotionally attached to Carnatic music. They look at the adoption of any new technology with the sort of suspicion that US Marines reserve for cars filled with Arabs driving towards security checkposts in Baghdad's green zone. Despite the fact that better microphone, mixing and speaker technologies have made concerts and recordings sound better than ever before, some of these chaps will still swear by the scratchy sound of an LP and the mellifluously soothing acoustics of those funnel shaped temple loudspeakers that were used back in the day.
I can understand this sort of Technostalgia (a fond, but irrational attachment to familiar technology from one's era) and a romantic attachment to music (and musicians) from a specific era, but when folks say “All this modern remix nonsense is not music at all. It's just a lazy copy- paste job”, it piques my interest. I can put up with informed elitism but misinformed elitism deserves a car bomb in Baghdad's green zone .
So what exactly is a “remix”? It is a repurposed version of someone else's creative output. Now what exactly did someone like Ariyakudi Ramanuja Iyengar do when he performed? He took, for instance, a Thyagaraja composition, preserved its basic melodic structure, including sangathi variations, blended in a bit of improv (“ niraval ”), prefixed it with an alapana where he indulged in what is actually a predictable exploration of the notes of the raga , and suffixed it with kalpanaswara , which some argue is proof of Carnatic music's vibrant creativity. But as a Carnatic violinist myself, I can assure you that most artistes don't really do “Kalpana” swara. They do “Kal Bana” (made yesterday) swara, all mugged-up and well-practised, very little real-time imagination.
So before you misunderstand me, let me say that Ariyakudi was a remarkable genius, no doubt. My point was that even a Carnatic performance by a maestro like him, is, in essence, a remix performance. He is remixing previously created content as much as a DJ or a music director does. The difference is that the DJ uses software to make life a bit easier for himself. The Carnatic musician undergoes years of arduous practice and memorises a large number of phrases and melodic structures unique to specific raga s while the DJ uses pre-recorded, high-quality instrumental or percussive loops. So if you don't like “remixes”, you must therefore criticise Ariyakudi for not composing every song that he performed himself and for also not inventing new sangathis for every song at every performance. Since he does not do that, he is therefore a remix artist as well.
I can understand that we like to appreciate and glorify manual effort over technological augmentation. The painter who paints with real-world brushes and water colours is somehow, at least in our mind, doing something “more” than the digital artist who uses Adobe Illustrator. But when you think about it, it's a bit of a fallacy. It's like claiming that the rice produced by a farmer who uses a bull and a plough is somehow superior to rice produced by someone who uses a tractor.
Of course, it's not all that simple. It's unfair to insist that we must not judge the method of production (music or rice) and only consider the output. It's the classic means-vs-end debate. In many genres of music, the method is often an integral part of the experience. A blues musician from the Mississippi delta, with a twangy, broken guitar and a grainy sounding harmonica produces evocative music whose methods are a memory of slaves' suffering in the Americas. I therefore suspect that the methods, the setting, and the performance mechanics of a Carnatic concert similarly define it as a genre. But please, stop berating music produced by different means.
