The December music season threw up a lot of surprises when it came to performers, performances, ragas and songs.
One does remember a surprisingly beautiful suruti heard during an afternoon concert in Mylapore this last season.
Data mined by an app that provides free listing of concerts, dance programmes and plays shows that there were more performances by women artists than men during the season.
“Unlike in the past, the season was not male dominated. While dance concerts were obviously dominated by women with an 88% share, surprisingly, 59% of the Carnatic vocal concerts were by female vocalists,” explained K. Kalyanasundaram, founder of the app and website, Music of Madras, that lists daily programmes in music, dance and theatre in the city.
Happy news
Renowned Carnatic vocalist Sudha Ragunathan said she was delighted to hear there were more women performers during the season than men.
“This only affirms my oft-repeated statement that more women are being appreciated and are taking up music as a profession. When I started learning music, there were many like me who learnt the art form. But only a few pursued it as a profession,” Ms. Ragunathan said.
“My inspiration came from my guru MLV amma and all the support I needed came from my husband,” she added.
The team analysed a total of 1,834 events and found that 1,454, representing around 80% of the total number of events, took place in December 2018.
The analysis found that the highest number of performances were conducted on Christmas day — 77. Around 43% of the performances were conducted in venues in Mylapore, followed by T. Nagar (22%), Alwarpet (15%), Royapettah (6%) and other places spread across the city.
Mr. Kalyanasundaram said they would soon do a study of the 2017 music season as well.
‘Tedious process’
“Though it will be a tedious process, we will do the study for statistical purposes. It took us a long time to clean the data from 2018,” he said.
“A small difference in spellings of names changes it entirely,” Mr. Kalyanasundaram added.
