Category: music

Books, Music, Disruption and Distribution

Having watched this short film by The Economist on disruption in the music business, I find the parallels between the books and the music businesses uncanny.

https://youtu.be/eAGPvnF7q7U

Both industries have been traditionally controlled by the middlemen – labels in the case of music, and publishers in the case of books. Both sets of middlemen are oligopolies – there are three big music labels and four (?) major publishers. This is primarily a result of production costs – traditionally, professional recording equipment has been both expensive and hard to get. Similarly, typesetting and printing a book was expensive business.

However, both industries have been massively disrupted in the last couple of decades, primarily thanks to new distribution models – streaming in the case of music, and online vendors and e-books in the case of books. Simultaneously, the cost of production have also plummeted – I can get studio quality recording and mixing software on my Macbook Pro, and I already have a version of my book that looks good on the Kindle.

Yet, in both industries, the incumbents strongly believe that they continue to add value despite the disruption, and staunchly defend the value of the marketing and distribution they bring. In the above video, for example, a record studio executive talks about how established artistes may do well going “indie”, but new artistes require support in production, marketing and distribution.

If you see blogs and news articles on publishing and self-publishing, on the other hand, most of the talk is about how little value publishers themselves bring into the marketing and distribution process. While publishers continue to have a broad monopoly on the traditional distribution chain (bookstores, primarily), they have no particular competitive advantage in the new channels.

One of the successful indie artistes interviewed in the above video talks about how he was successful thanks to the brand and following he built up on social media, which ensured that his album had several takers as soon as it was released. It is again similar to advice that authors who want to self-publish get!

As someone who has completed a book manuscript and is looking for production and distribution options, I find the developments in the indie space (across products) rather interesting. Going by all this, maybe I should just give up on the “stamp of approval” I’m looking for from a traditional publisher, and go indie myself!

I leave you with a few lines from one of my favourite poems, which I believe is a commentary about the music record label industry!

Now the frog puffed up with rage.
“Brainless bird – you’re on the stage –
Use your wits and follow fashion.
Puff your lungs out with your passion.”
Trembling, terrified to fail,
Blind with tears, the nightingale
Heard him out in silence, tried,
Puffed up, burst a vein, and died.

 

Live Music at Wedding Receptions

The problem with live music at wedding receptions is with the volume. If you keep the volume too low, the musicians find it offensive. If you keep the volume high, on the other hand, people can’t hear each other talk and get irritated. And I’ve never really attended a wedding reception where the live music has had the “right volume”.

Hence, at my wedding reception, we dispensed with live music and instead carefully put together a set of trance numbers which were to be played over a CD-speaker system. And two hours before the reception is to begin, we find that there was no music player in the hall, and no one had bothered arranging for one. Thankfully the photographer, who I’d fought with for the duration of the wedding, agreed to arrange for a music system at quick notice. And then, when the reception was about to begin, it turned out that the uncle who had the CDs had gone home to get dressed.

Ultimately, I think they played the music that we’d carefully put together. I don’t know really because it wasn’t audible on stage, but we’re told by a few people it was quite good (they even asked for and “borrowed” the CDs). If you attended my wedding reception, please to be telling me how the music was.

So before my wedding, when I sent the invite to Mammo, he replied asking who was performing at the reception. When I told him my reasons for not having live music at the reception, he explained that performing at a wedding was a good chance for musicians to experiment, and in some ways it was a “paid rehearsal”. And that it really helps in the development of musicians.

On the other hand, I remember, some fifteen years back, my violin teacher being furious that he’d been called to play at a wedding, and there was no one listening to him, and his volume was turned out to be quite low, and he had a really bad experience.

So I don’t know. I still think the best thing to do would be to put recorded instrumental music that isn’t too intrusive. What do you think?

The Classical Dead

One of the bands whose discography I have and whose music I listen to when I want to listen to “unknown music” is the Grateful Dead. And while I was listening to them last night, it sounded like it was heavily inspired by Indian classical music (especially Carnatic stuff).

The song I was listening to was “not fade away” from the album GratefulDead (1971).  Ok now a little bit of wiki research tells me that this song was originally written by Buddy Holly and the Dead version in this album was a cover. I haven’t listened to the original but I’m really intrigued that the dead version has such a profound Indian influence on it!

Thinking about it, the only Indian connection of the Dead I can think of is that drummer Mickey Hart used to regularly jam with Ustad Allah Rakha. But then considering he was a percussionist, it’s unlikely that the Indian influence came from him!

Anyways it seems like if I listen to this kind of music a bit more, The Grateful Dead may not be “unknown music” for too much longer.

Fixed and variable scales

One major point of difference I’ve noticed between Indian and Western classical music is about the starting point of scales. Western music has a fixed starting frequency, and all instruments and voices are supposed to be tuned to that. Every guitar is tuned identically, and I’m talking about absolute frequencies of various strings here. Similarly with other instruments.

Indian classical music on the other hand doesn’t bother as much about absolute freuqencies. The frequency of the base Sa doesn’t matter at all, it’s only the relative frequencies of various notes that matter and as long as those are perfect the music will be good. This allows greater flexibility to artistes, especially vocalists and allows them to find their own range rather than having to conform to set standards.

Related to this is the individualist nature of Indian music (you usually have one lead performer here, accompanied by two or three others) and the orchestra nature of Western classical. When the “band” is small, it is not so much of a big deal to retune instruments to match each other and because of this it is not so much of a problem to coordinate. When you are part of an orchestra, however, it is important to have a standard and have everyone conform to that, rather than have a large number of musicians retune for every performance.

What I wonder, however, is which came first – synchronized tuning or the orchestra.

Teaching Music in Schools

How many of you actually enjoyed your “songs”/music lessons in school? Not too many, I suppose. Actually I don’t think more than a tenth of the students would have ever enjoyed these lessons. And I don’t think there is too much surprise in this given the kind of stuff that is taught in schools.

At some point of time during my schooling, we used to have three (!!) “songs” classes during a week, each handled by a different teacher who would teach songs in different languages. The greying guitar-wielding fag-smelling Samson was a fixture, while the other two classes were handled by different people each year, none of whom I remember. One thing that connected all of them, irrespective of the differences in the nature of songs, was that most of the songs they taught were easily classified by us as “uncool” (back then, and even now I’d consider them uncool).

So earlier today I was trying to remember the different songs that had been taught to me in the “songs periods” in school, and the common thread was religion – irrespective of language. A disproportionately large proportion (yeah I love that phrase) of songs that were taught to us were about God, or doing good, or some such thing which could be approximated to a prayer. I remember that Samson also taught us some Christmas carols, but I would argue that even those can be classified as religious music.

There was no wonder that most of us dreaded the music lessons, and the only way we could look forward to them was to replace every significant word in a song with its opposite, or to simply replace it with moTTe (egg). No offence to any of the Gods in whose praise we were supposed to sing those songs but this was the only way we could make the lessons even remotely interesting.

I’m sure most of you would have also gone through similar experiences. And now consider this, courtesy askingfortreble:

Yeah that’s a bunch of schoolkids singing O Fortuna by Carl Orff. If you are done listening to that, then look at this – again being performed by students of the same school.

You heard right! They were singing Metallica’s Nothing Else Matters! Don’t you wish they had taught that to you in school? And made you sing it during the annual day? And if not anything else the bragging rights that would’ve given you later when you went to college? Or the coolness?

Thinking about it, Samson did teach us a couple of songs that were, in hindsight, cool. Ok we did enjoy them when he taught them to us also but they got lost in the midst of so many uncool songs that we never realized we knew such cool stuff. Harry Belafonte’s Jamaican Farewell and Dylan’s Blowing in the wind. Yeah, we learnt them in school but nobody told us they were cool.

Looking back, I wish we were taught many more such songs back then rather than having to substitute words of other songs with “motte”. For all you know, I might have actually taken up singing (ok that might be a stretch; even though I’ve learnt to play the classical violin for 6 years I hardly play it nowadays – ok that also maybe because most of the songs i know are uncool). Yeah I’m such a wannabe.

Unknown Music

There are times when you want to listen to songs that you don’t know. You want to listen to something that seems very vaguely familiar but something you don’t know. One way to implement this it to put winamp on randomize mode. But then, you are likely to know the songs so it won’t work that well. Another way is to listen to the radio but then they may not always play your kind of music (for example, there is one English radio channel in Bangalore and most of the time they play Miley Cyrus nad similar trash – not at this moment though, some awesome house music is playing).

Another way of implementing this which I’ve discovered is to listen to bands that you don’t listen to too often. A 250 GB harddisk on my laptop allows me to store lots of music and there are lots of bands whose music I largely like but don’t listen to enough in order to make myself familiar with their songs. So when I’m in one of those moods when I just wnat to listen to music without analyzing too much or thinking too much I just pull out one of these artistes, and listen to a couple of their albums.

Since I know what they broadly sound like, I can choose music to fit my mood. On the other hand, since I don’t listen to these bands too often, it sounds fresh and unfamiliar all the time, so I end up not thinking too much.

Do you people also feel the same sometimes? Feel like listening to music that doesn’t sound too familiar? What kind of stuff do you listen to then? Where do you source the music for such occasions? Do let me know

Freestyle

Have been practising the violin for a bit of late. Maybe I’ve picked it up some 4-5 times in the last week or so. And some twelve years after I stopped formal lessons it is still a lot of fun.

And as I practice I discover that I don’t find it too much fun playing songs, stuff for which someone else has written the notes. What I prefer is alaap/raga. Fix an up-scale and a down-scale (sometimes it might correspond to actually existing ragas, but I don’t care to check. And I don’t name my ragas). And just play, making up the notes as you go along. While making sure you don’t violate the rules of the raga that you’ve set for yourself.

Immense fun can result. I don’t think I’ve ever had this kind of fun trying to play something someone else wrote.

Simplicity and improvisation

While writing my previous post on the film game, I was thinking about simplicity and improvisation. About how if you seek to improvise, in order to improvise well, you would rather choose a simple base. Like how the simplicity of film aata allows you to improvise so much and create so much fun. I was thinking about this in several contexts.

This concept first entered my mind back in class 11, when a mridangist classmate told me that for all music competitions, he would choose to play the aadi taaLa. His funda was that the simple and intuitive 8-beat cycle in this taaLa let his mind free of conforming to the base and allowed him to use all his energy in improvisation.

Thinking about it, though I have little domain knowledge, I would consider it very unlikely that a Carnatic performer would choose a vakra raaga for the “main piece” of a concert. The main piece requires one to do extensive alaap and then taaLa and requires a lot of improvisation and creative thinking on the part of the performer. Now, a vakra raaga (one where there are strict rules governing the order to notes) would impose a lot of constraints on the performer and he would be spending a large part of his energy just keeping track of the raaga and making sure he isn’t straying from the strict scales.

Starting from a simple easy base allows you to do that much more. It gives you that many more degrees of freedom to experiment, that many more directions to take your product in. If you build a sundae with vanilla ice cream, you can do pretty much what you want with it. However, if you use butterscotch, you will need to make sure that every additive blends in well with the butterscotch flavour, thus constraining your choices.

When the base for your innovation is itself fairly complicated, it leaves you with little room to manouever, and I’m afraid this is what occasionally happens when you are into research. You specialize so much and start working on such a narrow field that you will be forced to build upon already existing work in the field, which is already at a high level of sophistication. This leaves you with little choice in terms of further work, and you end up publishing “delta papers”.

Similarly in the management context, if you start off by using something complicated as your “base framework”, there aren’t too many things you can put on top of it, and that constrains the possibilities. There is even the chance that you might miss out on the most optimal solution to the problem because your base framework didn’t allow you to pursue that direction.

It is all good to borrow. It is all good to not reinvent the wheel. It is all good to stand on the shoulders of giants. However, make sure you pick your bases carefully, and not start on complicated ground. You will produce your best work when you give yourself the maximum choice.

Fighterization of Carnatic music

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been writing a few essays on certain extensions of the studs-and-fighters theory. For example, I had written about how after a while, every profession gets “fighterized” so as to enable a larger set of people to undertake that profession. Then, I had written about processes and about how most of them are idiosyncratic ways of work for some “stud” and that most of them haven’t been originally designed to be general processes.

I was reminded of these when I was reading through Guitar Prasanna’s interview in the New Sunday Express. A couple of excerpts:

“Jazz is constantly evolving, while Carnatic music is static. That is the reason Carnatic music is in such a pathetic state today.” His point is simply that Carnatic musicians get caught up in expressing everything except themselves. “There are very few who play in order to express their personality. We don’t have radicals like Balamuralikrishna or GN Balasubramaniam or ‘Veena’ Balachandar anymore. Carnatic music was founded on the basis of bold innovators, dynamic thinkers, visionaries like Thyagaraja and Dikshitar and Syama Sastri.” And to listen to Prasanna, all the musical thinking today is done within the safe confines of an ironbound box.

And coming to the process bit,

“Everyone follows the Ariyakudi kutcheri format, which he formulated for reasons that suited him. He wanted to clear his throat by starting with a varnam. But I don’t have to warm up my throat. I only use my fingers.” During the last couple of seasons, therefore, these fingers opted to delineate some of Prasanna’s own compositions from Electric Ganesha Land, his Carnatic-rock tribute to Jimi Hendrix. “And I didn’t play a single tukkada.”

So the current format of a Carnatic concert was not designed to be the general concert format. It was simply the one that suited Ariyakudi Ramanuja Iyengar the most, and people have simply ended up copying him (even though they may not have the same requirements) and his format has ended up as a “process”.

Now the thing with Carnatic music is that there is constant pressure on performers not to “sell out”. It is as if there is a union in this industry, and the union has defined a certain set of standards, and if anyone in the industry doesn’t conform to those standards, he is decreed as having “sold out” or they simply say that what he is playing is “not Carnatic music”. I wonder what can be done to bring back the same level of innovation back into Carnatic music.

The problem with Carnatic music is that as soon as somone starts doing things differently to the way they have been done, they lose the support of the rest of the industry, and given how small the industry is (compared to other genres of music), this industry relies heavily on I-scratch-your-back-you-scratch-mine kind of arrangements – in terms of concert invitations, accompaniments, students, etc. What this means is that as soon as a performer wants to innovate (and thus “leave the genre”) he better find enough support for his “new system” to function completely independently of the existing system and infrastructure (this is stretching it a lot but it’s somewhat like ICL).

There have been a number of Carnatic-based musicians who have been bold enough to innovate, change the nature of their concerts, get in different influences, etc. Some of them have succeeded in getting in new audiences for their music, but still this new-found audience hasn’t been enough for them to inspire too many others to take their path. Another problem here is the clear distinction of genres. Going back to the interview

“In the US, performances aren’t advertised as ‘a jazz concert by Wayne Shorter,’ or ‘a classical concert by Elliot Carter.’ They merely say: A concert by Wayne Shorter or Elliot Carter.’ It’s the artist who’s the draw – and besides, everyone knows Wayne Shorter plays jazz.” But here, come December, the ads admonish: A Carnatic concert by Prasanna. “It indirectly tells me to be only one part of me. I’ve done that for many years, but today I’ve come to a stage where I want my audience to connect to me through my entire being. I still use the mridangam and the ghatam – but I don’t want to define my concert as Carnatic.”

It is this clear distinction of genre that is again a hindrance to integration of carnatic-based music into mainstream Carnatic music. Of course, Carnatic musicians “belonging to the union” are well-justified in keeping the genre-distinction strict, for it helps them to keep their own audience. The question is what someone who wants to bring in more influences into his music must do.

I wonder if there is a way in which studness can be brought back into mainstream Carnatic music. For now, the only hope is for established players to diversify their stuff after their careers have been well-established – but given that their career has been established on a base of conformity, this is not going to be very common. People will need to figure out how they can bring in more innovation into the system and still remain part of the “genre”.

Disco Raaga – Taana – Pallavi

This is one of those posts that I’ve been intending to post for over a couple of months, but each time I think about this, I don’t happen to be in front of a computer, and even if I do, I don’t feel like writing about it. So here I am – finally blogging this. As I write this, I’m listening to the Ledzep Live Album The Song Remains the Same. This post is about this album, and other related stuff.

As you might have figured out from the title of this post, one thing I’ve noticed about this album is about the approximate Carnatic format that the songs in this take on. It may not be in the strict order that Carnatic music prescribes, but these songs are roughly there. I’m currently listening to Dazed and Confused, and after the first few lines of the Pallavi were sung, Page has now gone off into an extended Aalapana of whichever Raaga this song is set in.

Periodically, they return to the song, and play a few more lines. Now, Plant is doing his bit by improvising with a few lines of his own. Jones and Bonham are dutifully doing their background stuff – Bonham will get his footage later in the album – for Moby Dick features a full-blown Tani Avartanam. It ends the same way Tani Avartanams in Carnatic concerts do – with the main line of the Pallavi being sung at the end of it. I know I might be force-fitting some Carnatic concepts into this album; nevertheless, all these improvements make for extremely interesting listening.

A few days after I had first noticed this, Udupa told me that a large number of concerts in the 70s were like this – the musicians would simply jam on stage in the middle of the songs. Created music on the spot. Spontaneous stuff. Unfortunately, Udupa continued, the trend changed a few years back when less informed audiences started demanding that more songs be crammed into the three hour concert, thus reducing the scope for such improvisations.

The best thing about Carnatic concerts is that each one is unique. You might look at two concerts – played by the same set of musicians and with the same line-up of krithis, but there is a very good chance that the two are markedly different. This is because Indian Classical music, in its concerts, encourages the musician to innovate, to play whatever comes to his mind at that point of time – while adhering to the fairly strict rules. It is this element of innovation that makes each concert special, and an experience in itself.

Western Classical music differs in this regard – especially in the orchestra form – since the large size of the troupe leaves little scope for innovation and the musicians are literally forced to play it by the book. In that context, it seems like it was genres such as rock which brought in the spontaneity and innovation into western music.

Nowadays, bands don’t tour as much as they used to a couple of decades ago, which means that whenever they visit a city (which is once in a few years), the fans in the city will want to hear as many songs as possible. And that kills innovation. It is not the bands’ fault – they are simply responding to the market. And I don’t know what it could be that could get them back to their RTP days.

Here is one of my retirement plans. For each song that I like, describe a Carnatic Raaga into which it can approximately fit into. Tinker around with the stanzas, to create a Pallavi-Anupallavi-Charana format. Try to make the raagas as rigid as possible – Vakra scales will be preferred. And then put RTP. Use some Western instruments too – for example, I definitely want the Bass guitar to be a regular feature in Carnatic concerts. I think the result is likely to be phenomenal.

It’s been a few years since I picked up the violin. I plan to do it sometime. And implement what I’ve described here. Hopefully I’ll do a good job. In the meantime, if there are any bands out there which want to implement this concept, they can feel free and do it – I promise I won’t sue them later for IPR.