In Mint Lounge today, a Raagtime column on what makes a sad song a sad song. That would be a minor third, according to new research by the Music Cognition Lab: A few months ago, in the philosophical quest to understand why music affects us the way it does, a new scientific line of thought [...]
A couple of pieces on music, published in the last few days in Mint. First, an obituary of Manohari Singh, the man responsible for many of Bollywood’s finest saxophone solos: In 1969, a group of musicians from Mumbai accompanied Kishore Kumar on a three-month tour of performances, visiting the West Indies, the US, and the [...]
In Mint today, a Raagtime column on the bewildering multiplicity of languages in Carnatic music — and how that impacts the way we listen to and appreciate the music: This assortment of tongues is daunting; it also leads to frequent friction. One of the eternal debates in Carnatic music runs roughly as follows: If a [...]
In Mint today, a Raagtime column on the difficulties of notating Carnatic music: Inevitably, a song’s libretto has to be written in a particular script, but even the notes underlying those lyrics rely on the alphabet. I wrote these notes in English—“S” for “Sa” and so on—but a student in Kerala might well write them [...]
In Mint today, a Raagtime column on the famed “Airport Concert” of Semmangudi Srinivasa Iyer: As it turned out, the concert occurred not in an airport but near one; the mridangam player in the concert, Trichy Sankaran, once confirmed that it was held, sometime in the 1960s, in a hall in Tambaram, a Chennai suburb [...]