Pattanam Pogalam Vaa (1981)
01.Aathangarai Mettorama - PJayachandran & SJanaki
Here is a song that has specific auditory qualities such as tonal curvatures and turns and vocal intonations making it a pure aural pleasure, in the particular context of its ability to represent the bygone bucolic past at its best.
Right from the choice of the musical instruments, -- particularly flute, nadaswaram and clarinet not to speak of tabala, beginning with the extended play of the flute that effortlessly summons the vast landscapes of the rural milieu into our minds, when joined by nadaswarm and backgrounded by a variety of percussions instruments – to the inflection and pronunciation of the lyrics that aspires to approximate the rustic colloquialism (notice the delivery of the word “soraga” instead of the correct “Joraaga”), every bit in this song captures the rarefied joy of the idyllic environ of the pastoral past.
This song, like most of its contemporaries from IR, has a distinctive cubic acoustics that reproduce the depth and panoramic vastness of the surroundings, in this case, of the countryside. It could have happened by default or by design (I learn from people and books that IR always paid huge and meticulous attention to sound engineering as much as composition). But listen in this song to the subtle echo and muffled reverberations that are typically rural and unquestionably impossible in the urban landscapes with its concrete jungles not generating any sort of reverberations or echoes of the sounds we make.
Just as we enter the charanam (or more aptly, as the charanam enters us), we are taken aback by the sudden mellowed melancholy in the voice of the singers as they long for the rural locales they are probably far way from, and probably again, they have returned to after a long time. In this regard, this song has an added appeal to us now, for it matches our present-day wistfulness for the lost past. Hence there is a glorious symmetry of concerns of the performers (the singers or the protagonists) and listeners (you and me).
In an archetypal IR style, this song has a goosebumps-inducing climax of the charanam that in combination with the pallavi starting thereafter is purely otherworldly in its evocation.
Aided appositely by the minimal choice of music instruments the pieces in this song assume metaphorical qualities. Both the improvisation on the raga and the musical juxtapositions are purely imagistic in that the sounds transcend the instruments they emanate from and conjure up the images, vistas, smell, colors and feel of the agronomic locales with their unalloyed innocence, even as the sounds vapourize once presenting the images to us. After listening to this song we are left with mellifluous images rather than picturesque sounds.
A poet once averred “words are mere carriers of the images I want to paint in the minds of the readers. Words ought to disappear or die once transferring the images. If the readers carry the words instead of the images, it is bad poetry”
If it is the hallmark of good poetry, are not IR’s songs musical poetries?
பாடலை கேட்க
02.Kaaliyaam Kovilile - SJanaki
பாடலை கேட்க
03.Maalai Mangalam - SPShailaja
பாடலை கேட்க
04.Vazvil Un Nunaival - Malaysia Vasudhevan
பாடலை கேட்க
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