Sounds of Music!!

At the age of 7 when my father took me to the most well known ‘School of Music’ at Durgapur, I was not sure what instrument he had in his mind that I must learn to play. Neither did I have any choice of an instrument that fascinated me. Music as they say runs in the blood…aha! I wasn’t sure that was the case with me. Honestly, I am sure I couldn’t have copied even a donkey and his fine art of braying, let alone mastering the art of repeatability. Both my elder sisters however were learning vocal under the famous Mrs. Rangan of Durgapur. She had a very strong and distinct south Indian accent when she spoke Hindi – literally speaking a perfect give-away! It became my responsibility to accompany my 2nd sister during her trips to Mrs. Rangan’s house when my eldest sister went out of town for her graduate course in science. With apparently no ear for music, the 60 minutes wait for my sister to complete her classroom training used to seem endless and a torture. Generally afternoon and evening hours were reserved for playing with friends and acquaintances and Durgapur being a sleepy colony town there was no dearth for play grounds. Being stuck at Mrs. Rangan’s house seemed a waste of precious play time. What is amazing however is the way the notes, sahitya and the tune have a stickiness in the mind. Four decades and five years later, I can still recall the tune of songs sung by my sister and it is coming in handy as I learn to play the violin now.

Coming back to my first day at ‘School of Music’, I was led by my father to a tabalchi teacher Shri Moni Das from the Allahabad Gharana and that is where my suspense ended. I was destined to learn Tabla. What struck me as odd was the friendly disposition of my tabla teacher. A teacher is a teacher is a teacher, or so I thought. The mind associated a teacher as someone who would be a task master, giving tons of homework, have a very serious air around them and have no tolerance for erring students. Contrary to my expectations this teacher was, to put it simply, just the opposite. He would shower heaps of praise if I just positioned my hands and fingers correctly on the instrument. His demonstration of joy new no bounds if I struck the notes correctly. It was so enchanting that I just wanted to be repeatedly perfect in the way I held my hands and played the beat. It was that instant recognition that was so gratifying and on hindsight it probably made me want to practice and play more, just to impress. Music or the science of rhythm and beat was just incidental. What was even more exciting was the lack of home work. The next class would be a week later and this would most often be a repeat of what we had learnt earlier. We were allowed to learn at our own pace, something that we couldn’t dream of in our regular classroom. In those impressionable years, I have only fond memories of my attempts at learning to play a percussion instrument.

It continued this way for the next seven years from being a beginner; I appeared for both written and practical exams. What I lacked was the experience in accompanying vocalists. The ‘School of Music’ at Durgapur made us proficient in playing the instrument and they were also quite efficient in making us overcome our stage fright. We were all asked regularly to appear as big teams playing this instrument in unison in front of large to very large gatherings. But when it came to accompanying other musicians and vocalists, we drew a blank. I got accidentally initiated into this by my brother-in-law who is a self taught singer and a harmonium player. With a very keen sense and an ear for music, he would urge me to accompany whenever he played the harmonium or sang light music numbers (film songs of the yester years). This unexpected, yet, a necessary exposure came in extremely handy when I joined the engineering college at Trichy in Tamil Nadu. Students with additional skills especially if it was connected to playing an instrument got instant recognition. They would automatically get initiated into a motley set of budding artists and proudly call themselves as THE college band. It also had some side advantages as one would get ragged less and RE College Trichy was pretty well known when it came to creativity in ragging styles. Although shy by nature, I must admit that I got my fair share of brand recognition. On the graduation day speech, Major Srinivasan, our kind and lovable Training & Placement Officer; he chose to prefix my name with the word ‘Tabla’ and said Tabla Rama Rao believes that all individuals must work hard for themselves. I am not sure I understood the context when Major uttered these words, but the words were indeed absolutely prophetic! I couldn’t have found a better mission statement that would describe me, myself and I, in a more apt manner, without the prefix, of course.

Incidentally and for some odd reason I have never been known by my first name. My title Rao has got stuck with me amongst my friends and colleagues + clients as well. The only person who used to call me by my full name was my grandmother. My wife has settled for an abridged version and addresses me as Vish, her Wish I guess! When my engineering career took me to Mumbai in 1982, I developed a close circle of friends in Kannada Association at their club premises located in Matunga near the well known landmark, ‘King’s Circle’. I got together with a few like minded folks and we formed a troupe of sorts. We started with group songs with yours truly playing the tabla. We even experimented with a few skits but they invariably ended in a disaster. What we considered humor was disdainfully looked upon as a serious attempt at slapstick. However, Kannada folk music was a big hit and we stuck to it much like the way a drowning person would hold on to a twig in the ocean to stay afloat. With continuous practice, we even got a bit famous in the circle of light music lovers and were invited to record for a small fifteen minute program in All India Radio’s Bombay ‘B’ service. I continued my association with a similar Kannada Sangha when I moved to Calcutta in September 1983 and associated with an active group out there. However, the Calcutta unit wasn’t as active or progressive as the Bombay Sangha and my visits to these places dwindled with time. So were my skills at playing tabla. Without practice and encouragement any art however well learnt can eventually fade into oblivion.

To a small but limited extent, it was rekindled and revived when I was asked to accompany a large group of vocalists during Rang Tarang after joining HTMT. I was encouraged when our friends from US came on their annual visit and we had cobbled a team to sing a few popular group songs in an in-house entertainment program. Like in the college I discovered that having some additional skills made a person stand apart from the masses however small or big, whether a teaching institution or an organization. While the urge was always strong to learn an additional instrument, I had not conjured enough courage to search for a teacher or decided on an instrument to dabble in this fine art. During a casual conversation with Madhu, I mentioned to him that if I were to get an opportunity to learn play the violin, I would make a serious attempt, however late in life. Madhu, who is always the adventurous kind and with an ever willing attitude to learn and master new subjects responded saying he would come back to me in case he found a good teacher closer home. He did come back a couple of months later and excitedly told me that he had found a very good teacher; someone who had taught for a long time, first in Chennai and then in Singapore before deciding to make Bangalore her home. On 25th November 2009, Madhu introduced me to his teacher Ms. Venkatalashmi, who is an accomplished violinist with a distinguished career as an artist and now a teacher.

I am sure she was skeptical when I met her for the first time, whether I would be willing to commit the time on a regular basis to learn the instrument. Violin is by far the most difficult instrument to play as there are no frets to stop the string. One has to intuitively feel the way with the left hand to arrive at the correct position to play the note through practice and ear training. Combined with the bow movement which runs perpendicular to the movement of fingers on the finger board, it takes a while for the brain to figure out what’s happening and what instructions to give each of the hands and fingers. I was all over the place when I started learning and am sure it must have been a pretty comical sight. Beginners sometimes rely on tapes placed on the fingerboard for finger placement, but usually abandon the tapes as they advance. Another commonly used marking technique uses the white marker, which wears off in a few weeks of regular practice. My violin teacher helped me by using a white ink marker and thankfully traces of it still remain on the finger board guiding me the relative positions to play each note. While a percussion instrument like the tabla can at best be an accompaniment, music from a stringed instrument like the violin can act as a close substitute to a vocalist. It can produce the same variations that any vocalist can do with their trained voice. While the South Indian violin is almost identical to the Western violin, it differs from it in tuning and playing position. It is traditionally played, sitting cross-legged, with the scroll placed on the player’s right ankle and the back of the violin resting on the player’s left shoulder. This position gives freedom to the left hand to play Indian Musical Gamaka or pulsating rhythm.

While all of these details sound nice on paper, practically holding the violin between the left shoulder and right ankle, and placing the bow close to the bridge to bring out the best quality of sound can be an enormous challenge. Pressing the bow very hard on the string can produce a very harsh cracking sound while gliding it softly on the string produces a very feeble sound. One needs to find the right balance of pressure and smooth glide. The bow is typically 75 cm in length and has a ribbon of white horsehair and needs a firm rubbing with rosin to make it grip the string intermittently causing them to vibrate. Another big challenge is to move the bow in a manner that it connects with only one string at a time. The dos and don’ts can indeed be mind blowing.

While I had bravely joined the class and also went ahead and bought myself a fairly expensive violin, I wasn’t sure whether I would be able to cope up with the daily grind and the lessons. I even went to the extent of asking my teacher whether I, at the age of 51 could still indulge in learning this fine art; not just holding the instrument in its correct position but also produce sounds of music. It was music to my ears when she grandly stated that she had a few accomplished violinists while at Singapore and these students had started to learn at the age of 70! It gave me the much needed courage and I am glad that I continued to practice under the teachers trained eyes and ears. It used to be an effort to play the seven swaras in the beginning and with a childlike enthusiasm I would ask my wife and boys to sit and hear me play the seven notes. By itself these seven notes does not constitute music, but the fact that such unending permutation and combination of swaras can create such enchanting music is unfathomable until one gets a chance to dabble in them. Ten months into my lessons, I am now able to play a few beginners’ bhajans with fewer mistakes and my music loving family, my wife is an accomplished vocalist in Hindustani style, my elder son is a keyboard player and my second son is a fine tabalchi, do not have second thoughts when I call them to listen while I play. To me, that is a big endorsement and I am grateful to them for their patience and endurance!

Cheers!!