Rajshekhar Mansur: Preserving Raga-s

My father has always been a source of encouragement. He allowed me to grow musically in my own way. I called him the other day and he informed me that he was flying to Chicago for a programme. This energy is through divine grace. Singing to me, is a form of prayer.

In a prayer, the worshipper tries to establish a bond with the deity. There are several steps through which he climbs up. So it is in singing. The first bond is with yourself, then with your accompanists and their instruments. The singer then appeals to the audience and only when they are all completely with him does he transport them towards divine abstraction. In classical performance the requirement for bonding are very high. The alap tries to give grounding of basic rules of the composition, but there is always the fear of the singer getting lost in his own complexity. All the popular classical artistes, be it Pt. Ravishankar or Pt. Shivkumar or Pt. Hariprasad, know the art of presenting the material in a condensed form. If the artiste can encapsulate the presentation according to the mood and patience of the audience he shall be successful. The same bhajan I used to present in one hour ten years back, I finish in fifteen minutes today. Last week when I was performing at Raipur, the audience was enlightened and without realizing kept singing a single composition for forty five minutes.

It is the bond which matters. So many things conspire to create this union. On 2nd October when I was at Rajghat, the presence of Mahatma's memory was so alive in the audience that I kept singing Vaishnav jan and Ramdhun without any sense of time.

But shortened presentation do not imply limited practice. Young musicians who practice only short pieces can never sound deep as masters who have done riyaz with complete Raga-s. One should always be ready for a full lenght performance but be able to condense it according to people and place.

In My View:

Music as Bonding

By Anoop jalota