With the controversy of her singing of Christian songs in Carnatic music still raging, Nithyasree Mahadevan became the target of more trolling by right wingers on social media when a song she had sung early last year in praise of slain LTTE leader V Prabhakaran was dug up. In that song, she had...
Music is supposed to unite, not divide. Yet Carnatic music, which has created harmony between people and communities no less than any other top system in the world, has been targeted by certain people with feigned or genuine concerns to churn up religious or communal disharmony in recent...
Sometime in the late 90s, I tuned in late on radio to a concert. The tanam had just begun. As Khamboji flowed I was trying to figure out who the player was. I was quite sure I hadn't heard this musician before. The measured yet vibrant playing got me hooked onto the rest of the concert. At the...
For almost a decade, K Sathyanarayanan has been performing on an instrument that would appear to be totally unsuited to Carnatic music – gamakas. In 2001, he demonstrated how the gamakas, the hallmark of the genre, could be coaxed out of the keyboard, which critics accepted, if with some...
