Semmangudi: A Mosaic- Portrait

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About The Book

When an artist lives to be 80-plus, his career, his achievements and his personality are bound to reveal many facets. Unless, of course, he is a nondescript person.

Semmangudi is anything but nondescript. For those who have the eyes to see and the will to examine, he is a fascinating subject for study. And a complex one too.

This is a collection of articles, chips allowed to fall freely. Each offers a closer look at many facets only tangentially touched upon in the profile of the artist. Together, they offer a polychromatic mosaic-portrait. The portrait may seem to have different dominant shades, depending on the angles from which the readers look at it.

Preface

When an artist lives to be 80-plus, his career, his achievements and his personality are bound to reveal many facets. Unless, of course, he is a nondescript person.

Semmangudi is anything but nondescript. For those who have the eyes to see and the will to examine, he is a fascinating subject for study.And a complex one too.

What follows is a collection of articles, chips allowed to fall freely. Each offers a closer look at many facets only tangentially touched upon in the profile of the artist Together, they offer a polychromatic mosaic-portrait. The portrait may seem to have different dominant shades, depending on the angles from which the readers look at it.

The articles, organised in 16 sections, were originally published in Sruti in 1989. They have been updated and edited slightly.

I am grateful to all those who assisted us by providing valuable information and opinions, especially Sri SemmangudiSrinivasaIyer himself. I am equally grateful to all who have contributed the articles, as well as to my colleagues on the staff of The Sruti Foundation, particularly S. Janaki (production control), M. Sudha (layout) and T. Karpagam (key-punching), who worked with diligence and dispatch to produce this volume.

Dr. Raja Ramanna readily responded to my request to write the Foreword to this book I offer my thanks to him too.

Foreword

Musicians and music lovers will be happy to know that books are being written on composers and performers of Carnatic music of the past and present. We have lost a lot of useful information on Carnatic music because of the lack of records. We have also realised that reliable books can be written only when authentic sources of information are available.

Authenticity is an essential part of a biography. It used to be the fashion to praise and glorify the artist and avoid any reference to him which may show him in bad light, however trivial To analyse the development of a great artist requires descriptions not only of his achievements but also of all the trials and tribulations the composer or performer suffered on his way to the pinnacle If one does not point out his shortcomings, balanced by his achievements, the result will not show a way to greater excellence.

There will always be problems of writing about distinguished and sensitive musicians who over react to criticism. The following story about a great British composer of the Victorian period is of some relevance Sir Charles Stanford is among the most important names in the revival of a modern school of English music. He is remembered for his courageous attempts to revive serious opera works of British composers and I believe he was successful. But for some reason, Bernard Shaw, the famous music critic of the times, better known for his literary work, took a dislike to Sir Charles'endeavours and wrote severely about them and the composer. Sir Charles wrote a rejoinder about the way critics function, on how they write on a work without knowing much about music as such and within an hour of a performance of a large work, which might have taken several years to write and several months to stage This, he believed, was a mischief on the public and a disservice to music His reference was mainly to Bernard Shaw as he says that, by just having literary qualities, one cannot write about everything. In a most interesting reply, Bernard Shaw admitted the weaknesses of a critic's position but expressed his belief that, to keep standards high, critical assessments are necessary even if they do not happen to be from experts. He stated that sermons from the pulpits are bores only because nobody ever criticises them.

This biography of SemmangudiSrinivasalyer consists of articles which appeared earlier in the magazine Sruti. It includes personal interviews with Srinivasalyer, who, everyone knows, is the doyen of Carnatic music. The articles bring out the character of the artist as a very broadminded man, who could express himself in simple Tamil with a mastery that would captivate any audience in the same way as his vocal performances at concerts. Semmangudi openly criticises the unscientific uses of microphones and, though sensitive to criticism like all good musicians, he is able to talk about music and other musicians in an unbiased way. The days of merely praising everybody in the name of biography have gone forever.

The authors of the various articles must be praised for starting a new trend in writing about a musician, covering as they do all aspects of the great man's character The new generation will thus have a better appreciation of the artist's career, achievements and contributions, as well as of the conditions of classical music during the early years of the present century.

**Contents and Sample Pages**