Musical cares

(continued...)

I have been finding over the last couple of months that a number of people who say they like music, don’t. Not really, truly, at least. They enjoy one or maybe two styles, tolerate the rest as background noise and abjure the – in their opinions, whatever those may be – more esoteric. They will listen to the unfamiliar and the familiarly disliked for a brief while to please their loved ones or to be social or, sometimes, to show their accommodating large-heartedness, or even their willingness to be ‘in’, but not with any discernible attention and interest. There is an element of crocodile in their smiles, a soupcon of Punchinello in their nods, a sense of panic in their need to know the average playing length of the CD or tape or live rendition.

From this rather nastily snobbish point of view, Mumbai is more genuine than almost any other Indian city I know – personally or by hearsay. This, even though the man who manages my favourite music store in my home town (the aforementioned Mumbai) tells me that Chennai has a more adventurous audience and so a larger selection of genres like alternative, fusion, jazz, be-bop and rai. It may be because the South – as a people more than a geography – is more Brahmin, tolerant, accepting, even genuinely curious and therefore involved. Another explanation could be that with so much less of the bureaucracy and self-consciousness that plagues Delhi, minds outside the capital are more open to outside influences, more inviting to the myriad sounds of music, new and old.

My exposure to melody and phonic input has been both deliberate and subliminal over the many years of my life in various parts of the globe. From shaadi sangeets to traditional kutcheries, operas and rock concerts to chamber orchestras, commuter-train singers, tourist-bus antakshari teams, beggar minstrels and party crooners to meal-time entertainers, tapes, CDs and now the magic of MP3, I have survived the whole gamut and enjoyed most of it, even singing along occasionally in my best shower-stopping voice.

I remember one wonderful concert I went to when I was in college in New York. It was wonderful not just because of my escort – the best looking man on campus and just a dear friend, unfortunately – but because of the strange genre it was. Atonal, the show proclaimed. Instead of an orchestra or musicians or instruments or anything remotely familiarly musically related, there were two huge speakers on the stage, with spotlights focussed on them, the scene worthy of a full-blown opera setting. The synthetic sounds came squeaking, scraping, sonorous, sensual, sensitive, stirring over the superbly balanced acoustic system. I sat there, sometimes moved, other times uncomprehending, but always rapt, wholly absorbed in the strangeness of the experience.

A few years ago, I was taken to listen to chamber music at the India International Centre, Delhi. I had just arrived in the city after a hideously long and tiring journey by rail from Mumbai, and the train lag was hitting me very badly. The music – being mild and easy to absorb Mozart, Hadyn and Handel – was unchallenging to a sleep-deprived brain, and the movements of the internationally well-known string quartet slow, swinging and soporific. I started by enjoying the familiar sounds, then slowly drifted into a state of gently swaying inertia and, finally, to the unmitigated collective horror of my parents and hosts, sank inevitably back against the headrest of my seat and succumbed – mercifully silently - to the incessant demands of Morpheus. No amount of surreptitious shaking and prodding pulled me that evening from behind the walls of dreamland and I missed a musical treat…or so I was told for many years thereafter.

And now I am driven to the borderlines of insanity by that scourge on the phonic soundscape – the remix. It plays without any reason, sense or comprehensible logic in shopping malls, elevators, hotel foyers, weddings, parties, discotheques…even my car on occasion. It takes the familiar – usually Hindi film music of myriad time zones and genres - and makes it uncomfortably unfamiliar, a catchy beat and souped up instrumental improvisations combined with rap and rapid rhythmic variations to create a series of noises that do appeal in the short-term, but repel if heard more than once, unless well-flavoured – and often muffled – by the welcome musicality of traffic in a metropolis through an open window.

Music as she is heard - but is that the way it was meant to be?