Ilayaraaja the great–ranked 9globally

ILAYARAAJA THE GREAT–Ranked 9globally
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The Great Ilayaraaja
Ilaiyaraaja (Tamil:
) is a critically
acclaimed Indian film composer,
singer, and lyricist and the first
Asian Composer to score a
Symphony. He is a gold medalist
from Trinity College of Music,
London has composed over 4,500
songs and provided film scores for
more than 900 Indian films in
various languages in a career
spanning more than 30 years. He
is based in Chennai, the fourth
largest city in India ARISE TRAINING & RESEARCH CENTER -
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BEGINNING 1970
Ilaiyaraaja is a prominent composer of film
music in South Indian cinema from the late
1970s till date. His work integrated Tamil folk
lyricism and introduced broader Western
musical sensibilities into the South Indian
musical mainstream. He has thrice won the
Indian National Film Award for best film
scoring.
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EARLY LIFE
Ilaiyaraaja was born into a poor rural Dalit family in
Pannaipuram, Theni district, Tamil Nadu, India, as the third
son of Daniel Ramaswamy and Chinnathayammal. Growing
up in a rural area, Ilaiyaraaja was exposed to a range of
Tamil folk music. At the age of 14, he joined a travelling
musical troupe headed by his elder step-brother, Pavalar
Varadarajan, and spent the next decade performing
throughout South India. While working with the troupe, he
penned his first composition, a musical setting of an elegy
written by the Tamil poet laureate Kannadasan for
Jawaharlal Nehru, India's first prime minister.
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MUSIC COURSE
In 1968, Ilaiyaraaja began a
music course with Professor
Dhanraj in Madras (now
Chennai), which included an
overview of Western classical
music, compositional training
in techniques such as
counterpoint, and study in
instrumental performance.
Ilaiyaraaja specialized in
classical guitar and had done
a course in it with the Trinity
College of Music, London.
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A.R.REHMAN JOINED ILAYARAAJA
Session musician and film orchestrator In the 1970s in Chennai,
Ilaiyaraaja played guitar in a band-for-hire, and worked as a
session guitarist, keyboardist, organist for film music composers
and directors such as Salil Chowdhury from West Bengal. After
his hiring as the musical assistant to Kannada film composer G.
K. Venkatesh, he worked on 200 film projects, mostly in the
Kannada language. As G. K. Venkatesh's assistant, Ilaiyaraaja
would orchestrate the melodic outlines developed by Venkatesh.
During this period, Ilaiyaraaja also began writing his own
scores. To hear his compositions, he would persuade Venkatesh's
session musicians to play excerpts from his scores during their
break times.
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Something Special
Ilaiyaraaja would hire
instruments from
composer R. K. Shekhar,
father of composer A. R.
Rahman who would
later join Ilaiyaraaja's
orchestra as a
keyboardist.
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MUSIC STYLE
• In 1976, film producer Panchu Arunachalam commissioned him to
compose the songs and film score for a Tamil-language film called
Annakkili ('The Parrot'). For the soundtrack, Ilaiyaraaja applied the
techniques of modern popular film music orchestration to Tamil folk
poetry and folk song melodies, which created a fusion of Western and
Tamil idioms. Ilaiyaraaja's use of Tamil music in his film scores
injected new influence into the Indian film score milieu. By the mid-
1980s Ilaiyaraaja was gaining increasing stature as a film composer
and music director in the South Indian film industry. Besides Tamil,
Telugu, Malayalam and Kannada films, he has scored music for Hindi
(or Bollywood) film productions such as Sadma (1983), Mahadev
(1989), Lajja (2001) and Cheeni Kum (2007). He has worked with
Indian poets and lyricists such as Gulzar, Kannadasan, Vairamuthu
and T.S. Rangarajan (Vaali), and film directors such as K.
Balachander, K. Vishwanath, Singeetham Srinivasa Rao, Balu
Mahendra and Mani Ratnam.
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MUSIC STYLE
According to musicologist P. Greene,
Ilaiyaraaja's "deep understanding
of so many different styles of
music allowed him to create
syncretic pieces of music
combining very different musical
idioms in unified, coherent
musical statements". Ilaiyaraaja
has composed Indian film songs
that amalgamated elements of
genres such as pop, acoustic
guitar-propelled Western folk,
jazz, rock and roll, dance music
(e.g., disco), psychedelia, funk,
doo-wop, march, bossa nova,
flamenco, pathos, Indian
folk/traditional, Afro-tribal, and
Indian classical. ARISE TRAINING & RESEARCH CENTER -
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NICHE IN NOTES
"Ilayaraja (sic) would look
at the scene once, and
immediately start giving
notes to his assistants, as
a bunch of musicians,
hovering around him,
would collect the notes
and go to their places... A
director can be taken by
surprise at the speed of
events."
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MUSICAL CHARACTERISTICS
Ilaiyaraaja's music is characterised
by the use of an orchestration
technique that is a synthesis of
Western and Indian instruments
and musical modes. He used
electronic music technology that
integrated synthesisers, electric
guitars and keyboards, drum
machines, rhythm boxes and
MIDI with large orchestras that
feature traditional instruments
such as the veena, venu,
nadaswaram, dholak, mridangam
and tabla as well as Western lead
instruments such as saxophones
and flutes. ARISE TRAINING & RESEARCH CENTER -
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He uses catchy melodies fleshed
out with a variety of chord
progressions, beats and timbres.
Ilaiyaraaja's songs typically
have a musical form where
vocal stanzas and choruses are
interspersed with orchestral
preludes and interludes. They
often contain polyphonic
melodies, where the lead vocals
are interwoven with supporting
melody lines sung by another
voice or played by instruments.
MUSICAL CHARACTERISTICS
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M.G.R. AND ILAYARAAJA
The bass lines in his songs tend to be (melodically)
dynamic, rising and falling in a dramatic fashion.
Polyrhythms are also apparent, particularly in
songs with Indian folk or Carnatic influences. The
melodic structure of his songs demand considerable
vocal virtuosity, and have found expressive platform
amongst some of India's respected vocalists and
playback singers, such as K.J. Yesudas, S.P.
Balasubramaniam, S. Janaki, Sujatha, P. Susheela,
K.S. Chithra, Malaysia Vasudevan, Asha Bhosle and
Lata Mangeshkar. Ilaiyaraaja has sung over 400 of
his own compositions for films, and is recognisable
by his stark, nasal voice. He has penned the lyrics
for some of his songs in Tamil and other languages.
Ilaiyaraaja's film scores are known both for the
dramatic and evocative melodies, and for the more
subtle background music that he uses to provide
texture or mood for scenes in films such as Mouna
Raagam (1986) and Geethanjali (1989).
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RAJINI – ILAYARAAJA - KAMALAHASAN
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NON CINEMATIC OUTPUT
Ilaiyaraaja's first two non-film albums were explorations in
the fusion of Indian and Western classical music. The first,
How To Name It? (1986), is dedicated to the Carnatic
master Tyāgarāja and to J. S. Bach. It features a fusion of
the Carnatic form and ragas with Bach partitas, fugues and
Baroque musical textures. The second, Nothing But Wind
(1988), was performed by flautist Hariprasad Chaurasia
and a 50-piece orchestra and takes the conceptual approach
suggested in the title — that music is a natural phenomenon
akin to various forms of air currents (e.g., the wind, breeze,
tempest etc.).
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INSPIRED BY RAMANA THE MAHARISHI
He has composed a set of Carnatic kritis that was recorded by
electric mandolinist U. Srinivas for the album Ilayaraaja's
Classicals on the Mandolin (1994). Ilaiyaraaja has also
composed albums of religious/devotional songs. His Guru
Ramana Geetam (2004) is a cycle of prayer songs inspired by
the Hindu mystic Ramana Maharishi, and his Thiruvasakam in
Symphony (2005) is an oratorio of ancient Tamil poems
transcribed partially in English by American lyricist Stephen
Schwartz and performed by the Budapest Symphony
Orchestra. Ilaiyaraaja's most recent release is a world music-
oriented album called The Music Messiah (2006). Its musical
concept is based against a mythological narrative.
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NOTABLE WORKS
Ilaiyaraaja's composition Rakkama Kaiya Thattu from the
movie Thalapathi (1991) was amongst the songs listed
in a BBC World Top Ten music poll.
He composed the music for Nayakan (1987), an Indian
film ranked by TIME Magazine as one of the all-time
100 best movies, a number of India's official entries to
the Oscars, such as Anjali (1990) and Hey Ram (2000),
and for Indian art films such as Adoor
Gopalakrishnan's FIPRESCI Prize-winning
Nizhalkkuthu ('The Dance of Shadows') (2002)
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AWARDS & HONOURS
Ilaiyaraaja has won the National Film Award for Best
Music Direction for the films Saagara Sangamam
(1984), Sindhu Bhairavi (1986) and Rudraveena
(1989).He also won the National Film Award for Best
Background Score for Malayalam film Pazhassi Raja
(2010). He won the Gold Remi Award for Best Music
Score jointly with film composer M. S. Viswanathan at
the WorldFest-Houston Film Festival for the film
Vishwa Thulasi (2005).
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AWARDS & HONOURS
He was conferred the title Isaignani ('savant of
music') in 1988 by Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M.
Karunanidhi and received the Kalaimamani
Award, an annual award for excellence in the
field of arts from the Government of the State of
Tamil Nadu, India. He also received State
Government Awards from the governments of
Kerala (1995), Andhra Pradesh and Madhya
Pradesh (The Lata Mangeshkar Award) (1998)
for excellence in music.
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AWARDS & HONOURS
He was awarded honorary doctorates by Annamalai
University, Tamil Nadu, India (Degree of Doctor of Letter
(Honoris causa)) (March, 1994), the World university
Round Table, Arizona, U.S.A. (Cultural Doctorate in
Philosophy of Music) (April, 1994), and Madurai Kamaraj
University, Tamil Nadu (Degree of Doctor of Letters)
(1996). He received an Award of Appreciation from the
Foundation and Federation of Tamil Sangams of North
America (1994), and later that year was presented with an
honorary citizenship and key to the Teaneck township by
Mr. John Abraham, Mayor of Teaneck, New Jersey, U.S.A.
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PHOTOBIOGRAPHY
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Presents
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Thank You
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Ilayaraaja the great–ranked 9globally

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