The importance of music in Tamil movies, culture
MUSIC is an essential part of Tamil movies and, in some cases, the saving grace of the movie.
Many movies that flopped at the box office, however, produced excellent music and hit songs, one being Sangamam.
The golden era of Tamil film music produced such gems that, to date, most of these evergreen melodies are remembered and sung at concerts or experimented on in newer genres of music. Malaysia’s Yogi B is one such artist, who blended music director’s Illayaraja’s melodies into his Tamil Rap genre of music.
Over the years, the Tamil movie industry became a powerful medium for popularising music of Tamil Nadu.
Film music is derived from the three categories, which is carnatic or classical, devotional and folk music.
Tamil movie muso, Gangai Amaran, writes: “Research findings have established clearly that folk music preceded traditional classical music in Tamil Nadu. Cave men and tribal men made sounds that developed into a language. These people gave simple tunes without any rules, but a sense of music was apparent even then.”
Music is an integral part of the culture of the people of Tamil Nadu. Chennai is the hub for classical music festivals. People of Tamil Nadu are very conservative in their taste for music and not easily influenced by any external culture. They respect and preserve their ancestry and culture, including music.
Music composers thus have to ensure they compose music to suit the taste of the audiences and yet bring out a pure and clean traditional melody.
Music in movies has its origins in street and stage performers, who travelled from village to village telling stories. Songs were then interwoven into these stories. British technology transferred stage and street drama and its music to film format.
The Tamil film songs were strongly based on carnatic music tradition. In the early stages of movie production, all actors had to be endowed with good looks, good voices and trained in carnatic music.
Thyagaraja Bhagavathar, PU Chinnappa, TR Mahalingam, Seerkazhi Govindrarajan, C Jayaram and Tiruchi Loganathan are examples of actors of yesteryear endowed with such gifts.
Hence the songs of those days were based entirely on carnatic music.
To date, most playback singers are trained in carnatic music and those who enter the industry without carnatic music training endeavour to study it – as was the case of playback singer SP Balasubramaniam. As the era of film music progressed, each director added his own style and preferences of musical adaptation, instrumentation and voice blending to film music.
The formative years of Tamil cine music had an element of genuine inspiration behind it that could shape the musical sense of even the minor composers and there was no aping of Western music as in modern light music.
In contrast, today’s Tamil cine music seems to appeal to us only by the hi-fi sound effects and rarely by any musical sense. The composer of those times had a kind of devotion to music, which didn’t just have commercial interests.