Ilayaraaja the great–ranked 9globally

ILAYARAAJA THE GREAT–Ranked 9globally

ARISE TRAINING & RESEARCH CENTER - arisedreams.com

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 IndiaARISE TRAINING & RESEARCH CENTER -

arisedreams.com

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.

ARISE TRAINING & RESEARCH CENTER -arisedreams.com

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.


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.


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.


Something SpecialIlaiyaraaja would hire

instruments from

composer R. K. Shekhar,

father of composer A. R.

Rahman who would

later join Ilaiyaraaja's

orchestra as a

keyboardist.


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.ARISE TRAINING & RESEARCH CENTER -

arisedreams.com

MUSIC STYLEAccording 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 -arisedreams.com

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."


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 -arisedreams.com

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


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).ARISE TRAINING & RESEARCH CENTER -

arisedreams.com

RAJINI – ILAYARAAJA - KAMALAHASAN


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 Carnaticmaster 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 Chaurasiaand 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.).


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.


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)


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).


AWARDS & HONOURS

He was conferred the title Isaignani ('savant of music') in 1988 by Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M. Karunanidhi and received the KalaimamaniAward, 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.


AWARDS & HONOURS

He was awarded honorary doctorates by AnnamalaiUniversity, 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 KamarajUniversity, 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.


PHOTOBIOGRAPHY


PHOTOBIOGRAPHY


PHOTOBIOGRAPHY


PHOTOBIOGRAPHY


PHOTOBIOGRAPHY


arisedreams Presents


Thank You


Entertainment & Humor

Ilayaraaja the great–ranked 9globally