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Photo: M. MOORTHY

Inspired Plays carnatic on guitar with ease

The electric guitar, popularly used for jazz, blues, country music, and rock and roll, sounds closer to sitar, sarod and veena when R. Prasanna plays Indian classical on it.

“I consciously make an effort to try and sound my guitar like a guitar,” he says, resting two of his electric guitars beside him.

“Carnatic music is universal. You don’t need to modify guitar to play carnatic. The purest form of it can spring from any raw guitar. In that sense, even guitar is universal and versatile, helping all kinds of music play through it.”

For someone who plays ‘gamakas’ with equal felicity as any veena artist, carnatic-music-in-guitar had never been a dream. “Carnatic music was accidental to me. I wanted to learn Western in guitar. But my teacher turned me down saying I don’t have long nails to pluck the strings fast. He didn’t want me to use fake nails too, as we do in veena. That triggered my carnatic interest.”

The sonic exploration through electric guitar was also partly a reason for his flair towards it. “Electric guitar has become an inseparable part of western music. My sister taught me carnatic music through her veena. I realise carnatic music and fusion aren’t any out-of-the world stuff. Music in itself is wholesome, no matter whether it’s pure or a blend of different forms.”

The training in carnatic was just a beginning of his exposure to different schools of music. For want of formal western music lessons, the IIT-ian got into Berkeley School of Music, Boston.

Whenever he is confronted with questions like “what is the commonness in all schools of music?” he has just one thing to reiterate — Music. “It must be the first similarity one must find in any genre of music. Anybody who reacts to a sound becomes music. The amount of pleasure or annoyance derived from it is secondary.”

Having grown up listening to Ilayaraja, the unassuming musician finds the composer’s works as “harmonically sophisticated.” That said, Prasanna makes a point for yet again that music isn’t bequest of any sect. “Nobody owns music. Music owns itself. Even legendary composers like Dikshithar and Thiyagaraja intentionally stripped off ‘gamakams’ in few compositions to reach out to larger audience.”

Carnatic, he says, has been worked out in a planned manner. Every scale of notes used in it can be codified in any school of music, independent of culture.

To prove his point, he strums just a single note, as he played the ‘aarohanam’ of Kalyani. Surprisingly, the same swara sounded like a jazz number when he plucked three chords at the same time instead of one.

“Sounds are more important than technicalities involved. You hear the sound first before recognising its kind.” But ragas like Todi and Varali aren’t as flexible as Mohanam in the sense that the ragas challenge the basic premise on which the Guitar is constructed.

“However, as long as the artiste can produce all the authentic gamakas on the Guitar, any raga could be played with perfection. But that of course calls for extraordinary perception, technique and practice.”

Practice in musical instruments is not just to make music but to produce it as a way it must be done. Every instrument is unique in its technique. The trick lies in making them sound like a singer does. “When I record for carnatic albums, I double check to make sure my guitar sound like a singer. I strum it only where the singer mouths a syllable. If there are just four syllables spread out over two lines, I have to strum just two times and maintain the notes for that period of time.”

Fusionist, though he is called, Prasanna never tries to proclaim as one during his concerts, for obvious reasons.

“Fusing music must not be told but shown.”

Fusion has never gone down well among the south Indians, Prasanna says pointing fingers at assumptions made by carnatic musicians for it.

“Few musicians proclaim themselves as fusionists before the start of their performance. It raises scepticism in the minds of listeners. We normally don’t see the sum of the parts but the end result. If you find an addition in the work, then the fusion has failed. The end result must stand out as a single entity.”

When we talk of fusion, we are so used to the term western and classical. Despite believing in the incentives of embracing technology, Prasanna is conventional about the way we use the term ‘western music.’

“We use it very loosely. Technically, it’s music from western hemisphere. Other schools of music, just because they aren’t Indian music, are not western. We have to be sensitive to the kind of music we borrow.”

So what does the fusionist have to say about his way of synthesising music? “Doing a fusion is not an agenda for me. It’s perhaps natural to me. I’m born that way.”

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