personal preference art :‘I am a brand’
If you thought TM Krishna’s passion was reserved merely for his singing, you haven’t heard him get started about his schooling. The Carnatic vocalist is an alumnus of The School (Krishnamurti Foundation India), and he reveals, almost reverentially, “The KFI environment is very, very special. It contributed a lot to my taking up music as a profession. Even today, it’s helped me in terms of how I approach my career, because the first thing you learn there is to do something that you can do, and to do the best that you can.”
A lot of what we talk about snakes its way back to The School. Say, competition. “I believe it’s just a psychological phenomenon. It doesn’t actually exist. If my potential is going to be judged only with respect to what the next person is capable of, I could be mediocre all my life. That’s where KFI helped. Even when I was starting out, I never considered competing with anybody else. I just did what I needed to do, and I enjoyed doing it.” And criticism? “If there’s something valuable to be taken from what a critic says, I will. But the rest of it is just personal perception, so I don’t take either the compliments or the criticism too seriously. Ultimately the greatest conscience to your performance is yourself.”
But there are other times that Krishna doesn’t appear a product of The School so much as a law school. He holds very, very strong opinions about everything, and he will argue his case with an attorney’s zeal for persuading a jury until you, either convinced or exhausted, come around to his point of view. One of the cases he presents most eloquently the afternoon we meet is about musical tradition. Krishna is considered a traditionalist, but his concerts are often structured in ways that aren’t exactly traditional – for instance, he’s sung a varnam as the main piece (instead of the usual kriti). And he points out, “People believe that tradition is what they have listened to. If you ask a 70-year-old what musical tradition is, he’ll go back to Ariyakudi Ramanuja Iyengar. I’m proud to say I am a traditionalist, but I don’t believe that certain things that have come into practice over the years are necessarily part of tradition.
“Singing a varnam at the beginning of a concert was something Ariyakudi established. Now, let’s analyse this rationally. He’s a classic example of a traditionalist who was also a non-conformist — because he changed the face of Carnatic music performance.” Krishna is referring, of course, to the old master’s reconfiguration of the concert format — earlier, a performance would consist of fewer, elaborately-rendered numbers; Ramanuja Iyengar pioneered the shift to a mix with greater compositional variety — which is followed to this day. “For him, a varnam was very convenient. It helped him warm up his voice, get into the mood... So is that part of tradition or is that just an individual’s personal preference that’s become ‘tradition’ over a period of time?”
Listening to how Krishna analyses, deconstructs and rationalises every utterance of his, you can see why he first thought he’d make a career out of left-brain subjects like Management and Economics — despite starting to learn music from when he was about five-and-a-half. (The first guru was Seetharama Sharma, who was already teaching Krishna’s mother. Later, Krishna also learnt from Semmangudi Srinivasa Iyer.) Then in 1988, when he was 12, came his first official concert — at Chennai’s Music Academy, as part of their Spirit of Youth programme, which gave opportunities to talented youngsters.
But even then, says Krishna, “I didn’t think music was going to be my profession. I thought it was something I’d dabble in while working in some other field. I was always interested in Management and Economics.” (That explains his BA in Economics.) It was only around 1995-96, when he was in the third year at college, that he decided music would be his career. “What sparked that was probably a professional ascendance to a certain extent. I was getting good notices, and I got the confidence that this is something I could do.”
“Even so,” he adds, “at that point, I don’t know if I had the passion for music that I have now. But I loved singing, and when I realised I could make it a productive profession, I decided to go ahead. It was a rational decision.” Looking back, it was also the right decision. There was a time Krishna’s mother would give him auto fare so he could go and attend concerts of the biggest, brightest stars on the Carnatic music firmament. Today, he’s one of them — “a brand,” as he labels himself, borrowing a term from his college education.
Of course, Krishna didn’t just say that. He’d talked earlier about how the leisurely-paced padam is a lost art in concerts today and that it needed to be revived, and I’d asked him if audiences these days have the patience to sit through padams and javalis. That’s when he whipped himself into corporate mode. “The first time you come to a TM Krishna concert, you just listen. The second time, you expect something based on the previous experience. And so on for the third and fourth times. Now who decided those expectations? I did. I fed you with the data every time you came to my concert, and that data formed the basis of your expectations. Put in business terms, I am a brand.’’
‘‘The qualities of a brand are decided by the manufacturer, which is me. You buy the product once. If you like it, you buy it again. So if I think I can create an audience that can listen to a padam or a javali, it’s up to me to try and do it. I don’t agree with artistes who say that they do things because their audience wanted those things. That’s the biggest lie. Nobody wants anything from you except honesty.”
by Baradwaj Rangan
A lot of what we talk about snakes its way back to The School. Say, competition. “I believe it’s just a psychological phenomenon. It doesn’t actually exist. If my potential is going to be judged only with respect to what the next person is capable of, I could be mediocre all my life. That’s where KFI helped. Even when I was starting out, I never considered competing with anybody else. I just did what I needed to do, and I enjoyed doing it.” And criticism? “If there’s something valuable to be taken from what a critic says, I will. But the rest of it is just personal perception, so I don’t take either the compliments or the criticism too seriously. Ultimately the greatest conscience to your performance is yourself.”
But there are other times that Krishna doesn’t appear a product of The School so much as a law school. He holds very, very strong opinions about everything, and he will argue his case with an attorney’s zeal for persuading a jury until you, either convinced or exhausted, come around to his point of view. One of the cases he presents most eloquently the afternoon we meet is about musical tradition. Krishna is considered a traditionalist, but his concerts are often structured in ways that aren’t exactly traditional – for instance, he’s sung a varnam as the main piece (instead of the usual kriti). And he points out, “People believe that tradition is what they have listened to. If you ask a 70-year-old what musical tradition is, he’ll go back to Ariyakudi Ramanuja Iyengar. I’m proud to say I am a traditionalist, but I don’t believe that certain things that have come into practice over the years are necessarily part of tradition.
“Singing a varnam at the beginning of a concert was something Ariyakudi established. Now, let’s analyse this rationally. He’s a classic example of a traditionalist who was also a non-conformist — because he changed the face of Carnatic music performance.” Krishna is referring, of course, to the old master’s reconfiguration of the concert format — earlier, a performance would consist of fewer, elaborately-rendered numbers; Ramanuja Iyengar pioneered the shift to a mix with greater compositional variety — which is followed to this day. “For him, a varnam was very convenient. It helped him warm up his voice, get into the mood... So is that part of tradition or is that just an individual’s personal preference that’s become ‘tradition’ over a period of time?”
Listening to how Krishna analyses, deconstructs and rationalises every utterance of his, you can see why he first thought he’d make a career out of left-brain subjects like Management and Economics — despite starting to learn music from when he was about five-and-a-half. (The first guru was Seetharama Sharma, who was already teaching Krishna’s mother. Later, Krishna also learnt from Semmangudi Srinivasa Iyer.) Then in 1988, when he was 12, came his first official concert — at Chennai’s Music Academy, as part of their Spirit of Youth programme, which gave opportunities to talented youngsters.
But even then, says Krishna, “I didn’t think music was going to be my profession. I thought it was something I’d dabble in while working in some other field. I was always interested in Management and Economics.” (That explains his BA in Economics.) It was only around 1995-96, when he was in the third year at college, that he decided music would be his career. “What sparked that was probably a professional ascendance to a certain extent. I was getting good notices, and I got the confidence that this is something I could do.”
“Even so,” he adds, “at that point, I don’t know if I had the passion for music that I have now. But I loved singing, and when I realised I could make it a productive profession, I decided to go ahead. It was a rational decision.” Looking back, it was also the right decision. There was a time Krishna’s mother would give him auto fare so he could go and attend concerts of the biggest, brightest stars on the Carnatic music firmament. Today, he’s one of them — “a brand,” as he labels himself, borrowing a term from his college education.
Of course, Krishna didn’t just say that. He’d talked earlier about how the leisurely-paced padam is a lost art in concerts today and that it needed to be revived, and I’d asked him if audiences these days have the patience to sit through padams and javalis. That’s when he whipped himself into corporate mode. “The first time you come to a TM Krishna concert, you just listen. The second time, you expect something based on the previous experience. And so on for the third and fourth times. Now who decided those expectations? I did. I fed you with the data every time you came to my concert, and that data formed the basis of your expectations. Put in business terms, I am a brand.’’
‘‘The qualities of a brand are decided by the manufacturer, which is me. You buy the product once. If you like it, you buy it again. So if I think I can create an audience that can listen to a padam or a javali, it’s up to me to try and do it. I don’t agree with artistes who say that they do things because their audience wanted those things. That’s the biggest lie. Nobody wants anything from you except honesty.”
by Baradwaj Rangan
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