Subir Roy: Music across generations

OFFBEAT

The old audio cassette containing some of the Beatles' all time hits had clearly done its time. There were blips and breaks and I asked my son why he was not listening to The Beatles 1 which was newer and so much better in sound quality.

He took a little time to reply and then said: Do you realise how old this is, I have literally grown up with it. I had picked it up from a roadside shop in Bangkok (it was probably pirated) when he was barely three and it has played god knows how times on our humble two-in-one which was the key source of great music for our family until not so long ago.

My son's point about growing up made me realise that he was home from college the first time after turning 21. What also came through powerfully was that music fads come and go, but some music gets passed on from generation to generation. I can clearly recall how when we were in high school, our teachers had tried to dissuade us from falling victim to this peculiar output by a group of boys who knew neither grammar nor diction.

During my school days the main source of music was the good old radio (turntables and record collections cost money) and when my father retired and I finished school in the mid-sixties, he bought an absolute state of the art Murphy radio with a bit of his retirement benefits. For me and my sister, the great thing then was to buy every issue of Betar Jagat, the listing magazine of AIR, mark out all the good Indian classical music programmes and take care not to miss them. The great annual treat was the Radio Sangeet Sammelan when we heard the stalwarts live and felt part of it all when we heard the brief applause followed a rendering.

The college years were gone plunging headlong into the world of India classical music, made possible by the large number of music "festivals" that dotted the winter calendar in Kolkata. The initiation came listening to my sister's rewaz when the tabla player came home several times a week. The challenge was to recognise a raga within the first few notes and it was a great day when I realised that the same sa was so different in different ragas.

The journey into western music, barring the Beatles, of course, came much later and the high watermark was the concert in London when Joan Baez lived up to every bit of her reputation. As I walked home, I wondered if I was so overwhelmed simply because of my lack of exposure to other greats. But I was reassured when the next morning the reviewer in the Times described her as one of the "incomparable talents of our time."

Music is so much more accessible to today's youngsters and courtesy our current great Sony system our neighbours, whether they like it or not, are treated to a truly mixed bag of Indian and western, classical and popular. I cannot blame them if they say they are getting a bit too much of the flute of Hariprasad Chaurasia, or the guitar of Santana which stands up quite well to the medley of violin pieces from some of the all time western greats.

As for myself, now that Christmas is round the corner, I will go again to one of the services at St Mark's cathedral to get my annual fill of Christmas carols, something I missed during the interregnum in Delhi, between Kolkata and Bangalore.

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