Ramesh Vinayakam | Photo credit: Johan Sathyadas
Many things can happen during a coffee break. In the case of music composer Ramesh Vinayakam, it certainly is.
At the Goethe Institute in Chennai, the composer chatted during a coffee break with Sebastian Grams, the double bassist, and Jeremy Woodruff, now at the University of Graz, when he began Carnatic kriti. He sang phrases from ‘Thiruvarul tara varuvai’ and asked if they sounded familiar.
“It’s stunning. The end sounds familiar, but we can’t put our finger on it,” they said.
It was a little musical riddle that Ramesh came up with and the climax blew the guests away. Kriti has the same notes as Ludwig van Beethoven’s popular “Fur Elise”, which they discovered to their great surprise. “For me, it proves what I believe in: the unity of music,” says Ramesh about his musical experiment, which he recently recorded and published on YouTube.
“Thiruvarul thara vVaruvai” is based on a raga that Ramesh calls “Beethovanapriya” and is inspired by a elementary idea: what if Beethoven had been born in South India?
“This hypothesis led me to ‘Thiruvarul tara varuvai’, where I used the melodic elements of the first movement in A minor and stuck to it,” he recalls. “Beethoven was a great inventor, and I think he would have been delighted with the intricate microtonal gamakas of Indian music, which otherwise embellish his own music.
“Thiruvarul thara varuvai” was performed by Ramesh during a lecture in the December music season soon after its composition, but in 2018, Carnatic musician Abhisekh Raghuram sang it accompanied by Mylai Karthikeyan (nagaswaram) and L. Ramakrishnan (violin), an attempt that met with with enthusiastic applause.
During his musical career, Ramesh created ten ragas, including Prathidwani, Madya Mohanam and Dwi Niroshtra, among others. He is in the process of creating a raga using microtonal swarasthana called Sruti Ranjani. “For me, the invention of the raga is a natural process in the evolution of Indian music. All the ragas that are in vogue now never existed in the very beginning. We also do not know how they evolved, whether as a scale, or from a phrase, or from an emotional lyrical thought that was expressed through a musical idea that initiated the expansion towards raga. So the raga cannot be a revelation as some people assume,” says Ramesh.
Even as he works on newer compositions, the composer looks forward to his passion project, Gamaka Box Notation System (GBNS), a structured Indian music learning tool that enables conceptual learning of sophisticated ideas. GBNS is the core of Music Temple, a music technology company incubated by IIT Madras. Ramesh, also known in the film music community for hits such as “Vizhigalil” (Azhagiya Theeye), “Enna Idhu” (Nala Damayanthi) and his work in Ramanujan among others,he is also considering taking up further work related to film music. “I can’t wait to make many more films and create novel music. I believe that music is a manifestation of the divinity that is already present in man.”
