RMIM Archive Article "380".
From the RMIM Article Archive maintained by Satish Subramanian
#
# RMIM Archives..
# Subject: Salil - phenomenon in Bengali music - part 2
#
# Posted by: Sambit Basu sambit@agniroth.com
# Source: Sangeet Natak, Jan-Mar 1989
# Author: Suman Chatterjee (Manab Mitra)
#
Salil Chowdhury: A Phenomenon in Modern Bengali Music
- Manab Mitra
(Part 2)
In the 40s, Salil Chowdhury had the historic advantage of having such
courageous pioneers in experimental music behind him. But it was the
image of those same pioneers that must have stood before him, posing a
great challenge to a young composer who had to prove his merit or
accept the unsavoury epithet of a minor composer.
The most interesting feature of Salil Chowdhury's compositions in the
40s and early 50s is that he refused to follow any definite pattern or
to be confined in any category which others could call "typically
Salil". Every composition he made revealed a new face of the
composer. He reintroduced rhythm variation in the body of a single
song, a technique first introduced in modern Bengali song by
Rabindranath, but virtually left unexplored by the other major
composers after him. Salil Chowdhury departed from the accepted norms
of modern Bengali song structure by writing complex phrases of a
single movement which unfolded itself sometimes over several lines of
the lyric. This was a revolutionary innovation indeed, since the
prevailing tendency had been to conform to the pattern of having one
melody line, or at the most two, for a unit of lyric lines
constituting each segment of the song. In Salil's compositions,
musical information in terms of application of notes, their
combinations and movements, acquired a totally new dimension. The way
in which he phrased and scanned his melody lines along with the inner
movements of the rhythms he chose, vigorously syncopated them and
relentlessly explored the possibilities of tonal expressions,
permanently changed the face of modern Bengali song. Constant
experiments with song structures have always been Salil's
preoccupation - a characteristic that sets him conspicuously apart
from almost all other Indian composers in the post-Tagore era.
Great artists create problems for themselves and then look for elegant
solutions. This was exactly what Salil Chowdhury did. Most of his
songs contain a plethora of melodious problems he created for himself,
as though challenging his own capacities, problem he then solved with
just a few strokes of a deft hand busy carving out new patterns of
progress in music. Each of his songs, written and composed in the 40s
and 50s, is a separate experience in itself.
But probably the most striking experience in modern Indian songs had
to wait until Salil Chowdhury put to tune a long poem by Satyendranath
Dutta and a few others by Sukanta Bhattacharya. Here, he had the
historic challenge of making songs out of poems which were never meant
to become songs in the first place. "Palkir gan" and "Runner", to name
just two, became two separate studies in modern composition.
Rabindranath, that impossible wizard who was constantly minting so
many first-of-their-kind in modern Indian music, did make a masterly
debut in putting long poems to tune. But Salil Chowdhury's
compositions contained different information altogether. They were
utterly unknown experiences not only in terms of lyric but - more
importantly for composition - in terms of structural modalities. The
important difference was in the presence of a variety of inner musical
themes, sometimes quite disparate in their tonal information, within
the outer boundary of the central motif. Even the intelligent rhythm
and tempo variations, a musical delight in themselves, accompanying
the shifts in imagery and moods of these poems, pale in front of the
stupendous array of tonal motifs and themes which arrive, establish
themselves, and then smoothly dissolve into another, thus gradually
revealing a total panorama of tone pictures and colours, bound
together in sovereign cohesion. The degree of Salil Chowdhury's
musical imagination and his authority over his tools and materials
becomes equally apparent when one considers that he undertook, in both
these songs, several extremely complex feats of tonic changes ("kharaj
paribartan"). Tonic change, a regular and important feature of
European music and widely ignored in Hindustani classical music,
though the provisions are there, had already been experimented with in
modern Bengali songs by Rabindranath Tagore, Dwijendralal Roy and
Himangshu Dutta, albeit on a rather limited scale. But in Salil
Chowdhury's compositions, tonic changes occurred in considerably wider
and much more intricate applications, imparting the delightful effect
of a chain of songs within a song. His compositional treatment of
Sukanta's poem "Runner" may well be compared to a serious symphony,
though on a much more limited scale, owing to the fact that he was
composing a song and not an orchestral piece.
Elements of orchestral composition were very much there in his songs,
especially in those which did not use the idioms of folk music. And it
was just a matter of time for Salil Chowdhury to use real orchestral
back-up on a larger scale. In composing the instrumental parts, the
preludes and interludes as well as accompaniment, he started showing
much unique imaginativeness as he did in his songs. And it was a
"total producer" of modern songs - as lyrist, composer, as well as
orchestral arranger - that Salil Chowdhury emerged as the most
important figure in the post-Tagore Bengal. This unity of the three
very important capacities is, in fact, highly noteworthy. Since the
'30s, the production of modern songs in Bengal, especially in the
culture industry, has been marked by a division of labor. The lyrist
and the composer have not necessarily been the same person. With the
passage of time, the divided responsibilities have tended to become
the rule rather than the exception. The introduction of the orchestra
in recording brought in its wake another personality that was
previously unknown - the arranger. Systematic practice of this
division of labour, an historic product of the capitalist mode of song
production in the culture industry, has consolidated all over India
the typical constellation of three personalities to a song: the
lyrist, the composer, and the arranger. Salil Chowdhury had to give up
his lyrist identity when he started working for the film industry in
Bombay and in South India primarily for reasons of language. But in
Bengali songs - apart from those in which he collaborated with other
Indian composers like Hridaynath Mangeshkar - he has, by and large,
maintained his three-in-one identity which is exceptional in
contemporary popular music in India.
It is true that back-up orchestra had been used in India long before
Salil Chowdhury came on the scene. But most of the pre-Salil orchestra
work in Bengali songs on gramophone disks was simple accompaniment or,
at best, a kind of instrumental respite. In some exceptional cases the
accompanying orchestra did display a richness of sound, but very
seldom did it have any statement to make of its own. In Salil
Chowdhury's work of orchestra achieved its much needed liberation. He
accorded the accompanying instruments the status of voices capable of
making statements qualify or modify those made by human voice. He
started "voicing" his instruments. This did not, of course, happen
overnight, but it did happen soon enough after the Gramophone company
started recording Salil Chowdhury's songs. Should one listen to the
recorded versions of his songs chronologically, one could easily trace
the growth of his thoughts and work in instrumentation and
orchestration. His early discs impart a sense of economy regarding
instrumental back-up. But despite the quantitative thinness of the
accompaniment, a qualitative difference can be noticed. It can be
clearly seen that, economy notwithstanding, the instruments are trying
to "say" something on their own. They are neither repeating, nor are
they just embellishing it. Rather, they are supplementing the melody
of the song with related or independent lines of melody. This gives
the disc versions of Salil Chowdhury's songs a dramatic dimension that
was absent before.
One of the salient features of Salil Chowdhury's instrumentation has
always been his own way of using rhythms, percussion, and percussive
instruments. He clearly defines the rhythms and the rhythmic thrusts
of his songs with instruments, sometimes a whole group of instruments,
more suited to the purpose than just a Tabla which had been, for a
long time, the standard rhythm instrument used in the production of
modern Bengali songs. His innovative application of percussions other
than the obligatory Tabla in the early 50s was not only a welcome
relief but a pioneering work as well. Moreover, he sharpened and
enhanced the edge of the rhythm by using the piano which, in many of
his early recordings, played rhythmic chords, accentuating the
percussiveness of the accompaniment. In one of his songs in the late
50s or early 60s, "Surer ei jhorna", Salil used a group strings as
percussive accompaniment - an experiment which was surely the first of
its kind in the subcontinent. In that same song he introduced, for the
first time too, the technique of a dialogue between the lead singer
and the accompanying chorus. He had already done successful
experiments in harmonized choral singing before, but this particular
song, in its recorded form, was a different matter altogether. Here
the chorus is a harmonized vocal back-up as well as a separate entity
by itself. In the second movement of the song, the "antara", there is
a sudden reversal of roles. It is the chorus that takes the lead while
the lead voice replies and resolves the tension resulting from the
inversion of the voice set-up. This was, again, a major experimental
departure from the traditional and accepted norms of vocal arrangement
in which the lead voice asserted its leading role throughout the song
with the chorus condemned to a marginal existence. As the vocal
dialogue goes on in "Surer ei jhorna", a single accordion supplies yet
another line of continuous run, adding a third dimension to the tonal
picture. If one puts all these elements and factors together, one gets
to know the mind of a composer who has constantly been trying to
reshape his work and heighten the dramatic impact of his songs.
----------------------- About the author: ----------------
Manab Mitra is the penname of Suman Chatterjee. Suman had a pretty
long preparation in Hindustani classical music and in songs of
Rabindranath. He had also been a very close and active follower of
Bengali modern songs. In early 70s, after cutting two discs of
Rabindrasangeet he abandoned his music career to go abroad. As a
radio-journalist he worked in France, USA and Germany. While staying
abroad Suman took formal lessons in Western music - classical guitar
and piano. In late 80s he gave up journalism, returned to Calcutta to
try his career in Bengali music. His first cassette in 1992 gave him
immense popularity and Bengali music a much needed change. He works as
lyrist, composer, arranger and singer of his songs. Suman probably is
the most discussed personality in Bengali cultural scenario in last
couple of decades.
From the RMIM Article Archive maintained by Satish Subramanian