Yet another blog on carnatic music

Carnatic music (South Indian Classical Music) has been written about fairly extensively in the web. Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnatic_music) has a reasonably good introduction albeit as is true for most Wikipedia articles, the didactic nature of the article can dampen the zeal of the uninitiated.

Carnatic music (and Hindustani music, the North Indian counterpart), soporific it may seem to the untrained ear, is woven so finely in the fabric of Indian culture. One exposition of the subject, most often experienced through the surfeit of chromaticism inherent in Indian film songs, may serve the layperson in better appreciating classical music.

We will highlight various tamil film songs that are set in classical ragas and compare that to classical krithis rendered by various carnatic artists. We will attempt to show the use of classical music in both old and contemporary films. More often than not, the older film songs tend to preserve the character of the original carnatic raga compared to the modern ones (inexorable march of progress :-)).

Sites like http://tfmpage.com/ do a good job of listing Ragas of various Tamil film songs. However the best way to experience music is by listening -- hence this blog...

The audio/video clips come from various web sources such as YouTube, Music India Online etc. (searched through http://vtap.com/ )