MAESTRO ILAIYARAAJA NEWS & TITBITS VER.2010-2011

[KV]

ada, naan sonna paattellAm fit aavaadhunu theriyum, ahdu summa oru pozhudhupOkku.
But unga theme nalla dhaan irukku, would surely be interesting if there's something of this sort. One portion of the Italy concert has a theme based assortment (birth-growingup-play-work-love-marriage) which was actually a nice idea. Adhu maadhiri idhuvum seriya plan panna, work aagum.

[Plum]

Yeah, it will work if this is just a small part of the overall scheme. IdhuvE fullA irundhA sodhappidum...but I particularly like paattale buddhi sonnaar. Not much appreciated, that one. If anything, derided as self-dabba

[thumburu]

I am not very enthu about this
I had posted my list a week back in response to SVN's concern about Shuba madam's "abaridhamaana karisanam" for kadai kodi rasigargaL.
somehow my list didnt make it. My list also in consideration with the KKR of an era gone for ever madaam Subashree . You guysl have come up with an exhaustive, exclusive list that would give the genX a vivid view of his gems to be discovered, instead of tunnel vision of Raja's work associated only with Mani or Rajini or Kamal [that too, post Nayaan]

ore naaL unnai naan - moon light romance
nadhi oram - for river side romance
thanga changili minnidum painkiLi - rustic romance
saama kozhi yen koovudhamma - erotica
yedo ninaivugaL - nostalgic trip of sweet 70's
koodhalile megam vandhu - classical dose of Bilahari
endrendrum anandame - encapsulating Sarasangi with an ultra modern western pop
akkarai cheemai azhaginile - for the orchestration opulence decades ago
ponnula ponnula kannula - themmangu delight
naadham en jeevane - for the man for whom music is a way of life [ isaiyai arundhum saadhaga paravai pola avar vaazharaar]

Why go as far as EVK or RKP? Even if they could play some of the popular songs which lie buried under the sands of time, it would be worth watching.

[rajaramsgi]

nice variety thumburu.. If Yesudas is part of the concert, I prefer him singinging these 2 from your list..

1. Yedho ninaivugaL
2. koondhalile megam vandhu

[rajkumarc]

Let me also try to put up a list here (i have edited it multiple times already, oh god, I can never put up a list of favorite IR songs). Wanting IR to sing all of these could be Peraasai, so would be happy if any of it makes it to the concert. Mailed this to irjayatv@gmail.com as well. Let's see what unfolds

1. Uravenum Pudhiya Vaanil - Nenjathai Killadhe
2. En Gaanam - EVK
3. Unakkenathaane - Ponnu Oorukku Pudhusu
4. Oh Vasantha Raja - Neengal Kettavai
5. Manadhil Enna Ninaivugalo - Poonthalir
6. Muthaaduthe - Nallavanukku Nallavan (esp want to see those guitar works in 2nd interlude live)
7. Rettai Kili Suthi Vandha - Gramathu Minnal
8. Engirundho Azhaikkum - En Jeevan Paadudhu
9. Mella Oornthu - Nandalala
10. Kuthikkira - Azhagarsamiyin Kuthirai

[Plum]

Unakkaena thaane - yes, yes. Essence of the rustic 70s Raja. Essence of a tamil graamam in the 70s caught in a 3-minute capsule. Seniors get angry that it is usually said that IR broguht tamil folk to TFM because well didn't MSV et al do that before. Yet, when you hear such songs, you know that there is a grain of truth in that - the sheer authenticity of this is unmatched before or after. Uinfortunately, even Simbu fans can make such authoritative statements about their idol - such being the nature of fandom - and therefore, even authentic statements like this can be dismissed as fan-boy talk - but to those who drank the flavour of tamil rural milieu of those days and drank in IR's unique blend of tamil folk, they can feel that this is not mere fanboy talk. Every other statement on IR can be contested - but this one's no contest if an observer is truly unbiased.

[rajkumarc]

Essence of tamil graamam... aptly put Plum. Raja's folk songs have a distinct flavor with unmatched authenticity. To me, no other TFM takes me closer to the graamam than IR's songs. Call me a fanboy and I don't care

[rajsekar]

Today's Wall Street Journal carried a very interesting article on Maestro John Williams (somone whom Ilayaraaja admires a lot). John Williams who won 5 Oscars and was nominated 45 times, composes film scores the traditional way using live orchestra. Raaja follows the same method. Enjoy reading the article. Director Steven Spielberg even today uses John's film scores. What an incredible partnership!

Wall Street Journal - ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT
DECEMBER 16, 2011

The Last Movie Maestro

For decades, John Williams has been the go-to composer for swelling orchestral compositions. Now, younger, cheaper and edgier musicians are changing the score.

By JOHN JURGENSEN

On the sprawling Universal Studios lot, inside the bungalow where John Williams wrote the music for "Saving Private Ryan," "Schindler's List" and a handful of "Star Wars" films, the composer's office is carpeted, quiet, and without a computer or screens of any kind. He works at a small drafting desk, writing notation in pencil on lined paper, within a chair swivel of a Steinway grand.

It's the piano on which Steven Spielberg hears all the main themes of his movies for the first time—and almost always the last—before Mr. Williams records the full-blown product, often at the helm of a 100-piece orchestra. Their partnership and Mr. Williams's old-fashioned artistry have endured for nearly 40 years, through Hollywood upheavals, studio shuffles and now a dramatic shift in how film music is produced and paid for. The composer remains at the top of his industry in what he describes as "a very privileged bubble."
This Christmas, two Spielberg-directed films (driven by two very different Williams scores) open within days of each other, emphasizing how closely the director's career arc has mirrored the composer's. "War Horse," about an animal that alters the lives of everyone he encounters during World War I, finds the composer in a familiar mode: orchestral overdrive, all soaring strings and thundering brass. By contrast, "The Adventures of Tintin," based on an old comic book series about a daring reporter written by the Belgian artist Hergé, features a sound that's jazzy, kinetic and playful. Co-produced by Peter Jackson and shot with 3-D performance capture technology, it's the first animated film for Mr. Williams, who says he took some inspiration from old "Tom and Jerry" cartoons he loved.
Mr. Spielberg credits the composer for making him "a better director than I could have ever been without him." Recalling the blockbuster that made them both household names, he describes the "esoteric" placeholder music he'd selected as a model for the "Jaws" score—and how Mr. Williams forced him to reconsider. "He said, "Steven, it's not an intellectual film. It's a pirate movie," the director says, adding, "John is like a great writer. He rewrites me musically every single time." After the success of "Jaws," Mr. Spielberg nicknamed Mr. Williams "Max," after Max Steiner, who wrote the first memorable original feature film score (for "King Kong") and helped establish the orchestral language of the movies.

Before pop, rock and folk music stormed into soundtracks in the late 1960s and '70s, "there was an era that harked back to the old studio system when the composer was king," says Doreen Ringer Ross, who oversees the film and TV music division of BMI, the performing rights organization. "John is pretty much the last one standing" from that time.
Film critics respond to Mr. Williams's work with nearly uniform praise. Still, he has been accused of going over the top with bombast. His "Harry Potter" score, for example, "smothers the action with inappropriate grandiosity. It's selling the movie, not supporting it," opined Newsweek critic David Ansen in 2001.

Film historian Jon Burlingame says the traditional film score will live on as long as directors keep attempting sweeping narratives and historical heft: "God help you if you score a 15th-century epic with synthesizers." However, as young filmmakers raised on rock, pop and rap inherit the industry, and studio marketers chase the zeitgest, the sound of a swelling orchestra is losing some relevance. "You're not going to apply an 80-piece orchestra to the 'The Hangover,'" Mr. Burlingame says.

A recent parade of rock and electronica stars into film music isn't the first trend that Mr. Williams has weathered. "Starting in the 1980s with the advent of technology, the whole thing started to break down to a different realm of business," BMI's Ms. Ross says. Synthesizers revolutionized movie music not only with the modern mood they conveyed, but also the manpower they saved. With little more than a Moog console, John Carpenter in 1978 almost singlehandedly created the eerie score to "Halloween."

It may be less obvious to viewers how technology is linked to the budget pressures remaking movie music. Instead of hiring a small army of unionized L.A. musicians ($500 each for a six-hour session and twice that for first-chair aces) and renting a scoring stage at Sony or Warner Brothers (up to $15,000 per day), many composers increasingly hire players from Eastern Europe on the cheap (Bratislava, Slovakia, has been a popular choice for films including the recent Charles Darwin biopic "Creation") and conduct them remotely from L.A. via a live audiovisual link. Or, if money is especially tight, composers use software that can (somewhat) replicate the sound of a live symphony orchestra.

Music budgets have shrunk by at least 25% in the last seven years, says Sandy De Crescent, who hires musicians for Mr. Williams and other top composers. Studios "want an Aaron Copland score but they've only got enough for a chamber group," she says.

Instead of paying composers a separate fee and then picking up the tab for additional music expenses as they mount, studios in recent years have increasingly handed out so-called "packages"—fixed budgets that composers must stretch to cover all musical costs, including their own fee. If a score must be re-written or re-recorded, as is often the case during the editing process, the composer sees personal profit erode. "Even if the package is a generous one, everyone feels the strain," says Mark Graham, a copyist whose roles include transcribing and cataloging sheet music for dozens of Hollywood composers, including Mr. Williams.

Largely insulated from these changes are the handful of composers, including Hans Zimmer ("The Dark Knight"), Alexandre Desplat (the final "Harry Potter" films) and Danny Elfman ("Alice in Wonderland") who get hired to score many big-budget films.

Kathleen Kennedy, Mr. Spielberg's longtime producer, says she's never denied Mr. Williams any resources. Soprano Renée Fleming was recruited to sing an aria from Charles Gounod's "Romeo and Juliet" for a climactic scene in "Tintin." But in other ways Mr. Williams's process is "very tight and efficient," Ms. Kennedy says. He works with the same core team of about four people, including Ms. De Crescent (whom he met in the early 1960s) and doesn't employ an assistant or other intermediary staff. His biggest time saver: because of Mr. Spielberg's trust in the composer and the preliminary piano sketches he presents, Mr. Williams doesn't spend time mocking up "demo" recordings, an essential step for composers seeking a director's approval to move forward.

Unlike some of his peers who service multiple film projects at a time, Mr. Williams doesn't farm out any piecework to underlings. "I'm still writing every note. And it's labor intensive. Six and a half days a week. That's been my life," the composer says. Yet at age 79, he works more swiftly than many in his field, his collaborators say, crediting his singleminded approach to each project.

"There are some composers who are lucky to record five or six minutes of music in a six hour day with an orchestra. John can completely do 20 to 25 minutes, no problem, of complex difficult music with good takes that he doesn't have to revisit," says Mr. Graham, who organizes and distributes the printed music at all the sessions Mr. Williams conducts.

Starting with the end of silent pictures, Hollywood's Golden Age coincided with an influx of top-flight European musicians, some of whom, including Franz Waxman, had fled the Nazis. In the 1930s and '40s composers such as Erich Korngold ("The Adventures of Robin Hood") transposed their expertise in opera and other classical forms to cinema. The '50s and '60s were stamped by American-born composers such as Elmer Bernstein and Leonard Rosenman, who injected jazz and other contemporary sounds.

Despite the pedigree of some of the medium's contributors, including Aaron Copland, traditionalists looked down on film music. Alluding to a bias that still lingers today, Mr. Williams says, "If you go back to the '30s, writing for movies was something most serious composers wouldn't have any truck with."

Mr. Williams was born in New York and learned piano at age 7. His father was skilled percussionist Johnny Williams, who played in the CBS radio orchestra and later moved his family west, where he found session work in feature films such as "From Here to Eternity." His son jumped into the business as a freelance pianist in studio orchestras (listen for him on Mancini's "Peter Gunn"). Stanley Wilson, then head of music at Universal Television, mentored Mr. Williams and propelled his composing career. He showed early range on the swinging "Lost in Space" TV theme and the Americana of the Steve McQueen film "The Reivers," the soundtrack that caught a young Steven Spielberg's ear.

Mr. Williams had scored 34 films (according to the 15-page resume maintained by his agency) by the time Mr. Spielberg sought him out for his debut 1974 feature film "The Sugarland Express." Mr. Williams has won five Oscars, with 45 nominations—tied with Hollywood legend Alfred Newman (whom Mr. Williams once worked for). His next film project: Mr. Spielberg's "Lincoln."

He doesn't read scripts, preferring to write only to footage. He says he can't pinpoint how musical ideas take shape, but like a costume or set designer, responds to a story's setting and mood. In the case of "Tintin," he described Hergé's original comics in painterly terms. "The colors seem to be almost Gauguin-like. Yellows and purples and green-reds," he says, adding that the look of old cars and European architecture made instruments like the musette, a French accordian, seem apt for the movie's scenes of fast-paced street comedy.

His process starts with a "spotting" session with Mr. Spielberg, deciding which scenes should feature music or not. Then, unlike contemporary composers who use a computerized timer that clicks off the beats in a scene, Mr. Williams monitors an analog Minerva stopwatch to write to length. At his desk, he works off his memory of the on-screen action, whether it's a character striding across a room or, as in "War Horse," a horse stampeding through thickets of barbed wire. If he needs to analyze the sequence again, he strolls out of his office and across the hall to a room where music editor Ramiro Belgardt cues up the scene. As recently as the last "Indiana Jones" picture in 2008, this process involved Mr. Belgardt punching rewind and fast forward on a bulky videotape player. (He now calls up time-coded footage on a computer linked to a flat screen television.)

In his office last week, the composer took a break from the sheets of paper splayed across his desk, the theme music to NBC's "Meet the Press." It's a Williams composition that he's been hired to freshen, along with the "Today" opener, which NBC says will debut Jan. 16. He wore a black turtleneck shirt, charcoal slacks and black sneakers. His beard was the same shade of white it's been for three decades. On the coffee table there was a book of Robert Frost's poetry and a CD labeled with tracks from "Sunset Boulevard," "Titanic" and "Sabrina," fodder for one of the live programs of film music that he conducts at the Hollywood Bowl or Tanglewood in Massachusetts, where he's been a longtime presence.

Though self-effacing ("It isn't my personality to be particularly proud of what I do") the composer seems to recognize his legacy as arguably the only living film composer with both classical credentials and name recognition among everyday moviegoers. At the recent request of conductor James Levine, Mr. Williams wrote a piece for solo harp to be performed by Ann Hobson Pilot on the occasion of her retirement from the Boston Symphony.

And he's dead serious about the role movies can play in bringing the music he loves to millions. "Today we have fantastic art music being created over here," Mr. Williams said, gesturing with one hand, "and over here pop music that's ubiquitous and permeates everything. There's an enormous gap between these two universes, and if we need a tissue that would somehow connect it, it seems to be more and more film music which is creating a glue, a binder, between the vernacular and the music of art."

Corrections & Amplifications
Music editor Ramiro Belgardt works with John Williams. An earlier version of this article incorrectly gave his surname as Belgradt.

[Plum]

It's not even about being called a fan-boy - I don't think any fan boy of any artist feels bad about being called a fan-boy. It is about how "sbjectivity" is used to conveniently equalize things that really aren't objectively equal.

[Plum]

Tom and Jerry is a good reference. Many a time, when I play BGM tracks of Raja on my audio, my daughter calls it "tom and jerry" song . What it means ofcourse is "inspired by WCM", which, unsurprisingly, John Williams confesses to be. And so would his equivalent in TFM I guess...