Neethane En Ponvasantham | Yeto Vellipoyindhi Manasu | Assi Nabbe Poorey Sau

[MelHarmony]

[While listening to the awesome songs of Neethane En Ponvasantham (CD | mp3) by Ilaiyaraaja, I made an interesting discovery. To me, it looks all the songs end in the Panchamam (Pa note). Not sure if it is intentional or if it is coincidental. Songs ending with Shadjamam (Sa note) is very common. But all 8 songs (actually 9) from the album ending in Panchamam was interesting]

Good find!

I have a few minor comments.
Mostly IR songs will have scale differences between songs in a single film. This helps in a great way making the user feel to get a different experience of the raaga or harmony. But due to several reasons such as time constraints, composing sequence/composer's mood, motivation, film requirements, IR has provided this kind of single scale albums in the past. we can name them a lot, I believe from his 900 odd films.

But for NEPV I feel the reason for this single scale album are multipleIT could be cause of the following 2 main reasons...

1. When scale changes, retuning need to be done for many instruments if not all(particularly percussion). For ex., by default, percussion instrument will be tuned to E major in an orchestra. Piano doesn't need retuning. Except for a few instruments, most of the instruments require retuning when scale changes. There are many instruments (as always in many IR albums) used in this album. Typically tuning so many instruments for different scales for each song in an album is not an easy task as it is time consuming. First of all it requires lot of sound engineering effort to get it done before even rehearsal. Retuning percussion is not easy...
2. Another factor that comes to my mind is, this chosen scale actually suits both IR and YSR . Going beyond this scale, means they have to strain a lot to sing which would not have come out well. Hence IR would have judiciously chosen this scale. This is the not the first time he doing this way. I am seeing this being done for a very long whenever he sings.
3. Another factor is the sequence of tune creation. I dont know which was the first tune for which GVM requested IR a song. Going from that song, the comsposing sequence will actually affect the scale of the other songs because when IR creates a tune and records the tune in a particular scale and OKAYED by GVM he will not change that scale for that song. Also for the next song he will be influenced by other factors such who to put for singing. Also as we know all songs were composed in a single sitting and with the same love theme, I feel the panchamam scale for all songs is not a surprise.