Ages ago, when I was young, the primary channel that delivered music to most people’s ears was the radio. People who could afford it had a two-in-one – a radio which also had a tape recorder. Households for which affordability had not been a problem in a while also owned the two-in-one’s grandfather, a gramophone. Electric, if they were nouveau riche, or a hand-cranked HMV with the sawn-off trumpet if they were old money. Whatever else they did (or did not) have, every household had a radio. TV wasn’t such a big deal yet – only a few households had one. Black and White, at that. More often than not, it would be an huge wooden box with a glass oval popping out of its front like the eyeball of an octopus. TV was strictly for entertainment. Oliyum Oliyum on Fridays, Charlie Chaplin on weekends, and Johnny Sokko and his Flying Robot on – I forget – was it Wednesday evenings? The Radio, however, was much more than a box that played music. It was a lifeline. People adjusted their watches to “radio time”, depended on it for the morning news (seythigal vasippathu – Saroj Narayan Swami), and timed their schedules to the signature tune of the programme that was being broadcast. In most music-loving TamBram households, dinner would be an early affair, so that the music lovers could congregate around the radio by 9, right in time for their evening dose of classical music. If it was a National Programme of Music, which would be beamed all the way from Delhi, replete with Hindi announcers (and English ones) indulging in the wholesale massacre of Southern names – the entire household stayed up late, as long as the broadcast lasted. This was a special occasion, when the radio would bring an entire hour or two’s worth of kachheri to its audience, as compared to the piecemeal half-hour and one-hour broadcasts earlier in the week. No wonder then, that I grew up listening to DKP, DKJ, M. D. Ramanathan, Mani Krishnaswamy, MLV, T. N. Seshagopalan, Mangalampalli Balamurali Krishna, and other golden voices. I was too young to appreciate their music, however.
The radio in our household was a compact little Philips, shiny in its black and grey plastic casing, powered by three fat 1.5V batteries. It was, the embossing on its back announced, Tropicalized. It also had a tiny unreachable switch which would toggle between MW and SW. I had no idea what they meant. Often times, I had tried switching the radio to SW, only to hear the hiss of white noise. I assumed that SW was just another way of turning the radio off. One late evening – I don’t remember what time of the year it was – I was bored. I must have been all of ten years old. We were living in a small town called Udumalpet, about 80KM from Coimbatore. My father was late from work that day. As was usual, I postponed touching my homework until he was in. My brother was playing with the neighbouring kids, who were closer to his age than mine. My mother was, I think, chatting with her friend next door. TV was a big deal now. We had no less than two channels to choose from – Doordarshan, and – hold your breath – Rupavahini, that amazing entertainer from our Island neighbours down South. Udumalpet was so deep in the backwoods that our TV antennas had to be hoisted to a height of 40 feet, no less, to receive anything not remotely resembling snow. That blessed day, however, we were experiencing a power cut – which was why the TV wasn’t on. Emboldened by the late arrival of my father, I mustered up enough courage to pick up the radio and sit down with it on the doorstep. I turned it on, and listened to it whiste, hum and hiss as my thumb played with the tuner dial. This kept me entertained for about fifteen minutes. Idly, I found the unreachable magic switch, and selected SW. It was fun – the whistles sounded different, lasted longer, and there was a whole new variety of sounds that I’d never heard before. And then – I heard a human voice. “This is Radio Moscow”, it announced. “You’re listening to Moscow Mailbag”. I was struck dumb.
For me, that was truly a life-changing moment. In many ways. I’ll save the others for another day, and talk now about just one. Radio Moscow was soon followed by the Voice of America, Radio Australia, and many, many other stations. The one that stayed with me for long after, was The World Service of the BBC. It was on the World Service that I discovered the existence of Music of Other Kinds. Dave Lee Travis brought me pop and rock, I wrote to The Jolly Good Show every other month on an aerogramme with a stylized swan franking worth a precious Rs. 5, hoping to get a T-Shirt, but never did. I didn’t mind too much – getting to listen to good music was in itself a treat. Concert Hall, and later, Edward Greenfield and his eponymous collection, made me fall in love with classical music of a different kind. Haydn, Beethoven, Mozart, Ravel, Stravinsky, Bach, Wagner, Liszt, Mendlssohn, Handel, Chopin, and I forget who else. Greenfield it was who first introduced me to the magic that only Vladimir Ashkenazy can make with the Piano. This music was hard to get, and I savoured every moment of it that I could wring out of that black-and-grey box. A few years later, my father brought home a two-in-one. This was a godsend (I wasn’t an atheist then) – as long as I could wangle blank tapes from my dad, I was able to record the precious half-hour or one-hour long slots that the Beeb dedicated to classical music on its World Service. Tapes were so scarce that I would erase the pieces that I didn’t like, and record new ones over them. My father and I clashed over the use of the radio. Often times, Concert Hall would happen at the same time as a National Programme. Thus started my lifelong love affair with classical music of the Western kind. I hoarded my tapes, wouldn’t lend them to anybody, even if they asked nicely – for fear that they would treat my tapes carelessly. What was hard to get, stayed hard to get.
That was then. With the advent of the internet, music has become more or less cheap. One can find anything one wants, if one knows where to look. One such treasure trove of music was hosted by someone I’ll call Tengo, who dedicated it to his dearest Chaliga. I stumbled upon this storehouse of great pieces when I was studying in the Institute with the Tree Lined Avenues. There, I came across a piece by a composer I had never heard of – it was the Danza del Molinero, from Manuel de Falla’s El Sombrero de tres picos. It, not to put too fine a point on it, blew my mind. I scoured the net, scoured all the music stores I knew – but I couldn’t find any music by Manuel de Falla. It took me a couple of years to lay my hands on enough music by Falla, and the hunt reminded me of my younger days spent hunched over a black and grey box, straining my ears to listen to music that would periodically be overwhelmed by howls, whistles and hisses from the ether.
Last week, I got a faster broadband plan. One that lets me watch Youtube without having to buffer it for ages. I stumbled upon this: which was what put me on that train down memory lane. If you have the time (and the bandwidth – in this case, the product of the two quantities is /not/ a constant!), gentle reader, click on that button, and treat yourself to an amazing rendition of The Miller’s Dance.
