yes: modern upstarts. Although Judaism is ancient.
It is about TMK's laudable effort to take CM to the people of other religions
Why is it laudable? Anyone who wants carnatic music can have it. It isn't locked away. In this country, all they need to do is to turn on the radio at the right time of day.
I don't mean this to sound aggressive, and I do believe in widening the horizons of carnatic music, but... while the majority of foreign tourists passing through Chennai in December don't even know about carnatic music, let alone our Season, somehow I can't imagine that the christian population of Chennai is so ignorant of it. Like, "Oh, never realised this exists, and actually it sounds quite nice!" Maybe I have this all all wrong, and maybe that is the intention and perhaps, for a few, the result. Well, fair enough if it is.
Something else occurs to me... If TMK is really sincere about that, then why not send his students to sing in the churches. Regularly. Not just one headline-grabbing event, but quiet and consistent work. Perhaps it happens, but I don't know about it because it doesn't grab headlines*.
My writing style is a bit assertive: I'm not really meaning this to be assertive at all, more a mulling over of these things.
By the way... I was visiting someone in the christian heartlands of St Thomas Mount on Saturday. Judging by the awful pseudo-pop rubbish blaring from the next-door house, I'm pretty sure that they would be no more interested in carnatic than they would be in Beethoven. Or... even half-decent rock music! When it comes to Christian music, the devil won the battle!
. Minds full of that stuff are probably beyond "saving." But missionary-TMK can try, I suppose.
(Religion is not of the essence of this: I would have said the same of the Brits that I grew up who's minds were unable to expand beyond the "top-ten" of the day into intelligent rock or even folk, let alone classical**. However, since it became trendy for churches there and elsewhere to leave aside their own quality-music history for keyboard/guitar/drum-machine piffle, the church has certainly had a hand in lowering the musical-intelligence bar)
(I think they don't have this "problem" in Kerala? Sure, the music in the churches is the same "god-awful"
rubbish (I've been to weddings there), but I think christian students of carnatic music are not uncommon?)
* If future generations of Brits are a little more aware of Indian-music-beyond-Ravi-Shankar, it will because of the five-minute school-assembly slots given to South-Asian-origin kids to show off their singing/dancing/veena/etc.
**We return to the bottom line that serious music or art of any kind is for serious people and is necessarily a minority pursuit. Don't blame the composers/artists/performers: the
people make the choice.