No of Katcheris by Yester year Musicians?

sivachinta1965 · Post by **sivachinta1965** » 11 Jun 2009, 09:37

dear Rasikas

Is there any record available on no. of Katcheris given by the doyens of Karnatic music?

From a rough statistics can somebody say who was the first to complete 1000 katcheris in his/her life time? ( Ariyakkudi, Chembai, Semmangudi, GNB Madura Mani???)

sivaprasad

Musicfan · Post by **Musicfan** » 13 Jun 2009, 18:25

I have heard Balamuralikrishna keeps count of all the concerts he has given. I attended a concert of his in 1991 January in Chennai when he said it was his 17000++ concert. I am sure while some musicians would keep track of the number of concerts they give in a diary etc..but dont recollect any musician mentioning this in a stage on the exact no of concerts they have given apart from BMK. Also, I am not sure if there is any official record keeping by any official agency similar to the statiticians who keep track of say number of runs scored or wickets taken by a cricketer...but very interesting indeed...Would be good if Coolji or others would have a different answer.

coolkarni · Post by **coolkarni** » 13 Jun 2009, 18:48

coolkarni · Post by **coolkarni** » 13 Jun 2009, 18:50

vasanthakokilam · Post by **vasanthakokilam** » 13 Jun 2009, 21:06

Some companies ask the following types of interview questions: "How much water does Mississippi deposit into the ocean', 'How many miles of paved roads are there in the U.S.?' etc. It may be baffling at first, but the intent of the question is not to elicit an official exact number but to see what process one goes through to estimate such things ('back of the envelope' type estimates ). Candidates are usually encouraged to loudly think while answering such questions. The river question can be estimated using the approximate width of the river and the height and speed of water. Paved roads question can take many forms, one can start at number of households, average number of houses in a typical street etc. It helps to not focus on items that do not contribute hugely to the answer, like the roads that connect the towns and cities. Compared to neighborhood roads, those do not contribute much. So the trick is to find out the biggest contributor to the answer and estimate it using some measures. If the estimation technique is good, the estimated value is not that far from the actual value ( assuming the actual value is somehow known ).

If we recast sivaprasad's question as an estimating problem, how will we go about it? What kind of data you would like to get for that? There is no single approch, we can try different appraoches and see if the answer converges.

The average number of 'senior level' concerts in Chennai per year in various decades? This itself is probably another estimating problem and some useful data should be available at major sabhas.
Average number of concerts an yesteryear artist had given at that time per month or per year.
Look at old Hindu newspapers and see the ratio of concerts given by, say Semmangudi vs GNB vs MMI etc. to estimate the relative frequency of their concerts.

One may wonder if this kind of rough averaging would work. What about their early years and older years when they probably had less number of concerts, etc? You can add a certain % to it but given that the estimate itself is approximate, those edge values tend to be noise. Also, estimate tend to be not one exact value but a range. Smaller the range, more useful the data is.

rajeshnat · Post by **rajeshnat** » 13 Jun 2009, 21:29

Musicfan wrote:I have heard Balamuralikrishna keeps count of all the concerts he has given. I attended a concert of his in 1991 January in Chennai when he said it was his 17000++ concert.

Shri BMK was born in 1930, he was 61 in 1991. Assuming he started singing at 11, in 50 years he has given 17000 concerts , thats 340 per year. Very unlikely.

Interestingly about a year back when I and violinist mullaivAsal chandramouli travelled after attending his concert . I asked the same question, his opinion as a supporting artist one can have at the most around 200 concerts per year. I think the main artist may touch close to 125 concerts per year.

srkris · Post by **srkris** » 13 Jun 2009, 22:59

For BMK maybe all of his supposedly 17000 concerts were not vocal?

The large number looks unlikely though. BMK is not known to perform every day (or multiple concerts a day consistently) even in the peak of his career (60s to 80s), leave alone in 1991.

Probably we should start threads documenting the concert notes/recordings of each of the well-known past muscians?

sivachinta1965 · Post by **sivachinta1965** » 16 Jun 2009, 14:21

dear Rasikas,

Caranatic musicians were ( are?) poor scoreres.

How many of them had come up with their memories? Only Soolamangalam and Meenakshisundaram!

Does anybody know about autobiographies of other musicians?

Sivaprasad