The First Lesson by Mysore Vasudevacharya

[srini_pichumani]

Dear Rasikas,

here's a treat ! An essay entitled The First Lesson by Mysore Vasudevacharya (probably a translation from his classic essay collection of musical and personal remembrances -- not sure) along with some notations of rare(r) kritis by B.Rajam Iyer, A.S.Panchapakesa Iyer.

https://archive.org/details/MysoreVasud ... irstLesson

Enjoy !

-Srini.

[narayan]

Quite fascinating. Thanks.
Want to be the first to flag an irrelevancy - the ad for Nathan's coffee 'available fresh at ... Venkatachala street' is on the same page as the notation for Venkatachala ... Nice coincidence.

[srini_pichumani]

Does anyone know what year and what magazine this is from ? Unfortunately there is no header or footer in the sheaf of papers that I scanned in.

Is this from an older format Swadesamitran ? If so, the the papers are of a different size and of better quality than the 1950s.

The Harold Powers photo and article I uploaded are clearly marked as belonging to the mid-1950s of that same magazine. They seemed to have covered a lot of Dikshitar kritis notated by B.Rajam Iyer, and Mysore Vasudevachar kritis, around that time period.

-Srini.

[Pratyaksham Bala]

The overall format and the contents, as well as the format and placement of advertisements, clearly indicate that this is a Souvenir - probably issued by a Music Sabha.

As to the year of publication, there are two clues:-

Firstly, Indian Express advertisement boasts of 115621 certified net sales. It is not known when the newspaper reached this level of circulation. If only we get this information, may be from ABC, we would know the year of publication of the Souvenir.

Secondly, the advertisement of Mohamed Ebrahim & Co. Private Limited says, "The House of Repute that served you for the past 30 years"! This private limited company was established in 1942; add 30 years, and you get 1972 !

We may presume that this is a Souvenir published by a Music Sabha in 1972 or 1973.

(The articles, notations, etc. in the publication might have been collected from different sources.)

[Rsachi]

Sir,
Looks like a souvenir.
The time was when
No state names were extant
Phone numbers were in 4 digits in Madras
B Rajam Iyer looks around 30-35. (b. 1922)

K. Vasudevachar looks 50 (b. 1865, between Vivekananda and Gandhi) His article with photo seems to have been a reprint. Especially since it has Sanskrit shlokas.
The rest of the pages are not contiguous to the Vasudevachar article. Nor the paper looks the same. Notice the bleed from the backside in other pages which seems missing in Vasudevachar's article pages. So the article seems to have been torn from an earlier publication.
My guess for the souvenir is sometime in early 1950s.
The advertisements don't seem to suggest 1970s at all. The products belong to early years after independence.

[uday_shankar]

My guess for the souvenir is sometime in early 1950s.

I don't think so. Consider these facts:
Ashok Leyland was created in 1955 out of Ashok Motors, so the date is >= 1955.
Indian Express started its Madurai publication in 1957, which is mentioned, so the date is >= 1957.
Indian Express started its Bangalore publication in 1965, which is NOT mentioned, so the date is <= 1965.

So we have a window between 1957 and 1965 when this souvenir was printed.

[Pratyaksham Bala]

Thanks Rsachi, uday_shankar.

Let us check again the advertisement of Mohamed Ebrahim & Co. Private Limited. Though this company was incorporated in 1942, Mohamed Ebrahim Sait (b.1901) had in fact started his sole proprietorship business at Rattan Bazaar in 1926. The advertisement talks of '30 years of experience'. This points to 1956 !

Considering the time-frame set by Uday Shanker, we may presume that the Souvenir was printed in 1957.

[uday_shankar]

One more additional data point: the Leyland ad lists an address in "Bombay State", which became Maharashtra in 1960. That narrows my possible date to 1957-1960 with a certainty of 100%.

More anecdotally,
1. Panchapakesa Iyer was still the principal of Rasika Ranjani School. He moved to Bombay circa 1972.
2. Andhra Pradesh is mentioned in the Leyland ad so the the date is >= 1956, when it was established.
3. A red herring is "Himachal Pradesh", which was made a state only in 1971 !!! However, it was a union territory with the same name prior to that since 1956. Whew. That knocked my reasoning out for a while because nothing made sense !

Assuming the Mohamed Ebrahim ad is truthful, based on Pratyaksham Bala's findings, I set the date to 1957 with an uncertainly of 6 months.

QED .

[Pratyaksham Bala]

Great! 1957, it is!

Got this now: Mohamed Ebrahim & Co. (MECO) celebrated its 50th year in 1976, taking 1926 as the base year.

[Rsachi]

Well done.
I don't know why I wrote early 50s. I just meant 50s. And I guessed B Rajam Iyer looked 35..1957!

The bigger bit for me was the patch work of the titled article into a separate souvenir. So you aver on that?

[Rsachi]

PS you know what gives me a really good feeling? That 99% of my interactions and research connected with rasikas.org is done with my 3G/Wifi mobile phone Xperia Z2. Reading, research, photography, scanning, spell check, non English fonts, copy/paste, formatting, uploading, embedding, audio, video, hyperlinks,.. you name it. In the ensconced cocoon of privacy.

[Pratyaksham Bala]

The bigger bit for me was the patch work of the titled article into a separate souvenir. So you aver on that?

The first sheet also seems to be from the same Souvenir. Please note the master sheet number '13' at the bottom of page 5 (i.e. first sheet) and the master sheet number '14' at the bottom of page 11. The placement and font of both these numbers are same, which indicates that all the sheets are from the same Souvenir.

It is a collection of a few sheets from a Souvenir, and the handwritten page numbers are not the page numbers of the Souvenir.

[sureshvv]

Can someone explain how to get the file? I can see only torrents and metadata.

[sureshvv]

never mind.. i see it now..

[srini_pichumani]

Wow ! Quite a case of whodunit... Thanks for cracking it, Bala, RSachi, and Uday !

The handwritten numbers are my handiwork since these papers were part of a larger bound volume of different sets of weekly magazine cutouts from the 1950s and I needed to create a ToC for myself. The volume has long since come unbound, and hence it is easier for me to scan them now, like I did with the Harold Powers picture from 1950s in Tiruvayyaru. I was just going to post the lesson but since all these sheets were from a set, I decided to scan them together.

Now for some points about the article and the compositions:

1) Vasudevacharya came to Tiruvayyaru at the age of 19 and stayed for about 6 years, it seems... that would put it around 1884-1890.

2) "maracitlunDE" figures in the repertoire of most people who passed through Kalakshetra starting off with Kalpagam maami who taught there in the 1940s while still in her 20s and was associated with Tiger back then, and Mysore Vasudevacharya later.

[Mysore Vasudevacharya was the one to put her up to play the last ciTTasvaram in Viriboni with an atIta eduppu. She would chuckle that mridangist and audience alike would think that she messed up when she did this, but that it was the venerable MV himself who asked her to employ usi-tALam on the veena and modify the eDuppu boldly to match with that of the first 2 cittasvarams ! And this really did happen in a NJ concert in the US on her tour during 2008.]

3) MDR recordings have "maracitluNDE" if I am not mistaken, although I have not heard it closely. But it is SRJ Sir who brought it totally alive for us in a basement concert in my home in 1993 after a short but brilliant exposition of the finer points of Begada -- his son Ramji may have loaded the video on Youtube, since I remember seeing a few pieces like Latangi from that concert, where he also demonstrated aspects of Tiger's style.

4) Nedanuri sang "muripemu" at my request in a SIFA concert in the Bay area in the mid-90s. I had not heard it before and was pretty thrilled -- TKG sir who was sitting next to me was relatively cool to the kriti. I figure that he had soaked in all the Mukhari of "entaninnE", "enRaikku s'iva krpai", "pAhimAm ratnAcalanAyaka" etc !

5) "sarasvatyA bhagavatyA" is a classic of Dikshitar rendered by Kalpagam maami very very beautifully in some concerts in the 2000s. Had not heard her play this at her home which is the only place I had heard ever till the 2008 Cleveland concert. Maami's rendition does not have the additional "varayA" in the pallavi, given in the SSP, as LRamki pointed out to me. Looks like TLV received it that way, from B.Rajam Iyer's notation here.

BVRaman/Lakshmanan had a beautiful recording earlier too. The mrdangam accompaniment by Madurai T.Srinivasan on that whole tape was stunning -- particularly for "Jambupate".

The sAhityam is extremely beautiful and has so many allusions too. A very good friend of mine pointed out how the "yA" ending and the "vINA" beginning in the anupallavi 1st and 2nd lines are evocative of the "yA kundendu... yA vINA vara daNDa..." s'lokam. Another s'lokam Dikshitar paraphrases here is:

sangitamapi sAhityam sarasvatyA stana dvayam
ekam ApAta madhuram anyathA.locanAmrtam

6) The Purandaradasa kriti "anjikin yAdakayya" -- who can we get to hear it from ? Would love to hear from rasikas.
<edited... Thanks Bala !>

-Srini.

[Pratyaksham Bala]

Is it 'anjikinyAtakayya' ?
http://www.saavn.com/p/song/kannada/Han ... ycRXSZzYXY

[Rsachi]

The way Kannada words stack up:
anjike = Fear
innu= Henceforth/now
yAtakkayyA? = why, sir?

[Sreeni Rajarao]

Srini,

Regarding 6) The Purandaradasa kriti "anjikinyAtakayya" -- who can we get to hear it from ? Would love to hear from rasikas.

I have a short version sung by T N Seshagopalan and an elaborate version beautifully sung by Madurai Sundar in a Purandaradasa day concert here in Detroit.

[varsha]

http://www.mediafire.com/listen/39f2vdz ... _-_TNS.mp3
http://www.mediafire.com/listen/k0f76qo ... __-_NK.mp3

http://www.mediafire.com/listen/flx2wo7 ... _-_BMK.mp3
yes bmks track is beautifully sung.such a nice song .flows so sweetly

[srini_pichumani]

Guru purnimaa again today ! Mysore Vasudevacharya’s article starts off with a nirukta for guru !

https://archive.org/details/MysoreVasud ... irstLesson

[Lakshman]

The format of the pages is similar to the publications, by Swadeshamitran newspaper, like Ramanuja nutrandadi, Arunachalakavi Padalgal, Vasudeva Kirtanamanjari etc. I have these booklets.

[Lakshman]

By the way, those interested in tidbits about Chennoi of yore can look at this website:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/8249406 ... 318536961/