The case for art music - yet sacred
Since so much musical treasure has been accumulated through the process of ornamentation and sangatification of the great works of trinity, the time has come for us to liberate the art form from the clutches of sectarian ideas expressed in the lyrics and how we seem to intellect ourselves into a Ghetto using all of it. Plus instruments don't have their own story and listeners are left in doldrums unable to appreciate art, struggling as they are imagining their own things out of the lyrics and instrumentalists striving hard to bring forth the lyrical feel in their playing!!
Lot of musical treasure and human effort lies a waste, due to all these conflicts and conundrums.
Fortunately however our musical treatises have shown the way out, or several ways out may be. But one possible way out - and that is only a trigger into thinking ways out of this - could be the use of tAnam sounds or even jati sounds to recapture all the toil that has been wrongly inflicted on beautiful sAhitya , resulting in mangled lyrics and lot of heart burn. The tAnam sounds are modeled on the sounds of plucked instruments using dental syllables ta.. na.. and jati sounds bring in store, a staple of soft and hard consonants and long and short vowels , readily available for use to create a judicious mixture.
This mixture can be used to template out the hard work of many generations of illustrious musicians. And once recaptured, these new compositions can then be used by vocalists, feeling squirmy about oppressive ideas in lyrics, now no longer bothersome.
Instrumental music will eventually make more sense as they can now break free of lyrics and even from the stress of the new tAnam/jati sounds and create their unique sounds native to their instrumental idiom and construct. They got their own story now!!
But the fact remains that based on the Cosmology of sound and philosophy, such music will still be held sacred as a Guru SiSya conversation may still be required to debate and refine across generations, and as sangIta kalpadruma of Gayaka SikAmani Dr Sri HarikESanallur Muttiah BhAgavatar says, the least stressful consonant "sa" the first svara has a cosmic origin held sacred. As described, a bag of air pierced with a pin , what leaks is "ssss" - add to it "aa" the primordial you get "sa". This is all in spite of the fact that no deities are addressed and bhava can be there still, in the abstract form as bhava is an emergent phenomenon out of a pure human/divine effulgence!
Case rested!!