A large chunk of my Sundays is spent teaching Carnatic music. I have nine students now. Five of them are boys, aged between five and ten. Two girls and two ladies make up the rest. All the boys started their carnatic music lessons with me. Everybody in the female group had trained under other teachers before.
I must confess that before I started teaching music almost two years ago, I did not think much about music; I just sang. It is only now, thanks partly to the uninhibited curiosity of the children, and partly to my own wish to hear the students sing like I want them to, that I often think of music.
I do not know why some people sing more through their noses than from their throats, or why some ragas are more easily taught than others, or the rationale behind carnatic music's intricate system of taalas. How is one to hold a magnifying lens to the spaces between notes and observe and grasp the subtlest of melodic movements, or worse, even silences?
Then there is a whole range of cultural issues: the lyrics used in carnatic music compositions are not secular and cosmopolitan; they are by and large religious, or at least mythological. How am I to explain to children the meaning of these compositions? When translated, they seem like nonsense to the youngster, and may well turn his interest away from the art form.
Today, my understanding of the physiological, mathematical, aesthetic and scientific aspects of what I sing and teach is very shallow. I believe that a better understanding will help both the teacher and the taught.
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