Can Carnatic music do with a little more sax?
An evergreen debate on tradition versus modernity in Carnatic classical music has been revived with the music season on in full swing in Madras. Last Sunday, T.M. Krishna, while arguing for preserving the integrity of the Carnatic tradition, wrote in The Hindu that instruments like the saxophone and keyboard were just not cut out for the south Indian classical form. This has drawn a response from the pianist Anil Srinivasan in the Sunday magazine of The Hindu: “Tradition has become indelibly linked with the past. This is where the problems begin. We get autoregressive when discussing the preservation or conservation of a tradition. Trapping it in a time capsule and not allowing it to breathe or acquire newer characteristics is antithetical to the very notion of an intergenerational transfer…. “Historically, traditions were largely oral and were passed on from one generation to another…. “Music cannot be classified. To the human mind, the illusion of control or self perception leads it
