This story is from July 17, 2015

MSV: The world was his music

Unlike most music directors of his time and age, M S Viswanathan (MSV) was a public figure and a musical icon.
MSV: The world was his music
Vamanan
CHENNAI: Unlike most music directors of his time and age, M S Viswanathan (MSV) was a public figure and a musical icon. He might have slowed down in his eighties, but the magic of his muse hadn’t worn off, while the media’s hunger for celebrities had sharpened. He was on TV in reality shows; he was in a handful of films as an actor; he was in live music shows; and he was on rap remixes of his own numbers, crooning and cavorting ‘Thillu Mullu’ with contemporary worthies.
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And all along, as the illustrious music composer whose evergreen numbers set the benchmark for melody and lyrical excellence in the by-now legendary era of MGR and Sivaji, he was the last shining vestige of a classical age of music that had all but vanished.
Admirers MSV met would speak warmly about the beauty and melody of his music, and the composer would make formal noises of his gratefulness. But his gaze was fixed ahead, never on the laurels of the past. He itched to do more music, to exercise his musical faculties further.
In the last few years since the passing of his wife — the warm, open-hearted and generous Janaki Amma — his zest for life had been slowly waning. She had known he would be like a babe in the woods without her — why, he couldn’t even button his shirt himself. And she, ironically for a Hindu wife, despaired when told by an astrologer that she would predecease him.
Born in the nondescript Palakkad village of Elapulli to Manayangathu Subramanian and Narayani Ammal, he lost his father before he was four. The poignant conditions of his father’s demise as well as the unsettled circumstances in the family — he would recount an aborted bid by his mother to drown him as part of a suicide attempt — must have been traumatic. As a truant schoolboy in Cannanore (Kannur), where his maternal grandparent Krishnan Nair was a jail warden, MSV frequented touring cinemas selling snacks. That was when the magical melodies of the likes of Thyagaraja Bhagavathar, Aswathamma and V A Chellappa cast their spell on him.

The romance with music took a significant turn when music teacher Neelakanda Bhagavathar took him as a disciple. The tutelage climaxed in a concert by 12-year-old MSV in Cannanore town hall. In one of his rare moments of nostalgia, MSV would talk about the young student (MSV) perched on the shoulders of the guru as they bathed together in a stream — he reeling out the swaras as Bhagavathar belted out a Carnatic kriti. In yet rarer moments, he would say any sound was a musical note — part of a vast melodic scheme.
Running away from home in his early teens, MSV went to Tirupur and finally found his way into Jupiter Pictures in Madras. His tenure as a boy attendant in the production house’s music hall brought him close to music directors like Subbiah Naidu and paved the way for his emergence as a music director. The final leg of his internship was under the musical genius C R Subbaraman, whose premature demise at 28 set the stage for the emergence of his chelas, MSV and Ramamurthy, as the first musical duo of Tamil cinema in N S Krishnan’s ‘Panam’.
At 24, MSV, the younger partner, was dynamic and raring to exercise his prodigious creativity. Ramamurthi was 31, a respected violinist in film music circles with a special touch of melody, stern in temperament and more knowledgeable in Carnatic music. Together they made a swell team, and struggling through the fifties when opportunities were scarce, they burst out into their own in the early sixties with a new wave of light music in Tamil cinema.
Taking a cue from the western orchestration in Hindi film songs, they brought an orchestral richness to Tamil films combining it with lyrical and melodic significance. Kannadasan, who backed the duo from the start, played a pivotal role in this transformation in the ‘Paa’ series of films through his lyrical wizardry and was later joined by Vaali, among others. Viswanathan-Ramamurthy scored music together for just under 100 films before the poignant 1965 split.
MSV worked his magic in times when music directors were expected to offer an array of tunes for producers and directors to choose from. It was the time of live recordings when the logistical challenges of making a song were manifold.
A single mistake by a singer or instrumentalist would entail doing a song all over again. The recording studios weren’t air-conditioned yet and the ceiling fans would have to be switched off during takes. The number of films produced was increasing, and unlike the previous era, songs could not be rehearsed for months, but would have to be mostly taught in the studio during the recording.
Some music directors left the scoring of orchestral music to their associates, but MSV composed the interlude music of his songs himself, and preferred to do it at the spur of the moment, during the recording. Individual singers could notate the tunes for their reference and individual players could write down their parts, but he preferred performance by the ear. His own education had been entirely by the ear.
Post-split, MSV came out in flying colours as the most influential music director of Tamil cinema. Sivaji and MGR had emerged as the pillars of Tamil cinema. Whether it was Sivaji’s melodramatic expression of angst (‘Gowravam’s’ ‘Neeyum Naanuma’) or MGR’s song connect with his fans through political and social messages in lyrics (‘Neenga Nalla Irukkanum Naadu Munnera’ in ‘Idhayakkani’), MSV was past master in creating chartbusters.
While wowing the lay cinemagoer with peppy numbers, he would also woo the elite with tours de force of music for directors like K Balachander, turning out a soaring song (‘Adhisaya Ragam’) in a rare four note raga (‘Mahathi’) in keeping with the film’s title of Apoorva Raagangal, or etching a deeply meaningful lyric in a forceful raga malika (‘Yezhu Swarangalil’).
MSV understood the vocal potential of younger singers like S P Balasubramaniam, Vani Jairam, K J Yesudas and P Jayachandran and exploited them to the hilt to hone melodious numbers. He himself had an unusual singing voice full of feeling, and as the years went by, sang more frequently, mostly for off-screen song situations. A R Rahman harnessed his voice in films like ‘Sangamam’ and ‘Kannathil
Muthamittaal’.

Illustration: Varghese Kallada
The rise of a new generation of film makers in the mid-seventies to the anthem of Ilayaraja’s music slowly tapered off MSV’s musical career, though some boys on the burning deck like director R C Sakthi persisted with the veteran unto the last. A series of home productions in the early eighties landed MSV in financial hot waters. To bail him out, Ilayaraja teamed up with him in AVM’s Mella ‘Thirandhadhu Kanavu’.
There were a few more films they did together, with MSV composing the tunes and Ilayaraja doing the orchestration. In the event, MSV also joined up again with his erstwhile partner, Ramamurthy for a few films. But it turned out to be only a token gesture.
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