For the benefit of music lovers of Indian classical music and Indian classical flute, the following material is available for download for...
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For the benefit of music lovers of Indian classical music and Indian classical flute, the following material is available for download for your reading pleasure. Having sound knowledge of the theory and science behind these subjects would go a long way to developing a better appreciation and understanding of Indian classical music and the flute.
The contents of this material are exhaustively researched and verified with notable sources which are indexed in the reference section for each topic. In addition, the material is also reviewed by expert Indian classical musicians from both India and abroad.
Music lovers, art enthusiasts and musicians can use the material for private presentations in academic institutions, events and lecture demonstrations and other forms of arts related events without modifying the content.
Reading Materials
Introduction to Carnatic Music
Introduction to Carnatic Flute
Cross Fingering Technique
Double Octave Blowing
Tribute to T R Mahalingam When Semmangudi Srinivasa Iyer was asked to list the great geniuses of Carnatic Music, he thought of only thre...
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Tribute to T R Mahalingam
When Semmangudi Srinivasa Iyer was asked to list the great geniuses of Carnatic Music, he thought of only three names; 'Flute' Mali, T N Rajarathinam Pillai and Palghat Mani Iyer. That Mali and or T R Mahalingam though the youngest of the three, had come first to the mind of the ageing grandsire of music spoke eloquently of his unquestioned virtuosity on the flute. He was, in many ways, the flute quivalent of Rajarathinam Pillai on the Nageswaram. When Mali was in the mood he played some of the finest melodies on his flute, enchanting his listers and taking them on the path to musical nirvana. He did not just please his listeners, he would also move their hearts. But like Rajarathinam, Mali also was also associated with the strangest of eccentricities.
Such was his music and his unparalleled divine genius and together with his eccentricity, he stormed the world of music and left behind an eternal legacy of music that should be presented the way it should always be presented. His respect, concern and gratitude for those who respected him for he was as a person mattered more to him than the numerous awards and felicitations that he outrightly ignored. His deprived childhood, a corollary of his own success made many misunderstand his eccentric behaviour for his search and calling was beyond the material realm. This tribute would hope to do some real justice to the maestro or rather the wizard who has seen it all through a life of glistening fame and the darkness of loneliness.
Birthplace & Childhood Life
Mahalingam or Mali was born on November 6, 1926, to Ramaswamy Iyer and Brahadambal of Talainayar village of Tanjore District. The family was then residing at the nearby Tiruvidaimarudur town and was named after Mahalingaswami, the presiding deity of the temple. Mali was one among six siblings and his father was involved in agriculture besides the running of a small time business. As a three-year-old, the boy developed a boil on his right hand, that necessitated immediate treatment and he was therefore sent to his grandfather's house in Trichy. Shortly afterwards. Shortly afterwards, his parents too moved to the same town.
Gopala Iyer, a kinsman of Ramaswamy Iyer, had a good knowledge of music with the ability to play on the violin, the harmonium and the flute, besides being a good vocalist. He was eking out his livelihood as a music teacher, and very soon the entire Ramaswamy Iyer brood was enrolled for music lesson with him. Mali's eldest brother Gautaman learnt the lute while sister Devaki was taught vocal music. Mali himself, considered to be too frail of body to learn the flute, was taught vocal music. But it was the flute that really attracted him. He began to practice on it secretly, and rapidly acquired mastery over it.
Gopala Iyer, who soon discovered this interest was fasicinated by what he heard and tried to get Mali's father to let his son switch from vocal music to the flute. But the father would not agree. Nevertheless, when Mali learnt by himself the complicated Viribhoni varnam (Bhairavi, Pachaimiriyam Adiyappaiyaah) and even played it in three speeds, his father had to concede that there was something unusual about his son. He permitted him to enroll for formal lessons and within two years, Mali, aided by his guru to some extent, had taught himself all that could be known bout the flute. Possess of a strange faculty that enabled him to play any song he heard once, he rapidly advanced into the realms of alapanas, pallavis, neravals and svarams. His family came to recognise that in Mali they had a child prodigy.
Meeting with Palladam Sanjeeva Rao
Ramaswamy Iyer decided that Mali ought to perform before senior artistes and get their blessings. He took the boy to meet the then numero uno of the flute, Palladam Sanjeeva Rao, who had come to Trichy for a concert performance. Violinist Marungapuri Gopalakrishna Iyer and mirdangist Tanjore Vaidyanatha Iyer too were present and Mali took up the Bhairvai varnam followed by a song of Tyagaraja in Todi. Sanjeeva Rao got up abruptly and left even as Mali began the second piece. On being pressed by the boy's father for an opinion he replied curtly 'that the boy was not playing any flute'. In may ways this was true. Mali, had even at that age managed to perform in the vocal style, reproducing several of the gamakas that were hitherto considered impossible on the flute! Sanjeeva Rao, recognising the talent in the lad, had actually withheld his approval out of sheer jealousy. The accompanists, both senior musicians, were however most effusive in their praise.
Seeking Early College Education
Mali's father then took him to the Music College in Chidambaram and got him to perform in the presence of T S Sabhesa Iyer, the veteran guru, then serving there as the Principal. For some reason Sabhesa Iyer offered to enroll the young boy in a course for Nagaswaram playing. It has since been said in explanation that Sabhesa Iyer did so as there was no course then in the University for teaching the flute. But it was wa period when it was unheard of for a Brahmin boy to take to the Nagaswaram. Mali's father, taking this offer to be a calculated insult, gave vent to his ire in no uncertain terms resulting in a big argument with Sabhesa Iyer.
In the beginning, finding suitable accompaniments was a major headache and nobody wanted to be seen accompanying a mere stripling (even if he was actually capable of teaching them a trick or two in music). Soon however, Marungapuri Gopalakrishna Iyer came forward to accompany him on the violin. Mali's father then took the lad to Vizag where the Music College had Dwaram Venkataswami Naidu as its Principal. While Mali could not enroll at the college being under-aged, he came under the influence of the benign Dwaramgaru, who accompanied him of ten on the violin and kanjira during practice sessions at home. Despite being many years Mali's senior and a front ranking violinist, Dwaram had no hesitation in accompanying Mali during a few public concerts as well, thereby helping him establish himself.
Debut Concert in Madras
Mali's debut in Madras city was in 1933, when his father presented him under the auspices of the Tyagaraja Festival organised by the Rasika Ranjana Sabha, Mylapore. Accompanied by Rajamani on the vilin and Triplicane Srinivasa Rao on the mridangam, he gave a stupendous performance at the end which veterans Parur Sundaram Iyer and Musiri Subramania Iyer presented him with a silk shawl. His career took off after this and he was much in demand. The family's financial circumstances improved and they were able to move from the one room tenement they were occupying beside a mosque in Triplicate to a larger house on Triplicane High Road.
Concert to Stardom
Soon senior accompanists began to accept concert opportunities with him. Among the violinists, Chowdiah, Papa K S Venkataramaiah and Kumbhakonam Rajamanikkam Pillai were all to accompany him frequently. Pudukottai Dakshinamurthy Pillai, Kumbhakonam Azhagianambi Pillai and Tanjore Vaidyanatha Iyer were the early percussionts who accompanied him, thereby indicating the kind of stature that Mali was to enjoy even at that young age. Later maverick stalwarts like Palghat Mani Iyer and Palani Subramania Pilai shared the stage with him.
This was the period when Mali was the blue-eyes boy of the Carnatic fraternity. A boy of slight build with extraordinarily bright eyes, often hidden by a thick mop of hair that fell over his forehead, he was all innocence even as he respectfully carried out his father's bidding, many times to the very limits of his endurance. The father even went many times to the very limits of his endurance. The father even went to the extent of releasing advertisements on his son's great abilities in various magazines trying to attract more performance opportunities. These came in thick and fast, with crowds becoming unmanageable at most of his performances. At one particular concert, Mali had to be hoisted on to the shoulders of the hefty Kumbhakonam Rajamanikkam Pillai to negotiate the crowds. During this stage, Mali's music was fast and brilliant with rapid-fire bhrigas and quick glides. To the audience, which was used to hearing mainly staccato notes from his predecessors on the flute, Mali's usage of the gamakas was a great novelty. It brought the flute closer to the human voice.
As the years progressed, Mali's music continued to flower. An introduction to the Dhanammal family in the early 1940s by Papa Venkataramaiah exposed Mali to the joys of the slow moving padams and frisky javalis. Many a day he sat at the feet of Dhanammal's third daughter Jayammal and imbibed the finer nuances of Carnatic music. Adopting a more sedate style, his music became exploratory taking his audiences on a long and lovely trek and transporting to a world they had experience till then on only in the company of Rajarathinam Pillai. Mali acquired an enormous repertoire of songs, though in later years, he was in the habit of repeating a small selection over and over again.
Redesigning the Flute
He later went on to redesign the flute as well, making its reed thicker and its bore smaller to produce a strong and rich tone. Mali also altered the lipping and fingering techniques. His left hand held the flute in a peculiar way that came to be called the 'parrot clutch', which helped him in controlling the instrument. Unlike his predecessors he used flutes with eight holes in them. According to Professor Sambamoorthy, the musicologist, it was the eighth and extra hole that provided Mali with the extraordinary control he had on the instrument.
Reigning Supreme in Manodharma
In raga alapanas, Mali was at his best. He would not develop the raga note by note as GNB has perfected. On the other hand, he would select a few notes that were characteristic of the raga and continuously hover around them. In the hand of a lesser artiste this would have appeared monotonous, but Mali could demonstrate infinite shades in each note and together with various note combinations he could coax out the ragas's essence itself. Often, it appeared that he came to concerts with certain notes in mind. He would select ragas that had similar combinations and perform them demonstrating the subtle differences that each one had to bring about their individuality. His alapanas were long drawn creative affairs and he would take his time on each note, exploring its myriad beauties before going on to the next. He had tremendous breath control and could dwell on each note for over forty seconds, thereby lending full power to his blowing technique. Unlike most other flautists, Mali, through his amazing control over the instrument managed to infuse greater power volume in the lowest octave than in the higher ones. This made his meandering alapanas in this octave resonant and rich, very much like a bass singer. His essays of ragas like Bhairavi, Khamboji, Kalyani apart, Mali's brand of Athana, Sahana, Yadukulakhamboji, Bilahari, Kannada and etc., were very special.
In svaras, Mali was unparalleled. Here too he would select a set of notes and dwell on them, but what set apart his svara rendition was the usage of pauses. These could be in the beginning, middle or the end of a svara passage. His unerring sense of beat would guide him to the end of the tala cycles even if he paused in between. But all this meant that his accompanists had to be extra careful. The pauses also increased the sense of anticipation among the audience, each member trying to guess the next svara combination that would emerge from the flute.
The Brilliant Violinist
Mali was also a brilliant violinist. His violin, a battered instrument that was thrown about his lodgings often with a string or two short produced an unparalleled kind of music. However, there were only two occasions he had performed in public on the violin. Some records mentioned that he had accompanied the vocal stalwart Chembai Vaidhyanatha Bhagavathar on the violin. Mali himself felt that he was better as a violinist than as a flautist.
Later Years I: Eccentrics & Paranormal Claims
By 1939 Mali had begun what was to be a long line of eccentric acts. That year he cancelled a concert performance at the Ramakrishna Mission in Mylapore claiming that he was too distressed by the memories of his elder sister Devaki who had passed away some years earlier. In the 1950s, in a widely publicised event, the R R Sabha officials who managed to persuade him to perform a violin recital for the event was left dumbfounded when he did not turn up.
Later Years II: Psychosomatic Moods
In his sixteenth year, he claimed that had a strange experience, that a dazzling white light appeared to enter his head and an excruciating headache followed which remained with him for the rest of life. The headache which occurs on sporadic bursts and he would suffer in silence and solitude without telling anyone about it. The fear of this attack drove him to the bottle and he began to imbibe large quantities of alcohol which he would even consume on stage or during a live broadcast at AIR (where on one occasion the AIR station director had to remove him from a live broadcast). On two other occasions, the radio station played a recording of his without his live performance and got Tirupamburam Swaminatha Pillai to perform instead. There were times when he would be too drunk to perform and either not turn up at all or even land up and take the entire audience for a ride leading to several ugly scenes. He also put up on several occasions with also another close drinking friend, another legend, the inimitable Nagaswaram genius T N Rajarathinam Pillai discussing about music and life over a bottle of alcohol.
Many believed that the headaches was psychosomatic and was a result of his denied childhood and the economic pressures his father has unwaveringly exerted on him.
Later Years III: Withdrawal Moods
When his family was 'settled', he gradually stopped playing for the audiences and would play for himself and on his own terms. Very much a lone, he shifted to bachelor's digs at Bazaar Street, Mylapore when most of his first students learnt from him albeit rather sporadically as they picked up his techniques only when he performed. According to B M Sundar Rao, one of his first batch of students, Flute Mali brought him to a cemetery to sleep on the graves and more than that conversed on important lessons of life. In another occasion, when his concert was billed to start after the D K Pattammal's performance, he absconded after publicly praising her concert offered his goodbyes and vanished. In another occasion, he called off his concert at the last minute at the Ramakrishna Mission Home in Mylapore, disguised himself and went back to the notice board laughing to himself after listening to the audience cursing him. On another major event, he absconded from a recital with the violin maestro M S Gopalakrishnan in the Presidential Palace with the latter giving a violin solo recital instead.
Later Years IV: Helping Those In Need
There were however numerous occasions when he helped those in need despite his strange behaviour. When M K Thyagaraja Bhagavathar, the first superstar of Tamil Cinema had to call off a concert in 1952 due to ill health (due to the litigation of the Lakshmikanten Murder Case), Mali stood in for him at the last minute. He would perform regularly at a temple in Madras run by an old lady who was never in awe of his greatness but genuinely fond of his music. He never failed in his promises to her, often calling on her in advance to ascertain the dates.
There were occasions when Mali would be so pleased with his accompanists that he would give them the entire concert free including his own. He did this once to Vellore Ramabhadran and discovering the next day he himself had no money, sent a note to Ramabhadran asking id he could please lend Rs 10.
Later Years V: Standing Taller Than His Giants
Such was the calibre of the flute wizard that some of the top most monarchs of Carnatic vocal music accompanied him in his performances. On one famous instance at the Thyagaraja Vidwat Samajam, Chembai played the violin for Mali while Viswanatha Iyer (the guru of Semmangudi Srinivasa Iyer) played on the mridangam that awed everyone. Musiri Subramania Iyer was so moved by Mali's rendition of Matada Baradeno that he requested him to play it again. GNB and Semmangudi the regining emperors of Carnatic vocal music even mockingly told each other that they should quit music after listening to a recital of Flute Mali in complete disguise in a packed concert of Mali.
Though he respected the music of his seniors, he was not in awe of them and never hesitated in putting them in their place if he felt that they overstepped limits. When, during a performance at the R R Sabha, he was disturbed by T L Venkatarama Iyer and Mudicondan Venatarama Iyer chatting loudly in the front row, he publicly admonished them over the mike. And when they did not stop, ended his own performance by playing the mangalam (the concluding piece) at once. He had also publicly challenged the superiority of his music with Palladam Sanjeeva Rao for the early insult he received as a boy in the midst of a Music Academy performance. He later left to the US in 1980 after marrying Ellen, an American disciple of his and stayed there for the next five years accepting concert engagements of at least $2000 per concert.
Later Years VI: Premonition of his Death
In 1986, he returned to India and what appears to be a strong premonition of death, Mali sent out photographs of himself to various magazines and dailies stating that 'they may need the visuals when there was news about him'. The end came after a cerebral haemorrhage on 30th May that year. By strange coincidence, he died on the same day that his admirer and accompanist Palghat Mani Iyer had departed five years earlier.
"Art Its Dawn, Perfection and Future Role" - In the early history of humanity, man was very much more of an animal than he is no...
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"Art Its Dawn, Perfection and Future Role" - In the early history of humanity, man was very much more of an animal than he is now, concerned primarily with finding food and shelter and protection against the sun and rain and the wilderness of inanimate and animate nature. His instincts were related to the task of self-preservation and his creative faculties took destructive and self-perpetuating directions. The bow and the arrow, the earthen pot and the goat or sheepskin were later amenities. When such elementary needs were satisfied, primitive man flowered into a later development when he started making painted earthenware. The art of communication with his fellow beings produced significant language and elementary work-a-day arithmetic so useful in buying and bartering articles like food and clothing. The dawn of art broke in these foggy years of human history when Intelligence fluttered her eyelids and saw Nature in the clearer perception of her own light. With his new and unique gift, man's vision of Nature and things reacted in novel, pleasant and unknown ways in his "five little senses", "startled with the delight" of a better and a new perception. Man realised the peculiar and pleasing effects of line and colour, tone and rhythm, the embryo of painting and music. Thus it is that we find that early man began making pretty dwelling and daily utensils, which were not only useful but also charming and handy. He painted the walls of his dwellings and surfaces of pottery and earthenware with likeness from Nature-animals, birds and natural scenery. The twang of the bowstring was the origin of the harp. The wind or breeze moaning through bamboo grooves or reeds was the inspiration for the making of the flute and other wind instruments, and the spreading of the goat-skin over the mouth of earthenware gave birth to percussion-instruments. He himself started humming tunes and airs while doing daily work, like ploughing the field or drawing water from the well. Paper was made from bamboo-wood. The barks of trees and leaves were used for written language, which later gave us literature. It is interesting here to note that man first started doing things before knowing how to do them.
Thus the primitive emotions of love for all that contributed to security and comfort and hatred for the opposite, sublimated into something nobler, the love of the beautiful and hatred of the ugly. In a safer and more secure environment the sense of hearing and sight became less urgent in their use and man developed what can be called disinterested observation and appreciation of beauty. Though varying degrees of progress, the aesthetic sense - that which is sensitive to the quality of beauty - grew apace and the embryo of the artist - who as yet was unborn and dumb - came into being.
The material for all art is aesthetic experience, as different from ordinary human experience. The every-day man is one whose finer senses are dulled by routine, lethargy and mechanisation. Conditions of life being what they are or were, he could not react to his environment or circumstances so that the epicentre of his emotional being was shifted and he could experience, what may loosely called an aesthetics shock or earthquake. In the artiste, what the intelligence discovered is an experience the Imagination adorned and sublimated. Otherwise poets and artists cannot "give to airy nothings a local habitation and a name". But for this unique sensitiveness and aestheticism, the world of art would have been poorer for the stinging sensuous of Keats, the ethereal idealisation of Shelley, the elemental simplicity of Wordsworth and, the introverted mysticism of Browning and the Gothic, ornate grandeur of Milton. It is evident that the artist's reaction to things is quite different from the layman's. As if it were, Experience is put into the crucible of Emotions and under the warmth and fire of the Imagination and melts into aesthetic experience. Though no woman or man behaves in real life like the characters of Shakespeare's or Shaw's works, we are nowhere more shocked into the realisation of the fatal possessiveness of love than when we read Othello or when Anna Karenina, looks to us to be more really alive than many women we have met in private life. This leads us on to the realisation that more than the actual experience, it is the way the artist presents his theme or subject that distinguishes him from the rest of mankind in their expressiveness. Everyone looks at the moon, but it is the poet who calls her the "queen of the night". We do not describe wine in a glass-cup as "with beaded bubbles winking at the brim". Eventless time is eternity but the poet expresses it thus: "I saw eternity the other night, like a ring, great and pure, of endless bright". The artist is not concerned with the fruit of experience, but with experience itself - an aesthetic one - and his experience, in a language, which is again different from ours in its emotional content and significance. He creates as it were, fresh, immediate and sensible forms out of otherwise common things. It is an outcome of the irrepressible force of feeling that is innate in all human nature and overwhelming desire to express it. In other words, the artist is one whose capacity for feeling is inordinately greater than and uniquely different from the general order, of humanity - a gift for a peculiar quality of hypersensitiveness which transmutes everyday language into a higher significance. He communicates more to use than the mere smell of the rose more than the mere sounds in Music. We are made to feel with him and revel in the same kind and rush of reactions - a contagious and poignant excess in emotion - what Keats calls, "a burning forehead and a parching tongue". Thus the world of the artist is one that transcends common sense and common discourse, knowing and speaking what is otherwise unknowable and unspeakable. The artist here "partakes of the nature of the mystic in his experiences of beauty, in tune with the infinite, catching and communicating to us a glimpse of the Eternal and the Absolute". One is reminded of Carlyle who speaks of music as "a kind of inarticulate and unfathomable speech that takes us on and leads us to the edge of the Infinite and lets us for a few moments gaze into it". Art gives us a peace that passeth understanding - the same peace the artist finds in form and the mystic in the contemplation of God.
As a corollary, the chief quality and characteristic of the artist is the divine capacity to infect others with the same feelings as teh artist himself has experienced. Of course this does not mean that art achieves a verisimilitude to life. As a matter of fact, it is just the opposite. To achieve an artistic effect a certain amount of the addition of the grotesque, a twisting of the normal findings of life is indispensable. "When the reproduction coincides with the original, art is destroyed by the very perfection of the craftsmanship as the vital rhythm of a curve is lost in the geometrical symmetry of the circle". The apparently horizontal lines of the Parthenon are really curved. The most absorbing story is not necessarily a work of art. There is a certain deception in art. Art is something additional to the actual. The successions of sounds and rhythms in Music are artificial. From the study of the ordinary movements of the body while walking or sitting, the movements in dance are certainly artificial beyond the customary. To revert, one feels that the artist has expressed something which all of us have felt in us all the time, which we never realised. In revealing himself, the artist has revealed to us ourselves. While listening to good Music, one moves along its graces and nuances its waves of ascent and descent, its caresses and its kicks and its tears and its smiles.
One is thus made aware of the Universality of all art, its appeal irrespective of language or castes or creed.
Keats says in his "Ode on a Grecian urn",
"Forever warm and still to be enjoyed
Forever panting and forever young",
A statement on the endurance of all great art.
"A thing of beauty is a joy forever". Great art endures forever, standing permanent against the ravages of time and space and forever satisfying the aesthetic sense in their hunger for the beautiful in all ages and climes. Its language is the language of the universe, the language of the human emotions, taking us through the concrete and the sensual, known and experience, into a world thoroughly abstract, transcending the senses, unknown and transcending experience, through experience, feeling and language to a world beyond all of them. "Is it, not strange that sheep's guts should hale souls of of men's bodies" (Shakespeare). It is a reorientation of an experience, usual and peaceful, into one strange and intense. It comes of the exercise of that impulse to creative expression which is, Universal in human nature - an impulse which is deeper and more spiritual than the physical, wherein as James H. Cousins says, "The artist becomes one with the creative power of the Universe, inwardly to his own happiness and outwardly to the happiness of others, a revealer and translator of beauty, and truth, inherent in Nature and Humanity."
Of all the arts, Music is the most universal and least sensual in its appeal. If painting is two-dimensional, sculpture three, one can say music is four-dimensional having its basic on tone, colour, rhythm and melody. The artist and the listener are free of the bonds of time and the logic of circumstances. It is enjoying and creating beauty without responsibility. Really, there is no language for sounds or music. Yet it is the most universal language. "Sounds with significance is language, but music exploits the aural possibilities of pure sound, signifying nothing logical, but carrying aesthetically great and emotionally poignant meaning". Hence, the appeal of music is more intellectual and abstract than in the other Fine Arts. It is so curious to notice that all "musical compositions are edifices which exist transiently in time" - which are mainly musical ideas and essences internally related to each other and no more. "This objectless realism of sounds, irrelevant to anything but its own internal relations, is surprising in its emotional effect on the listener". Music can express the whole gamut of all emotions. Walter Tater says, "All arts constantly aspire towards the condition of Music", meaning while in the other sister arts it is possible to detach form from matter, all art especially music, is an attempt to break the detachment. In all great art, the end is inseparable from the means. In music the great artists have put into sound a hearing which echoes their own meaning of life. Music has, more than any other art, the infinite capacity to express to thousands of listeners, in a thousands different accents, in an intimate but irresponsible manner, what will be otherwise incommunicable.
Roger Fry says, "Art is a biological blasphemy" in the sense that it panders to the sense of the beautiful and is otherwise of no use. Is it really so? The exercise of any creative faculty is a biological function. It is a venue for the release of powerful and delectable emotional energy, which is again Man's self-assertive and perpetuating instinct, later in so many, at play. " Man does not live on bread alone". Of course, society in all ages and conditions has encouraged any workman who performs a useful function. But more than merely living, the spiritual hunger of a man gives birth to the unusual power to feel and the passion to create. Art is the result. In other words, the world of the artist is a richer dream, as it were, of experience, where the only reality is for the artist that it is aesthetically convincing and enjoyable. To this extent he is not a mere copyist of Nature or Humanity. With the technique and resources of his medium he expresses, in the phrases and idiom peculiar to it his imaginative reaction to some aspects of them.
This bifocal vision of Art has at all times produced what is commonly called "Commercial Art and Art for its own sake". Commercial art is that which has always a reference to the requirements of society. A painter paints a picture with the idea of selling it. The more the artist bridges in his products, the gap between what he years to produce and what the then society demands, the more commercial, his art becomes. But this pragmatic view of art has always been thought of at a lower evaluation by the higher conception, namely, that art should be indulged in for its own sake. Great artists have always been people whose souls were thoroughly unfettered by the present dreamers and visionaries of no use to anyone but to themselves. Hence it is that one sometimes finds such artists thoroughly unworldly, impractical and contributing nothing to the schematic efficiency of life. Apart from its commercial use, art fulfils a higher purpose. By intelligently educating the latent aesthetic sense, it is a means to a higher exaltation of the human spirit and an expression' of this ecstatic state of the soul. Besides, it uplifts the souls of all with its contagion thus unifying all into one. Clive Bell says on Art, "It is in fact a necessity to and a product of the spiritual life." Tolstoy also says, "it is a means of union among men, joining together in the same feelings and indispensable for the life, and progress towards the well-being of the individuals arid humanity". This double-edged view of aesthetic creation gradually merges into the two schools of thought, namely, Classicism and Romanticism. Ever since the beginning of the history of art, there have been two undecided and embittered sections of opinion regarding the aesthetic process of producing works of art, the Classical and the Romantic. It is a distinction between Reason and Emotion, Intellect and Imagination, in a crude way between Form and matter.
The Classicist is one who is concerned more with form than with matter. he imposes a voluntary conscious and rational control on the imagination and strives at a selective and chiseling ideal, making for simplicity and severity. His mission is to make the familiar charming, give novelty to things of everyday life. He has the peculiar gift of retaining freshness even while endlessly repeating the same theme or subject matter or himself. He is so good here because he expresses himself so well. It is no surprise therefore, that the whole absorbs the attention of the Classicist, more than the parts. But the worst of Classicism is that much of it looks like hackwork and mechanisation. At his best, he does not excite or thrill you. At his depths, he looks formal and sterile, dull and uninspired and lacking in emotional fire. He makes up in the unity, simplicity and austerity of the whole. One is sometimes, therefore, almost tempted to agree with the view that Classicism is negation repudiation and contradiction of the creative impulse.
The Romanticist, on the contrary, is one who believes more in intuition and inspiration and in the philosophy, "Better to have attempted and lost than not to have attempted at all". He subordinates reason and conscious design to imagination, thus caring less for the attribute of beauty and being interested more in the addition of the element of strangeness in all artistic organisation. He is interested more in saying or expressing something that is unfamiliar and strange rather than saying or expressing it well. The worst of Romanticism is that it results in the violently fantastic and bizarre. The romanticist is rich in emotional content and easily swept of f his own feet and gives you the suspicion that you cannot always be sure of him or that he is dependable. Thus what he lacks in structural unity, he makes up in the remarkable vigour and beauty of the parts but his merit far out-shines his weakness because his work is that of the unfettered creative impulse inherent in all humanity and satisfies the everlasting spiritual hunger of mankind. From there it is quite logical to infer that the classicist has greater chances of becoming a professional success than his opposite. The greatest art is that which is born of profound and powerful emotional inspiration, controlled selected and chiselled by the exercise of reason and giving us a unified and structural whole and achieving the union of vigour and beauty in the parts and exquisite attractiveness and appeal in the whole.
In short, the end of all art is to unite all in one common feeling. The use to which the individual puts his leisure is a key to knowing his cultural index and the arts constituting as they do, the playing time of the race indicate unequivocally, the quality and nature of its civilisation. All art is therefore a foretaste and an earnest of the future ideal state wherein we will all have a rational civilisation in which sensuous beauty, emotional delicacy and intellectual order will work together in harmony - a regimen for the conduct of the living, concerned with remediable evil and attainable good with happiness in this world and salvation in the next.
"A refined musical sensibility is the most civilising of educational instruments. A mind educated to musical form and an imagination refined to the finesse of musical emotion cannot remain completely gross in the contacts of life". (Edman). To conclude - in the end when all the nations of the earth are worn out in their fight for world-supremacy, when, there is a desperate cry for Universal Peace, Music will be the Messiah for the golden age, uniting all in one common language and religion of sound at once sensuous and intellectual, exciting to calm, stimulating to appeasement and marshalling all the powers for Goodness. Truth and Beauty to work in unison in a spontaneous, disciplined and organised manner, towards the achievement of the common weal of all mankind.
