When someone asked Carnatic vocalist T.M. Krishna why Hindustani music produced few child prodigies unlike its southern counterpart, he is said to have replied that Hindustani musicians had perforce to spend a longer gestation period than Carnatic musicians before they ascend the concert stage, or words to that effect.
The trouble with child prodigies is that not all of them are indeed prodigies. Research cited in his books by the recently deceased neurologist Oliver Sacks (1933-2015) has suggested for instance that certain parts of the brain are better developed in children with especial musical ability.
Sacks also provided evidence based on experiments to show that children exposed since the age of four continuously to music and musical training will in time have similarly developed brain parts (as well as musical ability).
This is probably scientific proof of Chitravina N. Narasimhan’s theory that any child can be made into a prodigy through systematic, scientifically developed methods of musical training. Narasimhan, in fact. taught his own children Ravikiran, Shashikiran and Kiranavali as well as their cousin Ganesh and other children using his methods and made them concert-ready at a very young age.
Another interesting discovery neuroscience has made about the relationship between the human brain and musical ability is that different areas of the brain are responsible for different aspects of music. For example, perfect pitch and musicality could be two different things; in fact, you can have perfect sruti and not be very musically gifted and vice versa. Natural rhythmic perfection is again controlled by a different zone. (Doesn't that explain much of what passes for Carnatic music)?
I recently experienced this phenomenon personally when a brilliant composer, no doubt a prodigy, demonstrated his composition comprising all the 72 melakarta ragas, which takes under seven minutes to render.
Amazingly he uses the name of each raga in the minute section depicting it. Swara Veenapani — for that is the name of this unusual composer — has won the approval of many senior musicians for his work, and even did a demonstration at the Music Academy, Chennai, last year, with the Hyderabad Brothers singing his compositions.
Veenapani, who has been a theatre professional and written award-winning lyrics for films, demonstrates his compositions playing them on a Casio keyboard. The interesting part of the demonstration is, when he sings along, the raga names flow in perfect melakarta order, but while the keyboard gets the variations of the ragas right, they all sound like the same raga in his voice.
(The writer is Editor, Sruti magazine)
