July 31, 2006

Idlebrain.com brings you a page from ilayaraja’s work. 'Hope' film director K Satish has given us a page from Ilayaraja’s compositions with the permission from the maestro. Ilayaraja also autographed on this page.

Here are the excepts from Satish interview where he elaborates his experience working with Ilayaraja -

Tell us about maestro's working style?
After watching the film, we were returning to his studio. Ilayaraja was talking about shots in the film. People normally talk about scenes, but he talked about visual shots. His memory is very powerful. When he agreed to do the film, he asked me to come to his studio at 6 am.

There is a portion in Prasad Labs, Chennai that is dedicated to Ilayaraja. Nobody touches it other than Ilayaraja. He has a keyboard and headphones. He takes a paper and pen and start writing some numbers while watching the reel. My film has no songs. It has only background music. Hope film has lot of scope for rerecording. He watches the film reel by reel. After watching a reel, he puts on his head phones and starts writing notes on the sheet by using numbers he noted down while watching the reel. After writing the notes, he walks through the hall to his office room. His assistant comes and starts dividing the notes instrument wise. He photo copies it and distributes it to all the musicians. They practice for 3-4 hours. After practice is over, Ilayaraja comes back composes the music using live orchestra. His memory is so powerful that he remembers everything in the reel and composes background music that matches the mood of the film frame to frame. Generally music directors use stopwatch to measure the length of a scene they record. Even the musicians does not even know what they are playing. They blindly follow the notes and perform. They will only understand it when they watch music on the screen. Ilayaraja completes his work by 9 pm in the night. 6 am to 9 pm are his working hours.

Another remarkable thing about maestro is that he mixes entire thing live. He does not leave anything for post editing. Our DTX mixing engineer Madhusudhan Reddy says that he wont touch any of Ilayaraja’s work while doing DTS mixing as he incorporates right levels while doing the rerecording.

Maestro is very systematic and he is very particular about minute details. Everything in his studio has to be in place. The pen, towel, tea cup, head phones etc are kept in the same position all the time. Even the amount of tea that is poured in cup is measured. The same person need to hand over the tea everyday.

Other articles on Ilayaraja:
Playback singer Usha about Ilayaraja
RS Balaji special on Ilayaraja