GAYATHRI RAJAPUR KASSEBAUM
(16th
MARCH 1938 TO 5TH 0CTOBER 2020)
A TRIBUTE
(post by Madhavi Ramkumar)
Gayathri Rajapur Kassebaum, outstanding musician, consummate
gottuvadyam artiste, musicologist, academician and scholar, author and writer, meticulous,
loving, caring and giving guru, and wise, warm and wonderful human being,
passed away recently. Unswerving guru bhakthi, reverence for and fidelity to
tradition in Carnatic Music, and indefatigable enthusiasm and dynamism were the
hallmarks of her approach to music, rather than the pursuit of fame and
recognition. Her unassuming and gentle presence will be missed by everyone who
knew her and the music world is the poorer for her passing.
The following article, first published in the Friday Review
of The Hindu, Bengaluru, on March 11th 2011, is being reproduced
here as a tribute to Gayathri Rajapur Kassebaum.
A LUMINOUS LEGACY
-
Madhavi
Ramkumar
A priceless artefact in the
possession of Gayathri Rajapur Kassebaum is a gottuvadyam that the great master
Budalur Krishnamurthy Shastri once owned and constantly played. She believes
the instrument to be about a hundred years old, a living testament to her close
and long association with the guru under whom she learnt to play, first as a
student of the Central College of Carnatic Music, Chennai, in the fifties and
as a recipient of the Government of India scholarship thereafter. In a recent
interview she spoke of her experiences in India and abroad as musician,
academician, writer and teacher, all sustained by a quiet and abiding passion
for music.
Gayathri Kassebaum first took up
gottuvadyam as a subsidiary to her main subject, vocal music, but it soon
became her chief area of interest. “What sets the Budalur style apart is, I
think, the holding of the kattai – it’s a shorter one – and the meetu,” she
observes. “The methods he followed, except for the gottu, were based on and
similar to those of the veena, though you can tell the difference between the
instruments. His models were Karaikudi Sambasiva Iyer and his brother Subbarama
Iyer, but he developed his own style, a way of moving the left hand, with very
delicate gamakas and nuances which sound very much like singing,”
Gayathri obtained her Ph.D, in
ethnomusicology from the University of Washington, Seattle. “Since I was
abroad, I wanted to make the best of it, and the closest thing to Carnatic
Music was ethnomusicology. So I could teach, learn something and that is how I
became an ethnomusicologist,” she recalls. About the relationship between the
folk and classical traditions in India, she feels that a lot more research on
the topic is required. Author of ‘Bharatiya Sangita Darshana’, a book in
Kannada, her articles have been published in several journals including those
of the Asian Music Research Institute, the Music Academy, Madras, the Sangeet
Natak Academy, and in the Garland Encyclopaedia of World Music. The subjects
handled range from ‘Regional Music Traditions of Karnataka’ to ‘Ornamentation
in Okinawan Classical Singing’ and ‘A Method for Analysis for Gamaka in
Alapana’.
As a teacher and performer in
India and abroad, she observes, “In the west there is great attention to
detail. The sound system is very good – they check it out an hour before, and
the audience is punctual and attentive. But the auditoriums are set up for
western classical music – in India there is more intimacy, the audience is more
vocal in appreciation.” Exposure to other systems of music such as Japanese,
Korean, Arabic and Persian, she feels, would expand perceptions. “African
percussion is fantastic, Indonesian and Javanese music with its gongs and bells
which create a special atmosphere is very interesting. We should be proud of
our music but must have an open mind.” Regarding the status of Indian classical
music abroad, she opines that it “is highly evolved, with a literature, which
is rare. Instrumental music and North Indian classical music are probably more
easily acceptable, but there is more acceptance for Carnatic Music now, and it
is highly regarded in academic circles.”
The gottuvadyam, says Gayathri
Kassebaum, is a beautiful and very ancient instrument and deserves more
popularity. “It is a very difficult instrument to stick to – in the beginning
it is difficult but in the advanced stages, veena is more difficult than
gottuvadyam, in my opinion. I would always advise gottuvadyam students to learn
singing – and then they can appreciate the nuances of the instrument. This is
true for all instruments, but especially so for gottuvadyam. It is easy to
produce apaswarams, more obviously than in veena, so that also discourages
people. I think there has to be a campaign such as the one the Department of
Kannada and Culture had for a year, for rare instruments. Musicians could also
encourage their students to take up gottuvadyam. It has been a rare instrument
for a long time, but that could change.”
Gayathri Kassebaum believes that
what she learnt under the great stalwarts like Musiri, Budalur and T. Brinda
who taught at the Central College was “a whole way of behaving towards music,
the gurus, and even the musical instrument. It was a guru-shishya relationship
that was not taught but communicated.” She has donned diverse roles in her long
musical career spanning about six decades, but she concludes thus: “To tell you
the truth, my heart and my soul is in making music, performing and playing
gottuvadyam.”
