GAYATHRI RAJAPUR KASSEBAUM, A TRIBUTE

 GAYATHRI RAJAPUR KASSEBAUM

(16^th MARCH 1938 TO 5^TH 0CTOBER 2020)

A TRIBUTE

(post by Madhavi Ramkumar)

photograph © Parvathi 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 11^th 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.”