Saturday, May 02, 2009

Some Telugu related links

A nice article on film singer A.M. Raja by J.K. Mohana Rao and Paruchuri Sreenivas. It has several downloadable songs in Telugu and Tamil; it seems A.M. Raja sang more songs in Tamil films than Telugu films. Here is apage of some of Raja's Telugu film songs from
oltelugusongs. Some of my favourites, eventhiugh they are not his best, are: chEyi chEyi kalupa rAvE, vennela pamdiri lOna. jAmi cheTTu mIdanunna jAti rAmachiluka possibly because the lyricsarein simple spoken Telugu. Paruchuri links to an AIR program of Savitri. There are some songs but more interesting to me are Savitri's conversationsabout her background and work.
The Seed transcriptUnlocking the Secrets and Powers of the Brain has a descrption of some of the views of Daniel Levitin, the author 'This is your Brain on Music':
"When a song comes on the radio that you haven’t heard since high school, you’re right there with it. You’re singing along. You remember all the nuances. The big story of memory revealed by music is that you tend to remember those things that you care about or that you have some deep emotional connection with. It can be a positive emotion, it can be negative, but there appear to be neurochemical tags associated with memories that are highly emotional. Those are the ones that get most accurately recorded in your memory and the ones that are easiest to draw out."

P.S. From the comments section in the article about A.M. Raja, there are interesting stories (from Rohiniprasad Kadavatiganti) on how A.M. Raja was chosen sing in the films 'vipranarayana' and 'missamma'. Apparently, around that time 'vipranarayana' was made Ghantasala used to smoke cigars and those days only one mike was used when recording duets. The female lead Bhanumati seems to have raised some objections. For the second film, the reasons seem to be due to prior contractual differences. In any case, A.M. Raja did a great job in both the films. I have also heard from a grandchild of Ghantasala that Ghantasala had two different families and a daughter from the second family is a bharatanatyam dancer.

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