English Note (by Madurai Mani Iyer) - String Quartet by Krish Ashok published on 2014-01-26T15:50:34Z The genius Carnatic vocalist Madurai Mani Iyer (1912-1968), possibly the greatest exponent of live improvisation in Carnatic classical music, popularized this "English Note" composed by Harikesanallur Mutthiah Bhagavathar (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fNjl5w8Prw0) to showcase his autodidactic (self teaching) talent in expanding beyond his strictly classical training. This piece was extremely popular with an independence era audience that felt pride in one of their own "getting" western music while no Englishman could perform a Thodi alapana. Obviously as a Indian classical musician, Mutthiah Bhagavathar only composed the main melody, an incredibly catchy and hummable tune that would have worked in the best courts of Vienna. But Western classical music is about harmony layered over the melody and I was surprised that no one had taken a crack at taking this really catch melody and writing a String quartet around it. There were some interesting challenges. Mani Iyer clearly did not keep harmony in mind when he wrote the piece so there are places where the melodic sequence presents quite a hard challenge to harmonize, but all in all, I think it turned out okayish. Again, I am quite an amateur and It will be great if more talented musicians take this melody and set it to even better background scores :) Genre quartet Comment by Pk Sridhar Simply beautiful 2016-11-08T13:53:59Z Comment by Subbaraman Krishnan This was composed by Shri Muthusami Dikshithar 2014-11-16T17:36:06Z Comment by Ganesh Shankar wow! 2014-07-15T03:13:04Z Comment by arcsun good ending 2014-02-16T17:05:40Z Comment by arcsun beautiful 2014-02-16T17:04:43Z Comment by arcsun wow 2014-02-16T17:03:46Z Comment by happy_as_a_baby Very good indeed. great talent you possess 2014-01-28T22:29:03Z Comment by shankarpnsn Is it just me or is it Tisram here ? 2014-01-27T16:07:07Z Comment by J Krishnamurthi beautiful 2014-01-27T07:34:35Z Comment by JagerMinister wowmax.. :) 2014-01-26T16:34:04Z Comment by Krishna Raj Lovely note, I say 2014-01-26T16:12:52Z