In a development that has sent shivers of cultural ecstasy through the cognoscenti and baffled the philistines, the Indian musical colossus Ilaiyaraaja has reached his half-century. Not the man himself, you understand, but his entry into the British orchestral consciousness. A milestone that the stuffy, bow-tied denizens of our concert halls are celebrating with the fervour of a toddler discovering a hidden lolly jar.
Yes, dear reader, the maestro who has composed more film scores than the number of gin and tonics I have consumed this week (a staggering and frankly unprintable figure) is now being championed by the very orchestras that once looked upon anything beyond the Rhine with the suspicion of a duchess discovering a rat in the parlour. The London Symphony Orchestra, the Philharmonia, the BBC Concert Orchestra: they have all fallen under his spell. Their woodwinds now whisper ragas, their strings mimic the veena, and their percussionists have developed a worrying addiction to complex tala cycles.
But what, you may ask, has prompted this sudden embrace of global fusion? Is it a genuine recognition of his genius? A belated attempt to atone for the colonial pilfering of cultural artefacts? Or simply the desperate need for a new revenue stream now that the government has slashed arts funding to the bone? I suspect the latter, laced with a generous dollop of fashionable wokeness.
Ilaiyaraaja, the man who can compose a symphony in the time it takes me to polish off a bottle of Bombay Sapphire, has always operated in a realm beyond mere mortal understanding. His music is a tapestry of cosmic drones, rhythmic complexities that would give a quantum physicist a migraine, and melodies so achingly beautiful they could coax tears from a statue of Margaret Thatcher. Yet for decades, the West ignored him. Why? Because he made film music. The horror. The unadulterated snobbery.
Now, the very same institutions that sneered at Bollywood are falling over themselves to commission new works. It is enough to make a satirist weep into his pint of Shiraz. The BBC Proms, that bastion of musical orthodoxy, has programmed his works alongside the usual dead German composers. The Albert Hall will soon echo with the sounds of a Carnatic violin battling a cello for supremacy, while a droning tambura provides the backdrop for a full brass section. It will be magnificent, cacophonous, and entirely beyond the comprehension of the tweed-clad audience sipping their interval Chardonnay.
But here is the rub. Ilaiyaraaja is not some exotic pet to be trotted out for liberal guilt. His fusion is not a polite handshake between cultures; it is a full-frontal assault. His music demands surrender, not appreciation. It does not whisper; it declares. It is the sound of a subcontinent that refuses to be a footnote in the history of classical music.
I can only hope that this newfound British enthusiasm endures beyond the current season of cultural hand-wringing. Let us not reduce his genius to a trendy tick-box exercise. Let us instead embrace the glorious, messy, transcendent chaos of a man who can make a thousand instruments sound like one voice. And if that means enduring the sight of a stern-faced conductor trying to keep time to a 17-beat cycle, so be it. It is a small price to pay for a glimpse of the divine.
Now, if you will excuse me, I have a date with a neglected piano and a bottle of something Scottish. The fusion begins at home.
