From the City’s trading floors to the Royal Albert Hall, a curious arbitrage is underway. While gilt yields wobble and the Bank of England frets over sticky inflation, a different kind of note is being struck. Ilaiyaraaja, the 80-year-old Indian composer with over 7,000 film scores to his name, has quietly been rewriting the rules of Western orchestration. His recent London concert, part of a global tour, has left British composers scrambling for their notebooks.
Let’s be clear: this is not cultural tourism. This is a structural shift in musical productivity. Ilaiyaraaja does not simply borrow from Western scales; he leverages them, hedges them with Indian ragas, and delivers an output that would make any FTSE 100 CEO weep. The man has composed more music than Mozart, Beethoven, and Bach combined, adjusted for lifespan. That is the kind of compound growth that should make a venture capitalist sit up.
The market for classical music has long been dominated by a cartel of European dead white males. But Ilaiyaraaja, who taught himself notation by studying Western scores in Madras, has cracked the code. His use of counterpoint in "Thalapathy" (1991) predates any such sophistication in mainstream Indian cinema. His harmonic progressions in "Thendral Vandhu" are a masterclass in tension and release, the kind of thing that would make Stockhausen consider a pivot to Chennai.
Yet the real story is fiscal. A single Ilaiyaraaja score, say for "Sagara Sangamam" (1983), contains enough musical ideas to fill a dozen Hollywood soundtracks. That is efficiency. That is the kind of resource allocation that would impress even the most hawkish Treasury mandarin. And he does it on a budget that would not cover the catering for a Hans Zimmer session.
British composers, accustomed to the steady dividends of the Romantic tradition, are now facing a liquidity crisis of inspiration. They have become complacent, relying on the same diminished sevenths and orchestral swells that have underpinned the BBC Proms for decades. Ilaiyaraaja offers a hostile takeover: a fusion of Carnatic rhythm cycles with Western chord structures, delivered at a pace that borders on the frantic.
Let us examine the balance sheet of his London debut. The audience, a mix of expat Tamils and curious westerners, witnessed a 45-minute orchestral suite that moved from the atonal to the ecstatic without a single credit default swap. The string section, mostly British, looked visibly strained as they attempted to navigate the microtonal bends of Ilaiyaraaja’s raga-based melodies. They were not used to such volatility.
The takeaway for the City? Musical monoculture is a bubble. The same way we once believed in the permanence of sterling or the infallibility of the property market, we believed Western classical music was the only game in town. Ilaiyaraaja has demonstrated that diversification pays. His portfolio of influences, from the baroque to the folk, from the spiritual to the cinematic, offers a hedge against creative stagnation.
Central bank policy should take note. Print less money and listen to more Ilaiyaraaja. His music is deflationary: it crams more value into each note. In a world of soaring government debt and anaemic growth, that is a sound investment.
British composers have two options: adapt or watch their market share erode. They could do worse than study Ilaiyaraaja’s opus. It is a masterclass in leverage, in taking a small set of resources and generating exponential returns. That is the bottom line.
And for those still sceptical: check the secondary market for his recordings. Limited edition vinyl of his 1980s Tamil film scores is now trading at a premium. That is real asset appreciation. The Maestro is not just redefining music. He is redefining value.
