Such modern system should have been in place at Radio Nepal as early as the 1960s when Nepal launched its Panchayat Period of intense propaganda and populist publicity drives on the air. This is what I noted in the beginning of this series, but the same old weary paraphernalia remained in place at the official levels, and only much later the worn-out and obsolete wares were replaced, and not by the government but by the private sector. His Majesty’s Government of Nepal chose to remain without imagination and vision, much less plans and implementation. Therefore, maestro Amber Gurung’s dream of forming even a modest orchestra – forget about a philharmonic symphony – of fifteen or twenty well-trained violinists, cellists and supporting musicians, or at least a chamber orchestra of five or six instrumentalists and singers playing Nepali folk or world music has still remained unfulfilled.
Even then, and even if Kathmandu and other urban centers of Nepal saw modern recording studios and CD production in place in the 1980s, what about dealing with the dearth of professional musicians and wide-ranging instruments that still plague the supply and demand situation?[break]
I feel it was Gopal Yonzon who knew best the acuity of the situation Nepali music and its creative artistes were going through for decades. So he made plans to remedy the backwardness of the arts which also had the viability of being a commercial industry. Sometime in 1985, he and I had a brief conversation on Durbar Marg in which he outlined two plans he had on his mind. In the following narration, I can see him as someone for reformation of Nepali music, then its transformation and modernization for his and each succeeding generation’s contemporaneousness in it.
First, he wanted to improve the Nepali sarangi string instrument by elongating its neck for some extra notes in the higher octave. He discussed the ideal wood for it – spruce, oak, mahogany, dhuppi pine, sal, sisou, agranth etc. He objected to the bastardized use of metal strings and violin bow used by the players of the day. He would revert to the traditional use of animal gut strings and horsehair for bow. His updated version would not be like the elaborate Indian prototype but should be in its crudest best, reflecting rural and pastoral Nepal, and exuding genuine Nepali folk sounds. The gut strings, horsehair and proper wood choice would greatly help in maintaining the sarangi’s true Nepali airs. As a finest sarangi player when in Darjeeling, he knew what he was talking about.
The second plan would be to train young Nepali musicians in varied instruments. Meanwhile, he also thought of importing those fine young musicians and chorus singers he heard were being produced in Darjeeling for the sound recording studio he was designing. He was readying the upper floor of his house in Basundhara for this purpose, soundproofing the interior and equipping it with synthesizers and keyboards he brought from Pakistan, speakers from Hong Kong, and preamps from Singapore. All these would be compatibly fitted in for a professional recording studio with matching sound system in his haven.
“What about musicians immediately needed for your recording schedules?” I asked.
“It’ll be better to have musicians from Calcutta for those instruments not played here,” he said.
“But most of Calcutta’s musicians, even the ones we knew in the old days, are in Bombay’s film studios. They’ve been there for years,” I said.
“Yes, true. But there are younger ones, too. Visiting Kathmandu would be a nice experience for them, and they’re likely to receive good coaching from me.”
In fact, Gopal also mentioned bringing in musicians from Bangladesh. “I’ll have players from Dhaka,” he said. He then outlined the budget, logistics of travel and lodging, recording schedules, the kinds of music he would have stored in his archives, and so on.
Illustration: Sworup Nhasiju
Sadly, Gopal passed away too quickly, well before his time. When I visited the house on the 13th day of his passing, his beloved studio floor was being cleared away for more room for the Tamang Lamas’ long puja to be held in funerary rites for his departed soul. The studio’s equipment and components were packed in boxes and cartons and placed in corners. Soon the house was also sold, and Gopal’s remaining family moved elsewhere.
“Once more – with feelings this time!”
Mr. Amber Gurung used to cite the above passionate exhortation made by Arturo Toscanini when we rehearsed for his songs and music in Darjeeling and Kathmandu. The Italian conductor of philharmonic orchestras was the Mussolini of the then classical music world for his infamous slave-driving attitude and severe practices whereby he drove his musicians to the end of their tether. Even then, he was generous enough to pay his compliments: “Ladies and gentlemen, that was a glorious rendition of Eroica! But let’s do it once again, shall we? And this time, with feelings!”
It is the heartfelt “feelings” in music, more especially in singing, that are most at stake today in Kathmandu with the arrival of digital tracking ease and convenience with multi-channel choices through ultramodern technology that are available for sound recording finesse at its finest in any commercially competitive studio.
For a layman on the street, such terminology-laden description can be even more confusing. So, simplified explanation must be resorted to, which goes in the following ways:
In the old days of vintage recording style, there used to be what we called assembly recording in the studio, also known as ensemble recording. In it, everybody – the principal singer/s, music director, concertmaster, arranger, the main orchestra, the side players or accompanists, the percussion section – gathered around the available microphones (usually only two or three) and rehearsed and recorded collectively. If anybody missed a beat or went off-key, the sound recording engineer in the next booth flashed on the red light, and everybody stopped. Then the green light was switched for another “take” or “retake.” This process repeated until the desired result was believed to have been achieved, consensually, and the particular tape was approved of as the version accepted by all parties concerned.
Though clumsy, time-consuming, boring and slow in future retrospections, this kind of assembly recording had human touches and humane airs inside the studio and around the recording microphones. There were many moods and various appearances and mixed personalities present. If the accordionist’s socks smelled awfully, the clarinetist’s cheap aftershave lotion spread a certain fragrance while the flutist smelled of cigarette smoke and the tabala player’s cud-chewing of jarda-and-jafrani paan exuded another perfume while the guitarist still carried the rancid hangover of last night. Different pomades, hair oil and deodorants countered sweaty bodies and unwashed skins. Clothes and dresses also added to the colorfulness of the assemblage; the lady singer’s printed pink sari and the blue and white polka-dot shirt of the male voice, the flowing white kurta of the tabala player and the magenta jacket of the guitarist all provided visages of shapes, shades and hues.
Now I believe the scenario has completely changed. Music is tracked in sections individually or in isolation, and singing is done in camera.
The tabala player comes in and rolls thirty beats as required and leaves the studio, collects his payment and is out of the premises in half an hour. The same with the guitarist; he plays the prescribed thirty bars and then disappears. And so forth and so on with the string section, the percussionists, and the chorus singers. This is fragmented recording, the musicians outsourced individually or in clusters at different times. Then the solitary singer is finally in, wraps the headphones around her ears for the harmonium lead and tabala beats and sings and then leaves. These strands are then spliced and superimposed on each other by the sound technicians to produce the final cut of the song.
The human touches, the cacophony, and the confusion of the old are in this way all eliminated by impersonal modern technical wizardry.
No wonder, Asha Bhonsle has lamented on occasions, “Oh, I miss the old studio recordings with orchestras and technicians, the small talks and tea breaks, and all!” or “These days I sing to the walls” of the recording studio.
Ranjit Gazmer is in my house while visiting Kathmandu. We talk about, well, music. One day, he told me about sharing his nostalgia and reminiscences of the old methods of music recording with his younger players in one studio in Mumbai. They listened to him, grimacing and gesturing in disbelief, and one of them finally said, in Hindi, “Yeh Nepali buddha lafada lagata hai!”
“Peter, I felt so sad and surprised that day!” was all Ranjit could say in the end.
Then, while writing this series, I happened to read a mid-August issue of Annapurna Post and its last-page interview segment. In it, Deep Shrestha described his confusion when he was required to face the lone microphone all by himself, all alone, in a state-of-the-art recording booth. This was a new experience for this veteran singer and composer who had been attuned to the old school of assembly recording with us at Radio Nepal. He said he lost his mooring in the new world of digital recording with multi-tracking channels where the singer becomes a solitary figure in a soulless and lifeless studio.
“We used to record just like that – ‘dyam-dyam’ – in those days,” he said to the interviewer. “The new system of doing things left me confused and speechless for quite sometime in the modern studio booth.”
This then is the real artistic casualty in today’s impersonal techno recording where singers and musicians are separated and isolated from each other. Almost reduced to little better than bathroom crooners, today’s lonely singers feel deprived of the collective feelings of the old, rendering them null and void in the absence of proximity, personal touches and professional engagements among those gathered for a common cause. The primitive one-track system of those days notwithstanding, the old system engendered kindred spirits and togetherness which have been obliterated in today’s techno-mechanical world of fast delivery and inanimate and robotic efficiency. Nepali music’s old saudade and soulfulness are thus mere memories today.
So, once a Nepali singer of today is pushed into a computerized solitary confinement, the barren gulag is emptied of any feeling and passion during the recording of the song. The absence of genuine feelingfulness is the biggest tragedy in today’s Nepali music-making ethos. That each word of the song and its melodic flow in an accompanying orchestra of the old system almost always escapes the singer today and this is the greatest sadness in today’s Nepali music. The studio may have the ideal Surround Sound ambience of the day’s super technology, but the musical-literary multiple effects of the creative work is almost always lost on the singer and his lone rendition of it.
To be continued in the next edition of The Week.
The author is copy chief at The Week, and can be contacted at pjkarthak@gmail.com