The interview which appears below was originally published in Nasreen Munni Kabir's book, A.R. Rahman: The Spirit of Music. ©The rights to this material are reserved to the owner. If you have any concerns or comments, please send an email to info@rahmaniac.com.
NMK: I hear there is now a Symphony Orchestra of India, which was founded in 2006 in Mumbai.
A.R. Rahman: Yes. The majority of people who play there are from Kazakhstan. But they’re developing local talent too.
NMK: Do you interact with the KM students?
A.R. Rahman: I do, but I don’t think I’m a good teacher. A lot of students learn about music through analyzing my work. I hold Q&A sessions with every batch of students. They ask me career questions and we discuss various compositions.
NMK: It’s great that KM can help develop the musicians of tomorrow. Do you think the recording technology of today can give the illusion it’s easy composing music?
A.R. Rahman: You can create music that isn’t passionate if you aren’t careful. If you play something and it’s bad, you know you can easily delete it. Technically it’s simple. So you don’t always put your full mind to composing. If I were to compose a tune on the piano and then record it onto tape, I know I’d think much harder about what I was doing. I would make sure that I wasn’t playing rubbish but something worth recording.
NMK: You mean technology makes things go faster, but not necessarily better.
A.R. Rahman: Right. It’s the same in so many fields, including photography. I was in Brussels once and a photographer was taking ages to take a picture of me. I asked him: “What are you doing?” He said: “This is film, sir. I need to think hard about how I compose the picture.” If he had a digital camera, I know he could just go “click click click” and sound like a crow. [both laugh]
NMK: The eclectic choice of sounds that you add to a song is fascinating—yet some directors say when the core melody is so wonderful, why not leave it alone? Why layer the song at all?
A.R. Rahman: You can go for a pure image, a literal image—A for apple, B for ball. Or you can add different textures to that image. This is true of most art forms, including painting or choreography. When the work is completed, it is often presented with much embellishment. I come from the old school in a way. I love melody, but pure melody doesn’t work for musical tastes today. Of course, you can just pick up a guitar or sit at a piano and sing a song—that always works in my opinion. But there’s also a way of creating a palette of sounds without compromising on the core melody. You want people to relate to melody and when you have a great melody and a sweeping harmony, you can help to hold attention by adding a driving rhythm. The rhythm is there for listeners who get restless and don’t necessarily enjoy pure melody.
As melody and harmony are everything in my work, I need to add texture through instrumentation and a variety of sounds. People think in multiple layers and we all have to multi-task. We watch a movie and send a text at the same time. When you layer a song, you can fully occupy the listener’s mind. When there are many musical elements on the track, it’s a way of seducing them: “Don’t listen to anything else… this is it.” [laughs]
NMK: Was the idea of texturing and layering deliberate choices from the start?
A.R. Rahman: Working within your own limitations can bring good results. I’m thinking of the great classical singer, Kumar Gandharva, who had lung cancer and needed surgery. This impacted his singing and as a result, he could not hold a note for long durations. So Kumar Gandharva sang in short musical phrases that were powerful and brilliant. He developed an extraordinary style out of his physical limitation. My limitations accidentally helped in the way that I approached composition in the early days. If I had the luxury of a full orchestra, I might have gone about composing in a traditional way, even if I hadn’t meant to. A full orchestra would have given me the choice of many instruments and musicians. But I was producing music in my studio at home and needed to use whatever was available to me and make it work to the advantage of the composition.
When I ran out of recorded material while composing a song—say I wanted the flute playing extended at a certain point, but the flute-player had gone home—so to fill the absence of the flute and yet continue in the same musical thinking, I would add another instrument. This became a pattern and a style that people seemed to accept. Now life has come full circle. Thanks to the KM Music Conservatory, I hope in the near future we’ll have a youth orchestra in India. Things will be different soon.
NMK: Layering your music in the way you do may have come from necessity, but it seems to reflect your multi-layered personality.
A.R. Rahman: It’s the same with everyone. We all have many emotions inside of us.
NMK: True, but we can’t all compose good music!
A.R. Rahman: [smiles]
