General expodseven change the raga-form. Hence the traditional condemnation of
learning pieces not from the mouth of the teacher, but from a book.
The preservation of songs in editions with notations is no doubt
welcome and represents an important and immense piece of work,
whose execution again depends on large-scale help from States, uni-
versities and cultural organizations. I have already spoken of the gi-
gantic work which Mr. Chinnaswami Mudaliar did; the rescue of the
unpublished part of this script would form a boon to South Indian
music. Similarily from Subbarama Dikshitar’s preface to his published
work, we gather he had worked up the material for several other vo-
lumes, covering the corpus of compositions of other masters, and the
huge manuscripts of these too remain to be unearthed. In Poona today,
a versatile musician and patron, Sardar Majumdar has, during his long
life, collected some tens of thousands of songs and the young Poona
University is too poor to accept the gift of this stupendous material and
face the responsibility of printing it.
This question of books brings us to that of the library. The paucity
of musical research has already been touched upon, as also the unsatis-
factory conditions regarding music publishing. I would refer here only
to one point which has always occurred to me but which has not been
heeded by those who are in charge of music institutions, or have to
build up a library for such institutions. More than printed materials,
it is records of music that should constitute the major part of a music
library. None of the libraries in our music institutions is equipped in
this line. In fact, with the availability of the new tape-recording facili-
ties, we should be able, if the necessary help is forthcoming, to embark
on a complete recording programme, a work which is closely bound
up with the preservation of our music tradition already adverted to.
A certain number of classical songs are no doubt available in gramo-
phone records, but not all of them are renderings by greater masters.
A catalogue of these, to which I too made a small contribution, has
been prepared for you by my friend Mr. Alain Danielou. The gramo-
phone companies had, to begin with, noteworthy classical renderings
but of these even the master records had been subsequently destroyed.
For the policy of the gramophone companies subsequently developed
a new commercial outlook which had a bad effect on our art. On the
one hand, they began to employ for renderings a bizarre background
of a variety of instruments, and on the other, flooded the market with
cheap cinema tunes and song hits; thus joining hands with the cellu-
loid, the wax corrupted the ears of the people. There is thus today no
possibility of depending on commercial firms in the matter of recording