Raja

The king of South Indian film music.

Many people have agreed this: "If we list out songs of Telugu and Tamil film music of the past 30 years, that are 'good' to 'very good', 'melodious' to 'memorable'... more than 80% of them will be tunes composed by Ilayaraja."

There is a lot in his music. I can hear (any) one song composed by Ilayaraja, 20 times at a strech and still don't feel bored of it.. in fact I will look forward to hearing the song 20 times more, at the same strech. I have a keen ear for his music. By hearing even a small bit of a composition for the first time, I can identify if it is by Ilayaraja (seems he composed music for more than 1000 movies - so a high probability of being correct is anyway there).

I don't like to compare Ilayaraja with anyone else or vice-versa. Everyone has a unique style.

However, I have some beliefs, especially about music: To show how light music (including film music with a lot of classical touch) should be sung, God has created Ghantasala (and P Suseela) for Telugu and Rafi (and also Lata) for Hindi. To show how Carnatic classical music should be sung, He created M Balamuralikrishna. To show what a flexible voice means, He created SP Balasubrahmanyam. To show how violin should be played, L Subramanian was created. Similarly Ilayaraja is created as His masterpiece of a film music director. Ilayaraja is God of Indian (South Indian, if you want) film music. Unlike his closest competitors who seem to have already peaked, Ilayaraja has quantity and quality - not any more on comparison.

Just because I am "now" hearing the song: lets have a word about "Sivapujaku chigurinchina siri siri muvva" from Swarnakamalam. In this song, the two completely different personalities of Venkatesh and Bhanupriya are portrayed by the tunes of their respective portions of the lyrics. The song gives the feeling of two different currents of breeze touching a person sitting on the beach - it doesn't strike as two different waves from the sea!!
It will be a sin to end any talk on Swarnakamalam without a mention of Seetarama Sastry. It is only because what I mentioned were God's creations for music world that I didn't mention about Sastry above. I feel that he and Veturi form God's example of how film-song lyrics should be written. More on this duo later. Lets remember the lyrics of the song "Sivapujaku" and thank God (or K Viswanath?) for presenting Seetarama Sastry to Telugu film world.