As a child, he had already mastered the complicated 72-Melakartha system of Ragas. He created new Ragas like Lavangi, Mahati, Manorama, Mohanangi and many more. They banned him from festivals and venues. The Carnatic community ostracised him, and his contemporaries distributed pamphlets among audiences at Madras Sabhas, calling him a madcap. He set to tune ragas with only four notes, named them, composed songs in them, and sang them at prestigious festivals and venues. The world of Carnatic music is as politicised as any other. Setting to tune hundreds of works, he alone revived hundreds of forgotten songs and grew the repertoire of the Carnatic genre. The path-breaking rebelįrom the 1960s to the ’80s, BMK invested himself into renewing the works of poet saints like Tallapaka Annamacharya, Bhadrachala Ramadasu, his maternal grandfather Prayaga Rangadasu, Sadasiva Brahmendra and the Kerala king composer Maharaja Swati Thirunal. And a decade later, in 1987, he won a National Award for best music direction for the film Madhawacharya. In 1976, he bagged the National Award for best playback singer for his work in the Kannada film Hamsageete (1975). As an actor, music director or playback singer, he contributed to over 30 films in Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam and Sanskrit – he even essayed the role of an aged musician in the Malayalam movie Sandine Kendina Sindooram. Listen to one of his more popular numbers from the film:įrom then on, his ties with cinema grew deeper. Playing the role of sage Narada, BMK sang his own songs in the film. In 1967, he debuted on the silver screen in the famous mythological Telugu film Bhakta Prahlada, starring Anjali Devi and SV Ranga Rao. While BMK kept his passion for Carnatic music alive, he also gave in to the lure of popular culture. His swift growth was watched by all the legends of the era. In 1944, he accompanied legendary Carnatic vocalists such as Ariyakudi Ramanuja Iyengar and Chitoor Subramaniaya Pillai on the viola. BMK was a star performer everywhere.įrom early concert calendars and show bills, we get to know that BMK, at the age of 13, gave more than 200 concerts a year. Every village had Sabhas, temples, and organisations that generously patronised music. The coastal districts of today’s Andhra Pradesh, which were once a part of the erstwhile Madras Presidency, were a hotbed of classical music and theatre patronage at the time. No other child could have been as busy as BMK was in his teenage years. She is said to have carried BMK in her arms and predicted that the child would one day be a genius in the world of music. There BMK’s singing floored the legendary singer Bangalore Nagarathnammal, who constructed the samadhi of Tyagaraja. The following year, in January, BMK accompanied his guru to the annual commemorative concerts in honour of Tyagaraja in Thiruvaiyaru in Tamil Nadu’s Thanjavur district. ![]() ![]() Invitations to concerts began pouring in. Listening to the young Muralikrishna there, the great Harikatha exponent Musunuri Suryanarayana Bhagawatar gave him the title of “Bala”.īala Muralikrishna was to remain the musical genius’ name for the rest of his life.īMK debuted on All India Radio on July 2, 1941, and became an icon overnight. Pantulu decided to debut his protégé at a music festival that he conducted in the memory of Susarla in Vijaywada on July 18, 1940. It was under Pantulu’s tutelage that Murali blossomed. Pantulu belonged to the “Shishya Parampara” (student lineage) of the saint poet Tyagaraja (1767-1847), one of the famous trinity of Carnatic composers, through Susarla Dakshinamurthi Sastri (1860-1917). Searching for a suitable guru, the father approached Parupalli Ramakrishnayya Pantulu (1883-1951) to accept eight-year-old Muralikrishna as his student. He dropped out after the fifth grade, at the behest of the teachers. Murali was admitted into a municipal school in Buckinghampet, but studies were never his strength. His father Pattabhiramayya was a skilled player of the flute, violin and veena, while his mother Sooryakantamma, daughter of the renowned composer Prayaga Rangadasu, was an excellent veena player.Īlthough music was a constant at their home, the father’s conservative Brahmin family always deemed it a “low habit”. He was 86.īalamurali Krishna was born on July 6, 1930, in the village of Shankaraguptam in the East Godavari district of coastal Andhra Pradesh. Mangalampalli Balamurali Krishna, the last of the great Carnatic musicians who preserved the grand Andhra tradition of vocalism, whose initials “BMK” alone evoked nostalgia and anecdotes among admirers, died in Chennai on Tuesday.
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