There is nothing quite like the December season in Chennai when it celebrates its classical music and dance. There is so much happening in the city ? you simply can?t keep track!
You not only have concerts and dance performances but also talks and walks on music and dance. These frenetic activities are all conducted by individual initiative and by organisations (sabhas). There is virtually no government support. There are about 200 organisations hosting about 3,000 programmes. They are all parallel self-contained events. Usually there are free concerts from morning to noon, and ticketed ones in the evening.
The Music Academy is the premier and the most prestigious organisation in the city. It was inaugurated in 1928 and held its first conference in 1929. It confers the title ?Sangita Kalanidi? every year to a Carnatic vocalist or instrumentalist and this is considered the ultimate in all awards a musician can get.
Throughout the 1940s and 1950s several sabhas were launched, but the 1970s saw the real boom in sabha culture. The new sabhas also started conducting festivals in December which spread the season all over the city with hundreds of performances at the same time.
With such an explosion of culture the December Season has grown far beyond December, events starting sometime in November spilling over to February. Conducting the festival is a logistical nightmare. It requires a lot of hard work and tremendous management skills.
Take the case of the Music Academy. N Murali, president of Music Academy (who has brought in his decades of experience in running the Hindu ) says, ?Every year we start on December 15 and end on January 1. We have five concerts a day. The first slot is given to veterans and the former to Sangita Kalanidhis. Then it is sub juniors and juniors. The evening and night concerts are allotted to the popular musicians who have evolved from these junior slots. We try to expand the scope by bringing in musicians from other states as well. We also have to balance vocal and instrumental music in all the slots.?
?Sub juniors are moved to junior slots after five years. If they do not make it in five years, they are out. The Academy does not usually fast track,? adds Murali. ?Slot selection, the most important process, has to be as transparent as possible,? he says.
Unless one gets a slot in the Academy, the chances of one making it as a musician are remote. A selection committee goes through this process.
The Academy faces a serious problem in that it has to give tickets to its 1,500 members (almost the number of seats in its auditorium) and therefore has very little flexibility in ticket sales. People are known to line up the previous night to purchase tickets for their favourite concerts. This year the ticketed sales started and closed in half an hour and rumour has it that there were fisticuffs.
The Academy has tried to screen the concerts live in its mini hall. It is standing room only there as well. So how does the Academy get its income? How has it managed to improve the infrastructure in the last six years? Conduct a dance festival in January? And start a music school for advanced students among a whole lot of related activity? Certainly not by ticket sales during the season.
The season is more or less supported by sponsors and advertising supplements. HCL?s Shiv Nadar gave the Academy R1 crore last year year. L Sabaretnam, president, Karthik Fine Arts, which is a relative new comer having been established in the 70s , says they have 500 members who are entitled to two tickets costing R1200 during the season.
?We collect R6 lakh from this. The rest of the expenses are all covered by sponsors. Corporates are more than willing to contribute. It is also part of their CSR activities. We get around R20 lakhs from sponsors, ? he informs.
Karthik Fine Arts? festival goes on for 47 days with 1,200 artists performing (including Tamil plays). Sabaretnam too brings in years of management experience with him.
It may be relatively simple for the market leaders like the Music Academy, Krishna Gana Sabha, Narada Gana Sabha and Karthik Fine Arts to find sponsors.
There are smaller sabhas which conduct five-day festivals, collect about R5 lakhs, spend R2.5 lakhs and survive the rest of the year. They are the ones who really have to sweat it out. More than 10 sabhas are supported single handedly by the city?s largest textile retailer Nalli Kuppuswamy Chetty. Businessman Vijay Kumar Reddy is another generous patron.
Come to think of it, where else will advertisers find a truly middle class and upper middle class (and increasingly the affluent NRI crowd ) in such concentration for nearly a month?
The local economy also booms during the season. You can?t find call taxis, hotel rooms or tailors. Catering sector flourishes satisfying hungry audiences in various sabhas. Every hall ? big or small gets booked for programmes. Marriage halls too are now blocked by sabhas.