[Music thread - Carnatic] Time on my hands and not much to do. So here we go with a carnatic music thread. I will talk about compositions in the raga MUKHARI

Mukhari, for some reason, has been known as a soga ragam, a sad ragam, azhugai ragam. You get the drift right? The truth is that Mukhari is far beyond that. It has various moods

SRJ in one of his lec dems sings a Tyagaraja krithi in Mukhari and asks, "Where is the shoka rasam in this? It is just adbutha". So we will not bother about this aspect at all in this thread.

For beginners, the feel of Mukhari and Bhairavi are very similar and for a long time I had problems in distinguishing between them. You can also add Huseni to this mix. Later I realized the personality of Mukhari clearly

Enough of the preamble. Let us get on with the show. Tyagaraja was a master in handling the rakti ragas. I told this in a thread I did earlier. And I say it again now. I will first play some amazing Mukharis of Tyagaraja before turning the spotlight on to other composers

We start with 'sangeetha sastra gnanamu'. Sung here by Nedanuri. This was the krithi that SRJ sung to show that Mukhari cannot be shackled only to shoka rasa

Next is the outstanding 'muripemu' sung by MS. This krithi describes the beauty of Tiruvaiyaru and shows us the poetic prowess of Tyagaraja.

In this krithi Tyagaraja asks Rama if he is not smiling slightly with pride seeing the beauty of Tiruvaiyaru.

And what a wonderful charanam this krithi has, 'eedu leni malayamarudhamu che koodina thatamandhu', lending itself to the perfect neraval as many Tyagraja krithi charanams do.

And MS ofcourse was a master of neravals and as usual she lovingly renders the neraval.

Tyagaraja's devotion to Rama was matched by his devotion to Rama bhaktas. He wrote 'Prahaladha Bhakthi Vijayam'. Here he is telling us how fortunate Sabari was. 'enthani ne varninthunu sabari bagyamu' Musiri Subramaniya Iyer

Musiri's pleading tone lent emotion to many songs. This krithi too benefited from it.

Also Musiri's singing was filled with sangatis, giving the krithi a gravitas. Even in this krithi you can see how one sangati follows another in a wonderful order, enhancing our listening experience.

Next up is 'karubaru' Here by the youngster Aishwarya Vidya Raghunath

'karubaru' is probably a morphing of the Urdu word 'karobar' meaning administration. Here Tyagaraja talks about the administrative capacity of Rama.

My favorite rendition is by Brinda Mukta. Unfortunately that is not available on YT. I couldn't find the MS rendition either.