CELEBRITY COLUMN | STRIKE A CHORD: ‘Don’t reduce music to just another academic pursuit’, writes Musician Vishal Mishra

It is extremely disheartening to see how young musicians these days are keen on going to music schools for the status or mere experience of it without even knowing why they want to go there and what they want out of it in the first place! Often, music to most Indian kids starts off as mandatory evening or weekend sessions to keep them culturally rooted or just occupied. Sadly, very few of them grow up to realise that they need to break out of their habitual pattern of imitating and discover their own voice!

In the long run, what this psyche really does to you is that it makes you want to pursue an idea of something rather than the reality of it. So, when you are at that junction where you need to stop mimicking and really start reaching into your own voice, you’re blank because you have never explored yourself and seen how music is inside of you. This is what happens when music is solely an academic pursuit to you.

To complement this mistake, music these days is barely aesthetic and is pro-technology, with intellectual details, complex layering, etc. that we rarely come across anybody talking about how satisfying it is to see any music as the musician’s form of expression. When was the last time you heard somebody who finds real joy in the simplicity and experience of music? This is not just in the classical world but almost every genre of music. It isn’t bad but if enthusiasts are constantly exposed only to the academic details of music like theory, perfection in performance, tonal quality, posture, technical expertise, etc. without showing them the grander picture of all these being tools of expression, musicians will fail to observe and appreciate aesthetic beauty in music.

If a musician isn’t allowed to discover music and is always only taught to execute or perform, this is as good as any other academic pursuit! Personally, I am not trained professionally, but I can play around 21 instruments, understand ragas and write music. One needs to be good at what one does. If you get someone to guide you it’s great but if you can do it by yourself, then I feel it works out better, especially for me. I practise music for 14 hours a day. I believe whatever you learn yourself, sticks with you forever.

The industry today is so fluid and demanding that I agree that it is necessary to keep reinventing yourself, but not to forget that music at the end of the day is your form of expression and life, not just a style statement.

Where musicians voice their thoughts about matters close to their hearts