47 Carnatic musicians join hands for a peace anthem

Forty-seven Carnatic musicians have come together for an anthem,

Paramacharya’s Maithreem Bhajatha

. Conceptualised and executed by Sudha Ragunathan and S Mahathi, the anthem has been sung by popular names in the

Carnatic music

world, including S Sowmya, Sikkil Gurucharan, Gayathri Venkatraghavan, Malladi Brothers, and Abhishek Raghuram, among others, to spread the message of peace and positivity. “This is probably the first time so many Carnatic musicians have come together to record a song for peace. We thought Maithreem Bhajatha, which MS Subbulakshmi amma had rendered at the UN, would be apt for these uncertain times,” begins Mahathi.

So, how was it conceptualised? Sudha says, “Our form of

music

is not something that can be easily sung together. Each one has a unique voice texture. One of the first things we focused on is how to make it sound as one. Since it is a five-minute song, and we had 47 singers, we got five or six singers to sing each line. A lot of thought went into it as it had to sound right aesthetically. Considering the lockdown and the fact that we had to record our voices with our phones, I’m proud of this feat.”

Mahathi says it took nearly two weeks to do the framework. “We recorded the reference track, and once it was okayed, we recorded the video.” The song features Embar Kannan on violin, and Akshay Anantapadmanabhan and MT Aditya Srinivasan on percussion.