The Man who knew Sound

As I set out recording my weekend video, I noticed an amazing phenomenon in this song. Ilaiyaraaja takes arranging chords to unimaginable heights in all his songs. The usual technique of arranging chords is that, composers take the melody and arrange the base chord which has the melody note in it. For example if the melody is F or A or C, they place the F Major chord..
But Raaja sets the chord such that the melody becomes the added note of a regular chord. This wizardry is well displayed in this video. For example in the prelude humming, the chord doesn't enter as soon as the humming starts (which is the usual way). It enters when the melody anchors on E and it is the root chord of the song which is F Major. Now, F Major chord doesn't have the note E. But together with the melody note the collective sound yields the notes:
F + A + C + E = F M7th. This gives such a unique sound. You cannot hear this sound in another composer's composition..

You can keep on extrapolating this phenomenon all over the prelude. The finishing part of the preludes has 8 bars. The melody of first 4 bars is almost similar to the last 4 bars. But the chords for the first four bars is: Dm| F| Dm| C|

And the last four bars of prelude humming are out of the world..
They are: BbM7th|Am7th|Bb6th|F6th.

As you can see none of them is a regular chord.. And melody note of humming's melody is used as the additional note of the chord as needed to bring about the descent..
I annotated that in the video. So you can view it.

Now this is no ordinary arrangement. Its because he knows the humming comes and ends in Sadjam. So he "constructs" the chord such that it gradually descends and settles down in the Sadjam. To make this graceful descend, he first creates an elevation. This is the first half which is heavily leaning on the relative minor and the second half is those 4 chords with such great balance of notes. Such vision is only possibly when you know how the collective sound of 4 notes will sound. I can't marvel them enough and that is why when it comes to composing based on organic thinking and pure concepts of music, none come close to the Maestro.

With Love
Vicky