Exploring the beauty of Sahana raga

Amritha Murali brought forth every aspect of the raga in a 90-minute exposition

The core of music, sangithaanubhava, is an indescribable subjective experience. According to Prof. Sambamurthy, a renowned scholar, a true aesthetic enjoyment of music is outside the scope of any recognised rasa. Some ragas take listeners to sublime heights. One such is Sahana, an ubhaya vakra raga. A rare sparkle and vigour marked Amritha Murali’s 90-minute exposition of Sahana and Saint Tyagaraja’s masterpiece, ‘Giripai nelakonna’, in this raga. The concert was for ARTery, as part of the ‘Magnum Opus’ series dedicated to the memory of vidwan T. N. Krishnan. Amritha’s music brims with gnanam and soukhyam. When she was nine, her grandmother Shankari Nagarajan initiated her into music, and she was later trained by K.R. Kedaranathan, P.S. Narayanaswamy and now by R.K. Shriramkumar. She learnt violin from Vittal Ramamurthy and T. Rukmini.