Yuvan Shankar Raja Meets Hedningrana - Kadhal Kondein & Raven

Let’s say you’ve come up with a really nice theme, but you just can’t find enough variations for it. Instead of forcing a variation that doesn’t really work, why not use orchestration to keep bringing the same melody back in different ways? You can change the instrument, register, rhythm and supporting arrangement while keeping the melody familiar. That is what I’ve tried to explore in this video. A little background about the song. Following the success of A.R. Rahman, Yuvan Shankar Raja established himself as another composer who brought a very different sound to Tamil film music. Like Rahman, he used the upper registers beautifully. Traditional Tamil film melodies often draw from ragas, with their beautiful ornamentations and gamakas. These can sound very natural in the lower and middle registers, but when pushed too high, too much ornamentation can sometimes sound exaggerated. Yuvan moved towards a more Western approach, especially in his melodies and the way he used the upper register. One of the things I find most interesting about his music is his use of dark colours. Not exactly sad, not exactly joyful — somewhere in between. Emotional, but with a darker shade. That is what makes this song interesting to me. Kadhal Kondein draws very heavily from Hedningarna’s “Raven”, and you can hear how much Yuvan was inspired by the composition. Yet the same dark character works surprisingly well in the Tamil song. It also shows a change in the way film music was evolving. A shift happened From Ilayaraja's era where a song didn’t always have to express one clear emotion exactly but it is enough if it sounds good, like this song expressing a longing emotion with a dark song. There was also enormous pressure on Yuvan at the time. Coming from the legendary Ilaiyaraaja family, he was naturally going to be compared with his father. May be that is the reason he copied all songs from this movie to make the film musically successful. Because of this success, for more than 25 years later, Yuvan continues to bring musical joy to a huge number of his fans. I hope you enjoy the arrangement — and perhaps pick up a few ideas that you can use in your own music.