Six Years!!!!!!

Ah! It has been Six Years since it began. I have hardly ever spoken to anyone in person a word about background score. It happened here, only here. It started like a fun quizzing exercise with me posting background score clips and the visitors of the blog guessing the name of the film from the background score clip. I had so much time back then that I worked six months collecting background score clips of Indian films from all over internet to start this blog. I wanted to have the content for at least first three months ready, before I published the blog to public.

Very soon, I got bored of the quiz. I started writing elaborate rambling pieces on background score. That wasn't an entirely original idea. It was at that time I discovered Lord of the Rings, the movie and the score. I became a huge fan of Lord of the Rings Trilogy Score and started searching and reading everything that is there on internet about Howard Shore's score. There were a lot of articles extensively dissecting and analyzing each and every layer in all the cues in the LOTR Soundtrack. I wondered why we don’t have such pieces written on Tamil film scores. I wanted to read such articles on Tamil film scores, and since no one was writing about it, I decided to write what I wanted to read.

I wish I had that natural flair for writing. It takes a lot of time for me to process a thought, achieve clarity and then condensing that clear thought into a piece takes even more time and finally when I post it, I would have already worked on it for a week or a month or sometime even a year.

I don’t think about who would read when typing long indulgent posts on background score. I realized that such write-ups eventually find its readers. I get emails and comments on Posts, years after I wrote them.

Recently I stumbled upon a blog who follows my writings and mention my name in one of his posts,

“Critiquing cinema is a noble profession, an art at that; read Roger Ebert or Raja Sen or Baradwaj Rangan or PS Suresh Kumar. And like those folks helped me see films from a totally different angle, I write for that one kid out there who's head is buzzing with questions on the nature of art, conformity with the masses, tools for objectivity and the auteur's intention behind the making of every shot. True, watching cinema is a solitary experience but discussing it can be an enriching one.”

No. I am certainly not delusional to believe that I am one on par with others in that group of Celebrity Cinema Critics, but I agree with what he said about the purpose of writing on an art.

Thanks to the regular readers and followers of this blog, and all the forums and social networking sites, where a link to a post in this blog triggered some conversation, that taught me a lot about music, background score, and music appreciation.

This space has given me and taught me so much, and the amount of learning and its subsequent effect on the things I do in everyday life are so intertwined that I can’t even begin to explain. If there was no backgroundscore.com, I wonder how I would have spent all those hundreds of hours of my life that I was lost in watching movies, ripping and editing background score clips and writing about them for 442 blog posts and many unpublished drafts.

There is so much more that I want to learn and write about, there are so many scribbled ideas to give a final shape to. There are hundreds of Ilaiyaraaja’s film scores, I want to listen to and explore various musical ideas Ilaiyaraaja executed in them. The site badly needs a more professional look and design. There are lots of audio links in many blog posts that don't work. I hope to fix them up soon.

Thanks everyone for being a part of www.backgroundscore.com

Happy Diwali!

Favourite post in backgroundscore.com – Do you have one or maybe more? Let me know.