Wednesday, June 11, 2008

Maestro Metrics


“Better”,”Faster”, “Relatively slow” etc are taboo in our project.

“Give me metrics” is the standard response from my manager. Is it because managers like PowerPoint presentations and love to see charts? Interpretation of data in the form of metrics brings facts to limelight. Sometimes, we miss the obvious. Don’t we?

While surfing, I got some important data on our Maestro’s work. Thanks to http://www.ilayaraja.co.in/movies.html. Immediately, I jumped into doing some magic on the data and came up with some interesting facts and figures. Thanks to Microsoft Excel.










Look at the graphs above. There is a reason why everyone calls Illayaraja as a prolific composer!! More than 50 movies per year – back to back to back to back……? Simply INCREDIBLE and phenomenal!!! Help!! Is there any other word to describe this?

Some more statistics:

Throughput = (28 movies per year for a span of 30 years) OR (12 songs + re-recording for 2 entire movie per month for a span of 30 years)

(This includes composing the tune, writing the musical score for all the instruments manually, rehearsal, lyrics writing, arrangement, orchestration and recording. Not to forget that re-recordings for the entire movie, scene by scene)

I kept starring at the chart post-ARR period and became quite emotional. What a steep fall for a genius? Would he have ever imagined that within few years he would be doing only less than 10 movies a year?

May be, he was satisfied and happy with what he gave, but not me as a fan. I know, I am very greedy here.

4 comments:

முருகேஷ் said...

I have heard that IR's then sub-ordinate V.S.Narasimhan used to take care of re-recording, orchestral arrangement and rehearsal for many of IR's movies. But his favorite directors (like Rajkiran, Maniratnam, Balachandar etc) always got IR's attention fully.

kumar said...

Murugesh ,
V.S.N used to conduct rehearsals for Song & BGM but not orchestral arrangement .Now , Purushotham ( Drummer& Rhythm programmer) has taken the baton from him .

Vignesh Subramanian said...

A very unique scientific analysis.. the Pie and the graph charts I mean... I guess there is no particular reason to be worried about the decline since the late 90s. The fact of the matter is, there was no dearth of quality songs even in that era, except that it wasn't as obvious any more and you were left doing some cherry picking due to external noises :-)

Emjay said...

Welcome Vignesh.

As a matter of fact, as I mentioned sometime earlier, I love Raaja's 90-95 songs more than what usual IR fans say (of 80s).

Some of his instant ALL songs hit came during 92-93.