Haddu Hakki Habba: A Carnatic Music-themed Festival for Children
Also from the India Foundation for the Arts Newsletter:
What Sumana Chandrashekhar says here is interesting. There’s often such a joyless approach to Carnatic music inculcated in children, mostly because of competitive parents, it’s really sad.
Haddu Hakki Habba: A Carnatic Music-themed Festival for Children
Our grant to Bangalore’s Ananya GML Cultural Academy in 2007 led to the production of 13 episodes of a radio programme on Carnatic music for middle school children. This was broadcast on All India Radio, Karnataka. As a part of this project, Ananya organised the Haddu Hakki festival in Bangalore and Mysore in the last week of November. An essay and collage competition and opportunities for children to interact with senior musicians were the highlights of the festival.
IFA Assistant Programme Executive, Sumana Chandrashekar, who helped to organise the festival, reports that she was taken aback by some of the views about Carnatic music expressed by the 10 to 16 year-olds in their essays. The essays revealed an obsession with performing well in music exams, a need to defend classical music against other musical forms and a tendency to view association with Carnatic music as a ‘status symbol’.
“It seems to me,” says Sumana, “that our music education system is perpetuating a belief that limits the spirit of music – to religion, to exams and to performance; where learning is driven more by the need to perform than by the joy of exploring; and learning itself seems to have become an insipid process of mechanical reproduction with absolutely no sense of inquiry.
A collage made by one of the festival’s participants:
She feels that Ananya’s Haddu Hakki project, where the emphasis is on cultivating a spirit of fun, acquires added relevance in such a situation.
Sorry for nitpicking. I think it’s “Haadu Hakki Habba” (not Haddu) and likely means ‘Festival of singing bird’ (Singing bird = Nightingale? …Kogile)
You may well be right, but that’s the way they’ve spelled it in the newsletter. I myself don’t know any Kannada! Thanks for the translation!