Tributación que afecta a los contribuyentes sujetos al régimen A) Base imponible afecta a impuestos

Indian cinema is loved the world over for its larger-than-life film song per-formances. Ethnomusicologists Joseph Getter and B. Balasubrahmaniyan state, ‘Film songs are essential to the creation and reception of movies in India, and they play a key role in the expressive nature of the cinema … Of all the music genres in India, film songs of any language possess the larg-est audience, and are the most geographically and culturally widespread.’³ These original songs are specifically composed to broadcast the characters’

internal thoughts and discourse through lyrics that relate to the plot of the film and also to broader contexts that allow a song to translate as a piece of popular music.

The film song phenomenon in mainstream Indian cinema separates it from its contemporary Western equivalent. While Indian films have cor-respondences with Hollywood filmed musicals, the distinct structural and aesthetic features of the latter genre are not necessarily present in Indian films, where singing and dancing are rarely central to the story. Film music scholar Guido Heldt argues that the characteristic feature of Hollywood musicals is ‘the form of musical numbers that showcase the stars and their talents’,⁴ a characteristic which applied to Indian films before playback technology was adopted mid-last-century in India, but which is no longer the case, as most Indian actors do not sing but instead lip-sync their song performances to the voices of well-known recording stars. Likewise, while the actors are generally present in the montage of film song set-pieces, professional dancers are often cast to represent them in intricately choreo-graphed and technically demanding dance sequences. In most Indian films

‘the number … is a function of the plot’, where in Hollywood musicals,

‘the plot … is a function of the numbers: the scaffolding for the numbers it has to frame and motivate, however flimsily’.⁵ Originally composed film songs are a staple in most genres of Indian cinema; an integral component of the nation’s film music practice unparalleled in Western cinema.

In the West, from the late 1950s, through the 60s and into the 70s, songs were composed primarily for the title sequences to feature films, and often themed in instrumental versions that underscored the dramatic

action.⁶ The 1960s saw the emergence of the ‘compilation soundtrack’ as a way of scoring films that continues to the present, the score consisting of a collection of popular songs, with no thematic links, often drawn from a variety of genres, which support narrative through a ‘system of extramusi-cal allusions and associations activated by the score’s referentiality’.⁷ In this treatment, as noted by film music theorist Anahid Kassabian, ‘perceiv-ers bring external associations with the songs into their engagements with the film’,⁸ which are personal and historical, and operate quite differently from the way in which original film songs affect their audience. Songs in Western cinema today, with few exceptions, differ from film songs in mainstream Indian cinema in that they generally pre-exist the film, are sourced from a variety of artists, and have already had their moment in time, which the film attempts to exploit.⁹ According to musicologist Jeff Smith, the two main ways in which popular songs are incorporated into Western films are, first, ‘as a kind of referential intertext capable of com-menting on or satirizing the image track’, or second, as music for montage sequences, where rapid and rhythmic editing of images is accompanied by a song which dominates the soundtrack, creating the ‘aural-visual set piece that … became a staple of rock scoring’, in a style that predated and later reflected the music video.¹⁰ These techniques for using songs as film music are prevalent in Indian cinema as well, in addition to the ubiquitous presentation of songs as musical performances that sit some-where at the boundaries of the diegesis. Heldt elaborates on Rick Altman’s term ‘supra- diegetic’ to describe song performances in filmed musicals, describing them as ‘transcendent spaces where normal diegetic logic is suspended, music takes over, and the genre reaches its purpose in displays of pure performative bliss’.¹¹

Another point of difference between Indian and Western cinemas is that Indian film composers, or ‘music directors’ as they are known at home, are first and foremost songwriters, and the underscore, or ‘background music’, is considered ancillary to the songs, which are characteristically presented via six to eight highly choreographed and dramatically edited music scenes per film.¹² Rahman’s Tamil film songs with lyricist Vairamuthu, including

‘Chinna Chinna’ from Roja,¹³ and ‘Uyire’ from Bombay,¹⁴ met with criti-cal and commercial success in India, contributing enormously to the suc-cess of these films. This reflects what Greg Booth, a scholar of South Asian music, refers to as ‘the ambiguous identity of film songs as popular music and as components of popular films’.¹⁵ ‘Jai Ho’ achieved similar goals for Slumdog Millionaire both in India and in the West, and was incorporated

at the end of Boyle’s film as a set-piece homage to Hindi film song tradi-tion. More often, Rahman’s original songs for Hollywood films conform to Western aesthetics through providing a non-diegetic accompaniment to images; yet, as original songs composed specifically to speak to the films’

characters and situations, and often featuring the composer’s own vocals, they remain somewhat unconventional by Western standards.

Aside from the ‘compilation score’ model mentioned above, which capitalizes on the synergy between contemporary film and popular music, Western film music aesthetics are largely dominated by the model of the

‘classical film score’. Film music theorist Kathryn Kalinak cites the lat-ter’s conventions as: ‘selective use of non-diegetic music; correspondence between that music and the implied content of the narrative; a high degree of synchronization between music and narrative action; and the use of leit-motiv as a structural framework’.¹⁶ Leitmotif is ‘a theme, or other coher-ent musical idea, clearly defined so as to retain its idcoher-entity if modified on subsequent appearances, whose purpose is to represent or symbolize a person, object, place, idea, state of mind, supernatural force or any other ingredient in a dramatic work’.¹⁷

Directly translated from the German, a leitmotif is a ‘lead’ or ‘guide’

motif that serves to guide the listener through the narrative.¹⁸ The term was first coined in the late nineteenth century to refer to Richard Wagner’s use of recurrent musical motifs in his operas, which forged powerful links between text, drama and music. Wagner’s leitmotifs were remarkable for the way in which they were able to ‘embody such a power and directness of expression that the emotion concerned would be recalled when the motif itself returned, even if action or text no longer alluded directly to its original associations’.¹⁹ Leitmotifs are important signifiers in music for films, and has now been assimilated as a scoring convention in many world cinemas, following its adaptation after opera to early Western multimedia forms such as ballet, pantomime and musicals, leading to its rapid up in film music in the early twentieth century. Film music scholar James Wierzbicki cites musicological discourse that problematizes the appropria-tion of the term leitmotif when referring to ‘film-score themes’, arguing that ‘Wagner’s technique (which involved fragmentary motifs capable of being not just developed but also intermixed) differs substantially from the basic Hollywood approach (which involved tune-like musical ideas that were for the most part simply reiterated whenever their associated filmic entities entered the narrative)’.²⁰ No doubt these commentators seek to differentiate hack film composition from Wagner’s approach where

motifs ‘move beyond their exact or varied repetition at textually appropri-ate moments into the kind of transformation that creappropri-ates deeper dramatic resonances and larger-scale musical continuities’,²¹ yet to deny that sophis-ticated film scores such as Bernard Herrmann’s Vertigo (Hitchcock, 1958) apply leitmotifs in complex ways is to do a disservice to the best exemplars of the ‘classical’ score. Indeed, the ability to skilfully weave leitmotif into the overall text of a film score is an aspect of compositional technique that sits at the very core of the accomplished screen composer’s craft.

In India, the association of characters with musical themes has corre-spondences in traditional forms of theatre, codified in the Nātya Śastra, the first or second century C. E. Sanskrit treatise on drama. Music is orga-nized selectively ‘so that audiences may identify a particular character by hearing a composition’.²² While it is tempting to speculate that Wagner may have South Asian influences to thank for the leitmotif it is at least clear that Indian music directors, whether influenced by Indian or Western precedents, draw on leitmotif to define character in their scores. A.R.

Rahman’s use of leitmotif has developed from a simplistic approach in his early films to a certain level of complexity in his later films. In Slumdog Millionaire, echoes of ‘Latika’s Theme’ sprinkle other cues as a way of bringing the girl’s character to mind during her long absences from the narrative; in 127 Hours, the ethereal melody of the signature song ‘If I Rise’ is rearranged to underscore the canyon landscape, and also turns up in the gruelling amputation scene layered with electric guitars and drums.

Unlike in the West, where instrumental themes to films often become part of a shared musical and cultural lexicon,²³ in India themes are ‘occa-sionally a topic for discussion among fans and filmgoers, but … usually do not circulate outside of the film itself as do the songs’.²⁴ Rahman himself provides a notable exception to this rule with his theme for Bombay, which is so well loved that it has been reappropriated into many other contexts.²⁵ Indian films that omit songs entirely and include only background music tend to belong to the Parallel Cinema²⁶ genre, which has appeal among urban audiences, without enjoying the box-office success of Bollywood films with their quota of film songs.

Due to the coexistence of diverse ethnicities, religions, cultural prac-tices and languages in twentieth-century India, its film music became a melting pot of styles. From the 1930s onwards, background music began to integrate a steadily growing range of foreign influences such as large orchestras, Latin music, colonial-era jazz and dance band styles, Western classical and popular music genres, traditional Indian instruments and folk

music, Hindustani and Carnatic classical music, Bharata Natyam dance music, urban Indipop, and many genres of religious music.²⁷ The classi-cal Hollywood score, central to ‘compelling yet absolutely unambiguous storytelling’²⁸ in the West, was far from standard fare in Eastern cinema’s musical diet. Film audiences in India were interested in different kinds of stories, and Indian filmmakers and music directors had different ways to tell them.

Many cultural and socio-economic factors were driving the gradual standardization of Indian film music as a broadly multicultural practice by the end of the twentieth century, when Rahman was approached by Ratnam to write his first film score. This set the foundations for the ‘alter-nate space’ his music inhabits. His compositional eclecticism cannot be discussed without making reference to his predecessor, the Tamil music director Ilayaraja, whose ‘music is distinctive for its complex arrange-ments and unique blend of Tamil folk, Indian classical, and Western clas-sical and pop music genres’.²⁹ Rahman’s Bombay theme contains similar influences, opening with a melody based on a Tamil lullaby,³⁰ played on the traditional Indian bamboo flute (bansuri) and later developed in a more ‘classical’ Hollywood rendering by the orchestra’s string section.

This theme functions as a microcosm for the whole score, which alter-nates consistently between Indian and global elements. In this respect, Rahman’s music exemplifies the Indian film music aesthetic of a natural

‘world music’ that is evolved and unselfconscious, reflecting the diverse cultures assimilated over centuries into contemporary India.