It is always good not to beat about the bush while interviewing a musical maestro and cover him up with epithets here and there for it wastes time, is inconsequential to the gathering of knowledge from him and is, perhaps, a trifle irksome as well for the concerned person. It is better to be direct, sincerely frank without being brash in asking questions and to allow the free flow of the conversation by letting the maestro speak spontaneously without frequent interruptions by the interviewer in overdoing things. Also, the audience is intelligent enough to understand the drift of a conversation and need not be guided like kindergarten kids to comprehend the text of what the maestro speaks in response to questions posed to him. The interviewer should be a background personality in the entire show, so as to say, and the interviewee must be allowed to shine in the foreground. Unfortunately, owing to lack of sufficient training in conducting interviews and due to the general boisterous nature of our common culture these days, the interviewer very much remains in the spotlight, both consciously and unconsciously, relegating the celebrity to the penumbra of the show. This is regrettable and deprives viewers of vital moments of possible proximity with the personality of their veneration.
The interviewer's job is a specialised one and requires careful forethought for a programme to come off well. It is not a casual conversation that appeals but quality interaction on the behalf of millions of viewers who hold their breath to absorb and savour every word of the hero of their dreams. To ask pedestrian questions to a musical maestro that betray an utter ignorance of the genre of music he represents and fill up the void thus with silly personal questions of a low order of popular culture is not only unwarranted but damaging to the purpose of the programme which is intended to enlighten the people about the maestro's life-work in his chosen field of excellence. Surely, the public deserve a better deal than to be constantly fed with routine rubbish from the mouth of the moderator and, thus, to be deprived of the cultured talk that could have emanated from the soul of the maestro had he been interviewed instead by another musician of repute and gifted in conversational skills as well. The interplay of thoughts and words would have then been itself music and that would be the best way to penetrate the musical consciousness of millions and quicken in them the impulse for future study of the system. Such an interview does happen in classical music performance itself and it is called 'sawal-jawab' of the melodic instrument and the accompanying percussion instrument, such as has so often been the good fortune of so many to witness in concerts and festivals where the audience is sent into raptures by the interplay of the sitar/sarod and the tabla. Who can after all forget the delightful exchanges between Pandit Ravi Shankar at the sitar and Ustad Alla Rakha at the tabla?
May our moderators gain some insight into their chosen trade from the sitar-tabla sawal-jawab sessions and renew their aspirations to good interviewing!
Written by Sugata Bose
No comments:
Post a Comment