Annamayya Keertanalu Options

[swarapriya]

Annamayya Keertanalu

Sri Tallapaka Annamacharya, popularly known as Annamayya, was born in early 1400’s (1408) and composed thousands of keertans in praise of Lord Venkateshwara (Lord Vishnu also known as Balaji). He was one of the prolific writer and composer of the keertans. It is estimated that he wrote and composed music for over 32,000 keertans. His musical composition style strongly influenced carnatic music.

He came from a background of poets. His wife was a poetess and wrote a book of poems and is considered to be the first Telugu speaking woman to publish. His son and grandson were also famous music composers. Annamayya, who lived to be 94 years old (passed away in 1503), spent most of his life at the Balaji temple in Tirupati in Andhra Pradesh. He used copper plates to engrave his keertans. Only 12,000 of these were discovered concealed in a small room close to where the Balaji idol is. It is believed that the rest of the engravements are lost forever by those who melted them for profit.

Titumala Tirupati Devsthanam (TTD) is actively trying to make all the keertans (12,000 of them) available to the public. Various artistes have taken the keertans and have sang them in classical style. One of the prominent personality who is deeply involved in this is Garimella Balakrishna Prasad. Working with TTD, he already has released over 600 songs, all done in classical style.

Annamayya’s keertans fall into two categories; aadhyaatma (spiritual) and shringaara (romantic). Most of these are in praise of either Balaji or Govinda (Lord Krishna), both different forms of Lord Vishnu. In the next few weeks I will try to bring some of this work to you.

(By the way, there are several pictures of Annamayya available on the Internet. But the ones I found all had a possible copyright warning with them. If anyone of you can, please share a picture here. Thanks.)

In 1999, a popular Telugu movie was made on the life of Annamayya. Though it was not a completely accurate depiction of Annamayya’s life, the movie was responsible to spur the interest of general public, that includes myself, to know more about his work. Before we start on the keertans, I will upload songs from this movie first. There are some great songs in this movie and we will start this thread with these songs first …

This post has been edited by swarapriya: Feb 2 2010, 07:07 AM