Ilaiyaraaja and strings

I was recently listening to "Gana Gana gana vena kanavinai vidhaikkira mazhaiyey mazhaiyey". This is one of the innumerable beautiful rain songs that IR has composed. There are the famous rain songs like oho megam vandhadho from Mouna Ragam, vaan megam from Punnagai mannan, Aathadi ammadi from Idhayathai thirudathey and then there are the not so famous ones like Ponnaana meni from Meendum kokila, Pothukkutt oothudhadi from Paayum Puli to which we could add Gana Gana. I couldn't find Gana Gana in any public domain, so you'd have to either hunt it yourself or be satisfied with your memory of the song, if you've heard it, and my blog.

The songs starts of with a fantastic signal of the onset of rains, before the strings join the party at the 6th second and starts celebrating the wonderful downpour. IR uses repetition, one of the key aesthetic principles, beautifully from the 10th to the 12th, where he manages to take a small 4-note motif and repeats it 8 times within 2 seconds. I've seen many lesser directors make an absolute mess of trying to repeat a small motif. They'll most likely tune a motif which is complete by itself, and then when repeated, it sounds awry. IR's simple rule in all such aesthetic repetitions is to pay special attention to the beginning and the last note, the 1st and 4th note here. The first note will be somewhere after the beginning, and the last note slightly before, where they were supposed to begin and end respectively, had they been featured in a non-repetitive motif. Composed this way, the repetition never tires the ear and is able to progressively build on the momentum generated by the repetitive motif.

I will try to find examples of good publically available IR's aesthetic repetitive motif and other examples of poorly composed repetitive motifs.