A. R. Rahman
A. R. Rahman is an Indian composer, songwriter, singer, multi-instrumentalist, and record producer born in Chennai on January 6, 1966, whose professional reach also extends to film scoring, music direction, film production, and film direction.
Rahman attended Madras Christian College Higher Secondary School and later studied at the Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance, a sequence of formal education that carried him from secondary schooling in Chennai to conservatoire training abroad. Beyond composing and scoring, he has taken on roles as a film producer, film director, and film actor, occupying an unusually wide range of positions across the music and film industries. His work is associated with the Tamil language, marking a significant axis of his output.
Among the honors Rahman has received, two carry particular weight. The Indian government awarded him the Padma Bhushan in recognition of his contributions to the arts. He has also received an Academy Award for Best Original Score, a distinction that extended his recognition well beyond his home country and placed him among a small number of Indian artists honored at that level by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
Rahman's practice draws together the roles of songwriter, record producer, film score composer, and music director — a convergence that allows him to shape a given project from the writing of individual songs through to the orchestration of an entire score and the oversight of its production. His association with Tamil-language work, his conservatoire education, and his accumulation of honors both domestic and international together describe a career conducted simultaneously across several creative and industrial registers.
Quotes by A. R. Rahman
A. R. Rahman's insights on:
The more I compose, the more I know that I don't know it all. I think it's a good way to start. If you think you know it all, the work becomes a repetition of what you've already done. I try to make sure that I don't repeat my music.
I basically love classical music. I love a lot of musicians playing together and the whole culture of that, whether it's Indian or it's Western.
When you do something with a lot of honesty, appetite and commitment, the input reflects in the output.
That was a very different emotion and I felt Dido’s words would be good and I had a template with my voice in it. Then, when he heard it, he wanted both our voices together in it and that’s the scene when he sees the boy and then he gets charged to go on that final cutting effort.
My list would be Russia, Morocco, Turkey, and South Africa I’m doing which is somewhere I’ve wanted to go, Australia, Japan maybe, and China, if I have the energy to go and play at all those places.
I grew up on Bach and Beethoven and now I’m listening to more modern composers who I can’t even name. But since I’m constantly doing music, it’s difficult to have that quality time to listen to music and do classical stuff. That’s the only reason I’m thinking of going on.
That’s a sound design thing but then we wanted to do music that would not disturb it and at the same time drive it.
There were basically three themes. One was the sun theme which is the guitar when he’d get sun on his leg and it comes again in the end. And there’s of course the lullaby which Dido sang, “If I Rise.” And then there’s this driving guitar which is the motivation theme.
Certain things are done intentionally opposite – like there’s no sound at the end or synthesizers or all that stuff. Anything that drowns the movie, no. Anything that makes you sit up and watch it, yes. So, some are expecting a very sad theme going on.
I think I would like to discover a new root where people don’t get bored with people singing boring lines but something exciting. That’d be interesting.