He listened to his own compositions by asking the session musicians to play snippet from his scores. Simultaneously he also worked on his own music composition. Later he teamed as an assistant music director to the Kannada music composer G K Venkatesh and worked for more than 200 films. After he slowly moved into a session guitarist and keyboardist heading an orchestra team for the then popular music composers like Salil Chowdhury. During the early 70's Ilayaraja played a role as an instrumentalist where he worked as a guitarist with a band-for-hire. At the age of 29 and in 1969 Ilayaraja moved to the city of Madras looking for a break in the field of Music. Ilayraja started his career as an Instrumentalist. Ilaiyaraaja has a brother Gangai Amaran, who is also a music director and lyricistin Tamil film industry. All three children of him are married and they are also associated with music for they sing and compose for films. He has three children Karthik Raja, Yuvan Shankar Raja and Bhavatharini. Ilayaraja was married to Jeeva who passed away recently on 31 October 2011. He is been accredited with the title of "Isaignani" which means savant of music or the most learned person of music. He has not only worked for the Tamil Music industry but also for other language films like Malayalam, Telugu, Kannada and Hindi. He is recognized and appreciated by the people for setting a trend for film music in South India, by introducing Western musical nuances into songs. We can even say that there are number of movies which became box office hits mainly because of his songs and background scores. He has composed more than 4500 songs and is the only composer in the history of cinema to provide film scores for over 1000 films, particularly being acclaimed for his background scoring. He is not only noted among the public as a music composer but also as an instrumentalist, conductor, singer, and a songwriter. Ilayaraja takes the credit of composing at least 4000 songs and worked in over 800 films, in a period of about three decades. Ilaiyaraja has learnt the classical guitar music and also later he took a specialization course in it from the Trinity College of Music, London. This music itinerary included a summary of Western classical music, compositional training in techniques such as counterpoint, and study in instrumental performance. Along with professor Dhanraj, Ilaiyaraja began his first music course in Chennai in the year 1968. While working with the troupe, he penned his first composition, a musical adaptation of an elegy written by the Tamil poet laureate Kannadasan for Jawaharlal Nehru, India's first prime minister. When he was fourteen years he joined the musical troupe owned by his step brother Pavalar Varadarajan who travelled to different places performing stage orchestras and for the next ten years he was with his brother. His exposure to native folk music was much more for he grew up in a rural area.
#HOW TO NAME IT ILAYARAJA MOVIE#
This happened at the time of his first movie Annakili. But however the pounding name Ilayaraja was given to him by the Tamil film producer Panchu Arunachalam who prefixed the name Raja with Ilaiya which means younger in Tamil language because there was one more music director in the name M. It was master Dhanraj changed his named his name to Raja. "Raasayya" once again became "Raja" after he joined Dhanraj Master as a student to learn musical instruments. "Gnanadesikan" became "Rajaiya" when his father put him in the school, but the people of the village called him as "Raasayya". Being in a village he was very much conversant with the folk and native music of the village area. His original name was Gnanadesikan and was born to father Ramaswamy and mother Chinnathayammal. He was born on Jwho spent most of his childhood along with nature in Pannaipuram which was one of the main reasons for music to be instilled in him. Ilayaraja was born in a very family in a remote village named Pannaipuram in the Theni district of Tamil Nadu. Ilayaraja the legend of the music world is a veteran music director of the South Indian film industry.