Page 102 - The Apu Trilogy_ Satyajit Ray and the Making of an Epic

Working with Ravi Shankar 89

materialise because of their disagreement over music for films.
After the Apu Trilogy, Shankar did not compose again for
Ray, who decided in 1961 that he would prefer to compose his
own music rather than wrestling with virtuoso players, such as
Shankar, Vilayat Khan (The Music Room) and, most difficult of
all, Ali Akbar Khan (The Goddess), as film composers. Interviewed
about Ray’s music in 1965, Shankar, while enthusing over the
Apu Trilogy and Ray as a director, was notably cool about Ray
as a film composer: ‘He is competent. He knows exactly what he
wants. He has experience in western music, specially the piano.’
He added that only Chaplin, among great film directors, had
also managed to distinguish himself as a composer.
‘We had a slight misunderstanding’, wrote Shankar in Raga
Mala, after Ray’s death. ‘I was quite hurt because he wrote
somewhere that I was unique as a writer of music for ballet and
the stage, but he thought film was something else. ... If Satyajit
thought he was suitable to do the music for his own films –
and people did like it – then he must have been. The director
is the boss – and especially when he has the stature Satyajit had
earned worldwide.’ Wonderfully apt though Shankar’s music for
the Apu Trilogy was, Ray came to feel that he himself was the
more gifted film composer – rightly in the view of many musi-
cians – especially as his knowledge of and feeling for western
music was undoubtedly far superior to Shankar’s. Such western
elements were crucial for his later, more urban films, as com-
pared to the village-inspired Apu Trilogy. ‘The average educated
middle-class Bengali may not be a sahib,’ said Ray in 1980, ‘but
his consciousness is cosmopolitan, influenced by western modes
and trends. To reflect that musically you have to blend – to do all
kinds of experiments. Mix the sitar with the alto and the trum-
pet and so on ... It’s a tricky matter, but the challenge cannot be
shirked.’ Ray’s complex, varied and subtle scores composed over
three decades, from Kanchenjungha in 1962 to The Stranger in
1991, including his own highly popular songs for The Adventures
of Goopy and Bagha – amply demonstrate this truth.

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