The player will continue to play Ilayaraja’s songs in the current window while you are browsing) ( A tip to enhance your listening pleasure: When listening to the songs in any of the players, if you want to browse further on this site or another one, open a new window for further browsing. Click the play arrow below to enjoy the creativity and novelty in his songs. You can also skip songs, but it limits the number of times you can skip. If you are in the USA or Canada, you can also enjoy the songs on the player below.

Just close your eyes, visualise the imagery he creates with his music and enjoy the beautiful effects from the playlist below. Ilayaraja’s tunes were way ahead of time and the accompanying visuals were very poor and in quite a few cases, bordering on the ridiculous and laughable. As in the previous posts, I will not advise anyone to see the visuals of these songs. It should be easy to identify and relate to the song, regardless of the language. This is primarily because most of the movies are made in both the languages. Most of Ilayaraja’s tunes are the same across both the languages.

I have created this mix of 12 songs from Tamil and Telugu songs. We need to understand the finer technical details to understand the novelty that Ilayaraja brought to his music. However, as an exception, I will delve into finer technical details in only two of the following songs. I am not delving deeply into the finer inner technical details of the composition, arrangements, lyrics or the raga base. I am trying to share the enjoyment of film music from the ‘outside’ by following the contours of the tune and feeling the effects of the orchestration and vocals. However, in this post, I will highlight the experiments, innovation and the ‘newness’ that Ilayaraja brought to film music. Invariably, his tunes have great arrangements and something ‘new’. As I keep mentioning, it is very difficult to separate the great orchestration and the innovation in his songs. In the earlier two posts on orchestration (links given below), I highlighted distinctive features of Ilayaraja’s orchestration.

Ilayaraja melody songs