Ilaiyaraaja (born Gnanadesikan on 2 June 1943) is an Indian Tamil film composer, singer, and lyricist. He is based in Chennai, the centre of the Tamil film industry. He is a recipient of prestigious Padma Bhushan Award from the Government of India.He has thrice won the Indian National Film Award for best film scoring.
Career
In the 1970s in Chennai, Ilaiyaraaja played guitar in a band-for-hire, and worked as a session guitarist, keyboardist, organist for film music composers and directors such as Salil Chowdhury from West Bengal.In 1976, film producer Panchu Arunachalam commissioned him to compose the songs and film score for a Tamil-language film called Annakkili ('The Parrot'). For the soundtrack, Ilaiyaraaja applied the techniques of modern popular film music orchestration to Tamil folk poetry and folk song melodies, which created a fusion of Western and Tamil idioms. Ilaiyaraaja's use of Tamil music in his film scores injected new influence into the Indian film score milieu. By the mid-1980s Ilaiyaraaja was gaining increasing stature as a film composer and music director in the South Indian film industry.
Ilaiyaraaja was one of the early Indian film composers to use Western classical music harmonies and string arrangements in Indian film music.