During this period, Ilaiyaraaja also began writing his own scores.
This is the time Ilaiyaraaja learned most of it about composing under the guidance of G. Venkatesh's assistant, Ilaiyaraaja would orchestrate the melodic outlines developed by Venkatesh. Venkatesh, he worked on 200 film projects, mostly in Kannada cinema. After being hired as the musical assistant to Kannada film composer G. Choudhury once said that Ilaiyaraaja is going to become the best composer in India. In the 1970s in Chennai, Ilaiyaraaja played guitar in a band-for-hire, and worked as a session guitarist, keyboardist, and organist for film music composers and directors such as Salil Chowdhury from West Bengal. Ilaiyaraaja (center) with Kamal Haasan (left) and Rajinikanth (right) at the Nadigar Sangam Protest in 2018 He learnt carnatic music from T.V.Gopalakrishnan. Ilaiyaraaja is a gold medalist in classical guitar after completing the course through distance learning channel from Trinity College of Music, London. In 1968, Ilaiyaraaja began a music course with Professor Dhanraj in Madras (now Chennai), which included an overview of Western classical music, compositional training in techniques such as counterpoint, and study in instrumental performance. 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. At the age of 14, he joined a travelling musical troupe called "Pavalar Brothers" headed by his elder brother Pavalar Varadarajan, and spent the next decade performing throughout South India. Ilaiyaraaja grew up in a rural area, exposed to a range of Tamil folk music.
Ilaiyaraaja's brother, Gangai Amaran, is also a music director and lyricist in the Tamil film industry. Ilaiyaraaja was married to Jeeva and the couple has three children- Karthik Raja, Yuvan Shankar Raja and Bhavatharini-all film composers and singers.
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In his first movie Annakili, Tamil film producer Panchu Arunachalam added "Ilaiya" (Ilaiya means younger in Tamil language) as a prefix in his name Raaja, and he named him as "Ilaiyaraaja", because in the 1970s there was one more music director A. Ilaiyaraaja joined Dhanraj Master as a student to learn musical instruments and the master renamed and called him just "Raaja". When he joined school his father changed his name to "Rajaiya", but his village people used to call him "Raasayya". Ilaiyaraaja was born as Gnanathesikan in a Dalit family belonging to Pannaipuram of present-day Theni district, Tamil Nadu, India in 1943.
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He was one of the earliest Indian film composers to use Western classical music harmonies and string arrangements in Tamil film music, and the first South Asian to compose a full symphony. In 1986, he was the first Indian composer to record film songs through computer for Tamil films for Vikram. He is known for integrating Indian folk music and traditional Indian instrumentation with western classical music techniques. Ilaiyaraaja is nicknamed "Isaignani" (musical genius) and is often referred to as " Maestro", amongst others by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, London.
He has composed more than 7,000 songs, provided film scores for more than 1,000 movies and performed in more than 20,000 concerts. Widely regarded as one of the greatest Indian music composers, he is often credited for introducing Western musical sensibilities in the South Indian film musical mainstream. Gnanathesikan (born 2 June 1943), known as Ilaiyaraaja, is an Indian film composer, conductor-arranger, singer and lyricist who works in the Indian film industry, predominantly in Tamil.