Naushad gave a new trend to popular film music by basing his tunes on classical music ragas and folk music.
Bhairavi (Hindustani) is his favourite
Raga Naushad was known for his skillful adaptation of the classical musical tradition for movie songs. Among all contemporary singer, Naushad Ali gave numbers of the songs to Mohammad Rafi. Most of Naushad Ali popular songs are sung by Mohammad Rafi. For some movies like
Baiju Bawra, he composed all scores in classical
raga modes and arranged for the well-known vocalist
Amir Khan to be a music consultant for this film. Naushad could easily work with Western instruments, including the clarinet, the mandolin and the accordion. He could incorporate Western musical idioms in his compositions and compose for Western-style orchestras. During the early 1940s, recordings were done in quiet parks and gardens after midnight because the studios did not have sound-proof recording rooms. In the gardens, there would be no echo and disturbances, unlike the studios where the sound reverberated because of the tin roofs. For films like 'Uran Khatola' and 'Amar', he recorded the voice of a particular artiste on a scale of 90, then recorded it on 70, then on 50 and so on. After the complete recording, it was played for the scene and the impact it created was terrific. He was one of the first to introduce sound mixing and the separate recording of voice and music tracks in playback singing. He was the first to combine the flute and the clarinet, the sitar and mandolin. He also introduced the
accordion to Hindi film music and was among the first to focus on background music to extend characters' moods and dialogue through music. But perhaps his greatest contribution was to bring
Indian classical music into the film medium. Many of his compositions were inspired by
ragas and he even used distinguished classical artistes like
Amir Khan and
D.V. Paluskar in
Baiju Bawra (1952) and
Bade Ghulam Ali Khan in
Mughal-e-Azam (1960).
Baiju Bawra (1952) demonstrated Naushad's grasp of classical music and his ability to bring it to the masses, for which he won the first
Filmfare Best Music Director Award in 1954. Naushad commented on a pre-release meeting about "Baiju Bawra": "When people heard that the film would be full of classical music and ragas, they protested, 'People will get a headache and they will run away.' I was adamant. I wanted to change public taste. Why should people be fed what they like all the time? We presented them with music from our culture and it worked". For
Aan (1952), he was the first to use a 100-piece orchestra. He was the first composer to have developed the system of western notation in India. The notation for the music of the film 'Aan' was published in book form in London. In
Uran Khatola (1955), he recorded an entire song without the use of orchestra, having replaced the sound of musical instruments with choral sound of humming. For
Mughal-e-Azam (1960) song Ae Mohabbat Zindabad, he used a chorus of 100 persons. For
Ganga Jamuna (1961), he used lyrics in chaste Bhojpuri dialect. He used just six instruments in the title song of Mere Mehboob (1963). In 2004, a colorized version of the classic
Mughal-e-Azam (1960) was released, for which Naushad had the orchestral music specially re-created (in Dolby Digital) by today's industry musicians, while maintaining all the solo vocals from the original soundtrack. To elaborate, the playback vocals (though not the chorus) recorded four decades ago are mixed with orchestra tracks created in the present millennium. As Indian film music gradually assumed a Western bend starting in the late 1960s, Naushad came to be considered old-fashioned. Composers who could compose
rock-and-roll and
disco-inflected music started getting increasingly popular. Naushad was still esteemed as a maestro, but his talents were sought mostly for historical movies where traditional scores were appropriate. It can be said of Naushad that in the early days of popular cinema music in the thirties and forties he set the standards for classical and folk music that resonated with the idea of India. In short he brought out the beauty of Indian music in a short film song of a few minutes which was not an easy feat. The composers who followed him were inspired by this aspect of his compositions. ==Filmography==