The 16^th edition of Parallel Music Festival will get under way here on December 4.Mr. N. Murali, President of The Music Academy, will be the guest of honour.

 Sangita Kalanidhi designates Neyveli Santhanagopalan (2020), Thiruvarur Bhakthavatsalam (2021) and Lalgudi G J R Krishnan & Lalgudi Vijayalakshmi (2022) will be guests of honour. The event will be held at Kasturi Srinivasan Hall, The Music Academy.

The function will also see PMF awards (Distinguished Carnatic Musicians Award) given away to vainika K. Srivatsa, vocalist S. Mathangi, mridangist Erode Nagaraj, flautist T. Sashidhar and morsing artist Nerkunam Manikandan.

The inaugural function will see a couple of one-hour concerts – a violin duet by Lalgudi Krishnan and Vijayalakshmi and a violin-flute duet by T.K. Padmanaban and T. Sashidhar.

The function is held under the auspices of Nippon Paint and Rotary Club of Madras Coromandel.

The concept of Parallel Music was an inspiration derived from former President late Abdul Kalam. He was invited to preside over the Platinum Jubilee of The Music Academy inDecember 2002. After his address as the chief guest, he surprised everybody by bringing on to the stage a troupe of differently-abled artistes from DRDO who performed to the poem he had penned on the flowers in his Mughal garden - his famed official residence the Rashtrapati Bhavan.In 2005, when a visually-challenged Carnatic violin maestro Dr.    M.Chandrasekaran was nominated by the Music Academy as its Sangita Kalanidhi Designate - the highest honour a classical Carnatic musician can hope to get in his lifetime, things fell in place and Rotary Club of Madras Coromandel, which has been empowering the visually challenged for higher education and employment opportunities for over two decades through its “Karna Vidya'' (education through ears), commenced its first Parallel Music Fest to showcase him as a role model for the visually-challenged Karna Vidya students and offering a platform for differently-abled musicians to perform on stage along with main stream artistes.

 Subsequently, Rotaract Club of Drishti, a rotary club exclusively formed by RCMC for the visually-challenged, also joined as a co-host of PMF.