Long before C Joseph Vijay became Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu, before the speeches and convoys and crowds waiting for him as a political leader, there was another Vijay entering Tamil homes in a considerably less complicated fashion.He arrived through songs. There was Ninaithen Vandhai, Priyamudan, Kushi and a succession of films in which romance, mischief, longing and youthful swagger acquired melodies that could escape the cinema hall and survive without the pictures. Before a star becomes an institution, he has to become familiar. Before people surrender to his entrance, they have to feel they already know him.Deva understood this peculiar transaction better than most. He understood it with Vijay. He had understood it earlier, and perhaps even more spectacularly, with Rajinikanth. In Annamalai, Baashha and Arunachalam, Deva did not merely provide songs for a superstar.Deva, the composer and singer who spent more than three decades making Tamil cinema sound alternately romantic, heroic, devotional, mischievous and gloriously local, died in Chennai on Saturday. He was 75. Hospital sources said he had no pulse when he was brought in and attempts to revive him were unsuccessful.His funeral will be held on Sunday at his native village of Mangadu, near Arcot in Ranipet district, with full state honours.There is an irresistible appropriateness in the state honouring Deva because, for a long period, Deva had been doing something similar for the state: providing background music to its ordinary life.He was born Devanesan Chokkalingam on November 20, 1950. Before cinema, there was employment in the Tamil Nadu Public Works Department, training in music and the less glamorous years of orchestras and musical work. His early film career took time to settle. Vaikasi Poranthachu in 1990 brought wider recognition and a Tamil Nadu State Film Award. Then came Annamalai in 1992, and the scale changed.Story continues below this adTamil film music of that period presents Deva’s achievement almost as a mathematical improbability. Ilaiyaraaja was already an empire. A R Rahman arrived and appeared to have discovered a new country altogether. Deva somehow opened a tea shop between the two and did extraordinary business. The comparison is useful precisely because he was not a lesser version of either man.Ilaiyaraaja could make the landscape itself appear to possess an interior life — a bus journey, a field, loneliness, rain could suddenly seem composed. Rahman altered the texture of recorded sound, building songs over a constant subterranean hum of bass, pulse and vibration that seemed to breathe beneath the melody from beginning to end, making the studio itself an instrument and Tamil film music feel simultaneously intimate and international. Deva’s great instinct was different. He seemed to ask this: What does this moment need to do to the people watching it?If Rajinikanth was walking down a staircase, the staircase acquired constitutional importance. The famous sonic architecture surrounding Rajinikanth in Baashha is difficult now to separate from the star himself. The music did not merely accompany Manickam’s transformation. It instructed an auditorium how to experience it. Suspense, recognition, elevation — Deva could compress them into seconds. A man entered a frame and hundreds of people behaved as though history had arrived.That was not subtle music. It was something more difficult: music that understood exactly when subtlety would be a terrible idea. Yet reducing Deva to “mass” music misses half the man. Aasai alone makes the argument. “Konja Naal Poru Thalaiva,” “Meenamma” and “Pulveli Pulveli” belonged to another Deva altogether — melodic, sensuous, occasionally wistful. With Hariharan and other singers, he produced songs whose emotional register was far removed from the hero-entry thunder for which he became famous. Kadhal Kottai, Nerukku Ner, Vaalee and Kushi extended that melodic life through another generation.Story continues below this adAnd then there was gaana. Deva did not invent the music of Chennai’s working-class neighbourhoods. His more important achievement was that he did not behave as though cinema had invented it either. “I hail from Chennai, and gaana is inseparable from Chennaiites,” he once said. “It may sound raw, but the musicality of this genre is very deep.” The sentence explains much of his career. He heard sophistication where respectable culture was capable of hearing only noise.Gaana carried courtship, sexual mischief, financial misery, friendship, bravado, alcohol, failure and the magnificent human capacity to make a joke five minutes after disaster. Deva took that vocabulary — particularly the music of North Chennai’s working-class neighbourhoods — into commercial cinema without first requiring it to put on a tie.Songs such as “Kavalaipadathe Sagothara” became popular partly because they seemed to understand a fundamental Tamil survival mechanism. Sorrow is serious, but there is no reason it cannot have percussion.His own voice mattered. It contained none of the polished anonymity that playback singing could sometimes demand. When Deva sang, a person appeared. The voice seemed to have travelled somewhere before reaching the microphone. That distinct voice was also part of why “Vaararu Vaararu Azhagar Vaararu,” from Kallazhagar, eventually escaped the film that contained it. Sung by Deva with S A Rajkumar, it became part of the soundscape of Madurai’s Chithirai festival, played as Kallazhagar enters the Vaigai before enormous crowds. Cinema had borrowed from public culture. Public culture calmly took the song back.Story continues below this adHis range was easy to overlook because Deva made accessibility seem effortless. He had studied Western and Indian music and possessed a grounding in classical forms. He worked with voices associated with devotional and classical traditions, and his compositions could move from gaana to melody to Carnatic inflection without issuing a press release about their sophistication.More than 400 films followed across Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam. His collaborators on Saturday remembered not only the catalogue but the temperament behind it.Lyricist Vairamuthu recalled their work on Annamalai, Baashha, Arunachalam, Aasai, Nerukku Ner, Vaalee, Kushi and Panchathanthiram, saying it felt as though he had “lost one of my own fingers.” Kamal Haasan remembered a “vibrant soul.” M K Stalin noted the unlikely space Deva created for himself in an age dominated by Ilaiyaraaja and Rahman.Chief Minister Vijay called his death an “irreplaceable loss” and said his music would remain in the history of film music. Vijay also visited Deva’s family on Saturday. There is something circular in that image. Cinema often tells us that stars manufacture themselves through determination, charisma and destiny. They do not. A star is a collective construction. Writers give him sentences, cinematographers give him light, editors decide how long the world should wait before showing his face. And composers teach us what to feel when he appears.Story continues below this adFor Rajinikanth, Deva could make an entrance feel like something that had already happened in mythology. When Rajini began walking down a staircase, Deva would put a few notes underneath, and suddenly the poor staircase had responsibilities.With the younger Vijay, the magic was quieter and perhaps more consequential. Deva helped him enter Tamil homes before Vijay ever imagined entering Tamil Nadu politics. He travelled ahead of the actor – through cassette players and tea-shop speakers, wedding halls and college buses, barber shops and bedrooms. The songs made the star familiar before politics made him important. People had fallen in love, sulked, danced, travelled and grown older with that voice and that face somewhere nearby. Decades later, when Vijay asked them to see him as something other than an actor, he was hardly arriving among strangers.This was one of Deva’s quiet superpowers. He made stars enormous without making his own presence stand between them and us. He supplied the trumpet, the tenderness, the swagger, sometimes the entire weather system around a hero — and then somehow disappeared into the experience. Perhaps that is the loveliest thing about a popular composer: Deva did not merely make music for stars. He helped make the stars, and then gave them back to people as memories.