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During all my years as a choir singer (celebrating 31 years of singing this year), making recordings have always come with mixed feelings. On one hand, you feel proud and happy to be able to document and spread your music and your choir, on the other hand, you dread the
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Latest News from On High: From now on in your town Fidelity is banned. If you are found to be faithful on The Day of Sacrifice, you and your partner shall be devoured by the Lake Monster. By Order. It had better not be you! Get unfaithful, quick! This is
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May 2018 was an exciting month for Bangalore – the première of the Bangalore City Chamber Orchestra (BCCO), a new star on the Indian horizon – an ensemble of young serious musicians, spearheaded by Bangalorean, Arun Rozario – founder-director! I admire Arun – his big dream finally found the light of day only
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The most common form of popular music in India is film music – songs from the movies, and Sperry has not shied away from adapting this form for choirs. Popular Music in Choral Format As mentioned in Part I of this series, the Natya Shastra intertwines drama, music and dance. Contemporary
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“One reason I love performing non-Western music is because I don’t find non-Western ideas in the music. I find basic human emotions and experiences that I have, I share, and I understand.” That outlook helps Ethan Sperry take on the daunting challenge of transplanting music between disparate traditions. Sperry
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As we all now know, Mumbai has an opera house, and what better in an opera house than lectures on opera? Apart from operas themselves, naturally. Well, hopefully, interest created by the one will lead to passion for the other. Some months ago, Royal Opera House impresario, Asad Lalljee, asked
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The United States of America (the India that Christopher Columbus thought he reached) and the real India lie on diametrically opposite sides of the globe; noon here, midnight there. The two lands only had sporadic contact in the distant past. But with America’s rise as a nation and the
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“From the minute a child is taught how to play an instrument, he’s no longer poor” Many years ago, soon after we had set up Child’s Play India Foundation, a music charity inspired hugely by the phenomenal success of Venezuela’s El Sistema movement, a wealthy Bombay socialite
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The death of English theoretical physicist, cosmologist, author and Director of Research at the Centre for Theoretical Cosmology, University of Cambridge, Professor Stephen Hawking on 14 March shook the world. Last year, to celebrate his 75th birthday, his Cambridge college – Gonville & Caius – commissioned composer Cheryl Frances-Hoad to write a
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The Western Music Education Association (WMEA) made its first foray into South India with a full day conference and conducting workshop in Kochi, Kerala, and an informational meeting in Chennai. Both events are part of WMEA’s organisational strategy to establish an all-India presence, reaching out to Western music teachers
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An exciting work for two percussionists from Berlin – Lukas Böhm and Ni Fan, who played the world premiere of this 2-percussion version of a much bigger piece at the Bad Kissingen Festival last summer. The rhythms, splashed on an array of percussion instruments, were inspired by ritual drumming at a
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Creative partnerships, between Western classical music societies and NGOs supporting the legitimacy of waste-pickers, formed the basis of my 6-city tour of India in 2012. These partnerships re-positioned an otherwise conventional Western classical music piano recital tour into one that made impact in unexpected and inspiring ways. The importance of
