Symphony in blues: "Western" music in India and more
Vivek Menezes
vmin...@gmail.com
June 11, 2010, and a bright midsummer evening in Moscow.
We're in one of the iconic buildings of the Russian capital,
the opulent Hall of Columns, with its spectacular crystal
chandeliers ablaze with light for Russia Day, that country's
equivalent of the American Fourth of July. This year, there's
more reason to celebrate -- it's the finale of the Festival
of the World's Symphony Orchestra's and the audience of
tuxedoed sophisticates is hushed, rapt with attention and
focused on the familiar music ringing in their ears.
It's Beethoven's ultimate masterpiece, the 9th Symphony,
so central to music history that the original format of the
compact disc was expanded from 10cm to 12cm specifically to
fit it. The audience sighs almost imperceptibly when the
'Ode to Joy' rings out, the rousing chorus on which the
official Anthem of Europe is played. It's undoubtedly the
most familiar and famous single piece of music ever written.
But zoom in closer, and you realize there is something
decidedly unusal about this symphony orchestra that's deep
into Beethoven's magnum opus. They're not Russians, or
Germans. In fact, they're not from any of the cultures that
sustain Western music, or even from the Far East which has
embraced it so successfully in recent generations. In fact,
we are looking on at the international debut of the Symphony
Orchestra of India (SOI), a four-year-old operation that's
sponsored by the National Centre for the Performing Arts in
Mumbai, the "fulfillment of a dream" of Khushroo Suntook, the
NCPA chairman.
"I grew up listening to the 'Ode to Joy', and
Beethoven's 9th Symphony" smiles Ashley Rego, a
25-year-old violinist who has been with the SOI
since its inception. "Moscow is known for producing
the best string players in the world, so playing
there is just a great honour." Rego is one of
several Goans who play full-time for the SOI, but a
close look at the rest of the players reveals that
Indians constitute just a handful of 109 members.
In fact, the SOI is a grab-bag of musicians from 14
different countries, with a particularly large
contingent representing Kazakhstan, the home
country of the SOI's music director, Marat Bisengaliev.
The Kazakh came to the attention of Suntook in London, where
he impressed the NCPA official at a concert he happened to
attend. He was invited to visit Mumbai with his orchestra,
and eventually to set up the SOI in 2006.
When this ambitious new venture was launched, there were only
10 Indians recruited to play in a crowd of musicians from the
ex-Soviet Union. After four years, there are now 15 Indian
regular players, so a bit more than ten per cent of the total
contingent, but still a considerable distance from
constituting a "national" orchestra worth the name.
The Moscow concert does constitute a milestone for the SOI,
and bodes well for the future development of a classical
music culture in the subcontinent.
But forgotten in all the hoopla about this "pioneering Indian
orchestra" is that it comes after long decades of purposeful
stifling of Western classical music in India, and a full 52
years after the first proper symphony orchestra in India was
founded, and then disbanded. What's more, the Indian Symphony
Orchestra that performed several times in 1951 and 1952 under
the baton of the visionary Anthony Gonsalves was constituted
entirely of Indians, and even played a repertoire of
"raga-based symphonies" that remains completely unique in the
history of Western classical music.
* * *
Most people don't realize that so-called "Western music" was
being played by Indians in India, and already
well-established hundreds of years before the sitar was
invented, or tablas made an appearance in what would much
later become enshrined as Hindustani music. Wrong-headed
nationalists like to trump the credentials of the music that
emerged from post-Mughal north India as somehow more "Indian"
than, say, a violin concerto. It's an absurd and ahistorical
argument, completely ignorant of the history of India's
western coastline.
For thousands of years, the Konkan and Malabar
coasts have been engaged in trade and cultural
exchange across the Arabian Sea. Every discrete
trading community from the Meditteranean all the
way down the East African coastline came and went
from the ports of this spice coast. Christianity
had established permanent roots in India before it
arrived in Europe, there were significant Christian
communities all along the Konkan and Malabar
coastline many centuries before England, Spain or
Portugal even saw their first convert.
So there must have been so-called "Western" music played in
this part of India long before Alfonso da Albuquerque seized
Goa in 1510 (many years before the first Mughal set foot in
India). However, it is the spate of church-building that he
set off that really gave the music Indian roots.
The Portuguese proved indifferent to most kinds of education,
for themselves and for their subjects as well. However, they
did see a need for many musicians to play church music in the
wake of the coerced conversions that created hundreds of
thousands of Konkani Catholics in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries.
Within months of his conquest of Goa, Albuquerque was already
beseeching the King of Portugal to furnish organs for the
churches that were coming up at full speed all over the new
Estado da India. Within a generation, Western instruments
were rooted in Konkan Catholic practice, church services were
accompanied by the same mix of instruments as Europe:
cornettos, violas, harpsichords.
By the seventeenth century, the native Goan's
expertise in church music had already become
legendary. In 1683, the Italian traveler Sebastiani
attended a mass in the Basilica of Bom Jesus, and
marveled "it was celebrated by seven choirs with
the sweetest instrumental interludes. I felt I was
in Rome. I could not believe how proficient these
Canarese are in this music, how well they perform
it, and with what facility."
The centrality of music to the distinctly Goan mode of
churchgoing was underlined by an historic 17th century decree
by the Vatican. Rome declared that unlike the rest of the
entire world, only the diocese of Goa would be allowed to use
instruments (violin, clarinet and bass were specifically
named) in their religious ceremonies which commemorated the
three days of great mourning that culminate in Easter Sunday.
These instruments and their practice had become that
ingrained in the Goan way of life -- a full hundred years
before the first sitar is recorded to make an appearance in history.
The musical history of the Goans was again dramatically
influenced in another direction when the British occupied the
territory during the Napoleonic Wars that culminated in the
Battle of Waterloo in 1815.
In that period, the British were delighted to encounter the
Goans. They had no dietary taboos, so many became cooks to
the colonialists. They were familiar with Western clothing,
so many became tailors across the Empire. And there were very
many who could play Western instruments, so thousands of men
picked up their violins and trumpets, learned to play 'God
Save the Queen', and trooped out of Goa to become
professional musicians in Rangoon and Karachi, Aden and
Singapore and all across the British Empire even to London's
famous Ritz Hotel (where a Goan pianist still tinkles away at
teatime each Sunday).
Via the prism of this history, it seems extremely ironic that
the Symphony Orchestra of India in 2010 has just a handful of
Indian musicians scattered among a host of foreigners.
It didn't have to come to this -- there was a Goan orchestra
playing at the Taj Mahal hotel in Mumbai as far back as 1916
and another in the 20's called the Bombay Chamber Orchestra
(led by the German, Edward Behr) which received huge acclaim
from foreign visitors.
Later, Dominic Pereira became the concertmaster of
another promising fledgling orchestra full of
Goans, the Bombay Philharmonic. Without
interference, these musical shoots would have
certainly flowered into a first-rate indigenous
classical orchestra. But politics stifled the
opportunity, and generation after generation of
piano and violin and trumpet players from India
were silenced, or forced to migrate to the West.
Some became subsumed into Bollywood. The Bandra-based editor
and brilliant researcher, Naresh Fernandes has brought that
period to life in a series of landmark essays. He writes,
"until the 1980's, India had no pop music save for Hindi film
songs. Millions memorized and hummed the compositions of C.
Ramachandra. Shankar and Jaikishan, Laxmikant and Pyarelal
and SD Burman, whose names rolled by in large letters at the
beginning of the movies. But the Sound of India was actually
created by Goan musicians, men whose names flickered by in
small type under the designation "arranger". It's clear. The
Hindi film classics that resound across the subcontinent and
in Indian homes around the world wouldn't have been made
without Goans."
The last serious attempt to form an indigenous
orchestra in India was also the most promising. It
came from this world of Goans in Hindi cinema, the
brainchild of Anthony Gonsalves, revered teacher of
a generation of Bollywood composers, whose name was
later immortalized in 'Amar Akbar Anthony' by his
grateful student, Pyarelal.
Gonsalves, an acknowledged musical genius, developed an
abiding love for Raga-based music. "It struck me very hard in
my heart and mind," he is reported to have said. He became
impassioned with creating symphonic music from ragas, and
wrote several pioneering pieces of music in this vein
including 'Sonatina Indiana' and 'Concerto in Raag Sarang'.
In 1958, Gonsalves paid all the bills to constitute 110
musicians into the Indian Symphony Orchestra. They made their
debut in the quadrangle of St. Xaviers College in South Bombay.
The photographs from that day are extremely impressive, but
also heart-breaking when seen in hindsight. 110 beautifully
dressed Indian musicians playing symphonic music with
tremendous gusto, with an impossibly young-looking Lata
Mangueshkar and Manna Dey singing along with great intensity.
Standing majestically atop his lectern, baton in action,
Gonsalves is poised and leonine. He looks very very happy.
But right there is where the story ends, and a
giant door was slammed on the future of symphonic
music in India. Idiotic nationalistic paranoia held
that Goan musicians like Gonsalves were suspect
because they had "foreign names" and played
"foreign music."
Walt Disney came calling for this brilliant composer and
asked him to score a movie for them with Indian governmental
involvement. But ministerial clearance never came: the I&B
minister told the shocked young Goan point-blank, "Christian
musicians cannot represent India."
Anthony Gonsalves was crushed, and bewildered by this
questioning of his Indianness. He disbanded his orchestra,
and went abroad for a lost decade before returning to
retirement in total isolation in a Goan village by the sea.
His unique raga-based symphonies have never been performed
again, and the musicians in his orchestra scattered into
obscurity. One day, his symphonies are certain to be
rediscovered, championed as great pioneering works, and
played in India, perhaps even by Bisengaliev and his crew of
Kazakhs and other nationalities in the SOI.
* * *
It was a combination of historical ignorance, juvenile
vindictiveness and cultural insecurity that killed off
Anthony Gonsalves's brave attempt to root symphonies in the
Indian musical lexicon, and the same forced conspired to
exert the absurd blanket ban on all imports of Western
musical instruments that held sway for a sold 40 years,
before being relaxed in 1995.
"The import restrictions severely hampered the
growth of music in this country," says Christopher
Gomes, the managing partner of Furtado's Music,
which has remained in the vanguard of music
education in India since 1865, and is by far the
largest distributor of imported instruments in the
country, with 15 showrooms and outlets from
Mangalore to Nagaland.
"Demand for the music never went away. There were always many
students who wanted to play the piano or violin," Gomes says,
"but there simply weren't enough instruments remaining after
1947 to allow the music to spread naturally.
Since the rules began tio change in 1995, he says the demand
has rapidly accelerated with each passing year,
"liberalization has meant that supply can start to catch up
to demand, and now it's obvious that this music has a very
bright future in India."
Just a few days before the SOI performed in Moscow, Furtado's
joined with the NCPA to organize the John Gomes Memorial All
India Piano Competition (named after his father) which was
judged by two eminent international pianists, the Canadian
Paul Stewart and the Vienna-based Goan, Marialena Fernandes.
Gomes says "Paul and Marialena were both really impressed by
the young talent that's now beginning to come out of India.
It's significantly better than just a few years ago. Now
we're seeing that young people envision their future in
music. It's only going to get better from here. My company is
going to support these positive developments in every way
that we can."
Like Marialena Fernandes, the London-based soprano Patricia
Rozario is another Bombay-born musical prodigy with Goan
roots. Rozario persevered to study western classical music in
the difficult days of the instrument ban, and eventually made
her way to the Guildhall School of Music where she excelled,
winning a Gold medal and many other prizes.
She's now established as one of the leading operatic singers
in the UK, with a unique style (she often wears a sari on
stage) that has inspired a host of the best contemporary
composers to write works especially for her. With Sir John
Tavener, it has become a unique collaboration -- he has
written more than thirty pieces of music exclusively for
Rozario to bring to life.
In 2009, Rozario decided to nourish her roots.
Along with her husband, the pianist Mark Troop, she
toured Mumbai, Delhi, Pune and Goa to identify
young singers with potential.
Rozario spent days in auditions, listening to scores of
singers, and picked out those who could benefit from her
mentoring, and perhaps make it to an international standard.
She agrees that "there is a great deal of promising talent in
India now. And there is also much more interest in this kind
of music, which can only grow with exposure." Rozario promises
to return each year to continue training singers, and has
also promised to help them seek training abroad when merited.
* *
Across the subcontinent, in the hillside cities and towns of
Meghalaya, Mizoram and Nagaland, there's another hotbed of
vocal talent that's quietly developing to critical mass, and
making the classical music world sit up and pay attention.
Like Goa, the roots of this movement can be traced back to
the Church.
The North-East's tryst with Christianity tracks back to the
rainy June day that the paradoxical figure of Thomas Jones
walked into Cherrapunjee, and immediately set Khasi history
on its ear.
A carpenter's son from Wales, Jones was an avowed
evangelist, but didn't actually convert a single
person while he was in India, and was eventually
kicked out of his own church for conduct
"derogatory to the character and calling of a
missionary." Yet, on the 150th anniversary of his
death (in 1991), more than 250,000 Khasi
Presbyterians gathered to celebrate his life.
Meanwhile his "mother church" back in Wales boasted
less than 5000 adherents in the whole country.
Thomas Jones distinguished himself -- and aggravated
colonial authorities -- by tirelessly dedicating himself to
the material improvement of the Khasis. He taught them modern
carpentry. He taught them accounting. He taught them how to
compute their almanac to the seven-day week. Above all, Jones
learned the unwritten Khasi language and transcribed it into
Roman script (with Welsh orthography!)
All the tribes of the North East believe Jones saved the
Khasi language -- and culture -- from certain extinction. And
so they repaid the Welshman by joining his church in droves.
The next 100 years saw the Khasis, Garos, the Mizos and Nagas
turn to Christianity in a huge wave, and right alongside the
religion came the music.
The biggest city of the North East, Shillong has
been called "India's rock capital" for many years,
and famously comes to a near-standstill every May
24 when the local legend, and Khasi icon, Lou Majaw
celebrates Bob Dylan's birthday. But the choral
tradition of the city is still virtually unknown,
even though the Shillong Chamber Choir has toured
all over the world, and won a series of prestigious
awards.
Right alongside Neil Nongkynrih's sophisticated ensemble are
literally thousands of other wonderful singers all across the
region who have gone unrecognized up to now. All across the
North-East, there are now serious choirs, which feature
incredible singers with world-class talent. With a little
recognition and support, the future could be limitlessly bright.
Earlier this year, the whole region saw what could lie ahead
when the young Naga singer, Sentirenla Lucia Panicker was
awarded the highest grade of her graduating class rat the
Berklee College of Music, the finest institution of its kind
in the USA, and brought the audience at her graduation to its
feet with a soul-stirring vocal performance.
She intends on returning to Nagaland, to pass on what she's
learned to another generation. Without the kind of
interference and meddling that destroyed the best hopes of
generations that came before her, it is young musicians with
her kind of drive who signify a hopeful future for serious
music in India, and allow us to dream of a day when the
Symphony Orchestra of India actually has more than a handful
of Indians in it. (ENDS)
--
An edited version of this article was published in the July
2010 edition of the Himal Magazine
http://www.himalmag.com/Indigenous-symphonies_nw4600.html
