Indian composers of international repute in the Western classical canon are hard to come by. Sandeep Bhagwati is one such example. Bhagwati was born to a German mother and an Indian father in the swinging 60s of Bombay. He left for Germany when he was just five and went on to study composition and conducting in Salzburg, Paris and Munich. Today the Berlin-based composer is also a multimedia artist, festival director, poet and academic. In 1998, Bhagwati's opera in five acts, Ramanujan, on the life of mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan premiered at the Munich Biennale.
This year, Germany's Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra—considered one of the oldest and finest in the world, performing around 90 concerts every year—premiered Bhagwati's piece Vistar (elaboration) in a concert tour across Indian metros from March 18 to 31. The concert series, held in partnership with Goethe-Institut/ Max Mueller Bhavan, played works of Bach and Brahms, alongside the world premiere of Vistar, a haunting pair of compositions for a string orchestra. Bhagwati in an email conversation with THE WEEK, further elaborates on Vistar, concert etiquette and his efforts to make an India tour happen.
Vistar was composed as a tribute to your friend and musicologist Dr Ashok Ranade. Can you tell us about your memories of Dr Ranade and how he influenced your work?
I met Dr Ranade when I travelled through India looking for musicians who would want to restart a musical dialogue between Indian and European music that would be a true dialogue. I wanted to commission renowned musicians of the classical traditions to write a piece for the most experimental orchestra in Germany, the Ensemble Modern. This Ensemble insists on the principle that in musicking there is nothing that is unacceptable, impossible or ugly, if you are truly serious about your commitment to music. I had repeatedly heard that if I wanted good Indian musicians to be interested in my idea not only as a money-making scheme but as a truly artistic project which might change their musical, I should try to get Dr Ranade on my side. I visited him in his house in North Mumbai, and he was the most gracious of hosts, overflowing with ideas and, most important for me, a true enthusiast for fundamental changes in the Indian tradition.
He repeatedly said, "India is in search of a new kind of song, a new kind of tradition of music." He also, as a musicologist, was an avid debunker of myths that had built up around Indian music, such as its eternal character and its long continuous history—characterising them as understandable but erroneous defensive reactions to colonial rule. He was looking for an intellectually stimulating, learned, wise Indian music that would be sonically and philosophically curious about the contemporary world and its concerns, not a classical tradition that vis-a-vis the modern world could only choose between conservative rigidity and commercial-minded abandon of all standards. This attitude impressed me deeply, and his support for my project ushered in two fruitful decades of me working in India and abroad with many wonderful Hindustani classical musicians, such as Shubha Mudgal, Aneesh Pradhan, Uday Bhawalkar, Dhruba Ghosh, Sameer Dublay and many others. I am eternally thankful to him for guiding these mutually deep explorations.
Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra
Vistar is sombre, and also dark and eerie in places. It almost feels like it plonks you in the middle of a mysterious forest. What are some of the themes you are exploring through this piece?
It is indeed a night music, full of strange noises and voices that appear and disappear. But I did not have a particular narrative in mind when I wrote it. I just followed the musical sound as it grew, transformed, one thing leading to another. Of course, the origin was a moment of mourning. I had written another piece called Alaap for Ashok at the time of his death. All the melodies in Vistar were taken from this piece. But in the years between writing Alaap and writing Vistar, my father passed away. He had, ever since I had become a musician, wanted me to build musical bridges between my two musical heritages. While I was writing Vistar, I often thought of him, and in a way, I have only recently realised that Vistar is actually more an aching understanding that I have actually lost my father. He was a wonderfully open-minded presence in my life, and I am only slowly realising with how much wisdom and in how many areas of life he had subtly guided me over the years.
What are the Indian ragas and musical influences woven in Vistar, apart from the very title of the piece?
Well, there are only a few Indian ragas that I have a strong emotional reaction to. One of them, Darbari Kannada, appears in several of my works, and in Vistar, too. Others, like Desh or Purvi make fleeting appearances, but this piece, of course, is not a raga composition. I did try to make Western-trained musicians appreciate the meends, the alankaras and the taans of Hindustani musicking, and I tried to notate them as well as I could. The overall musical language of this piece is an exploration of superposed melodies that grow, evolve, and mutually influence one another.
How do you think the reception and appreciation of Chamber Orchestra has grown in India? In terms of just concert etiquette, how much ground is to be covered here?
Sandeep Bhagwati
Well, I unfortunately was not present at the concert tour, so I cannot say anything about the evolution of audience etiquette. Western concerts of classical music are sit-still-and-listen concerts, western concert halls are built to produce the most intense silence (carpeted floors, room acoustics that dampen audience noise and amplify stage sounds) so that music can shine unamplified in perfect silence and performers are not troubled by audience sounds. Indian halls, with a few exceptions, are not built for that (they are mostly built for amplified sounds) and this will always make an Indian concert audience sound busy, regardless of how quiet they try to be. Even in the West, amplification is increasingly troubling the audience's understanding that performers and fellow audience members, too, should still be able to hear the music well, even if you yourself are distracted by something else. With amplification (or while watching screens) the performers and other audience members are not affected by your noise, and you can do what you want. That this is not the case in a chamber orchestra concert, and that the noise you make will negatively affect the musical experience for others, is an insight that is losing ground everywhere.
To what extent has digitisation and "computer creativity" infiltrated Western classical music? How worried are you about it?
All learned musics, whether Western, Indian, Chinese, Arabian or other, are highly technological arts. A sitar is a technological marvel, as is a piano or an Arabian lute. Creativity in all these music cultures, is not about inspiration alone, they all require a substantial amount of craft and scholarship before you can be truly creative. Digitisation is just the latest technology, and I am sure musicians will soon understand it in its own creative potential; it is, after all, fairly new.
If you compare this with the organ in the west—it was invented around the year 1000, but the first really interesting organ pieces were only written about 500 years later, i.e. 500 years of technological and intellectual/musical exploration were necessary for composers to be able to create good organ pieces. Today, we are moving faster, and many AI computer creations actually are already quite interesting. I work in this field, and I keep being amazed by some of the results. AI creativity in music is coming whether we want it or not. Resisting it would not make much sense to me, neither pragmatically nor as a creative artist. As someone who treasures invention and new challenges, I like to work with the newest vehicles of imagination and I would like to understand their potential to make new types of music that still truly touch listeners. And as a composer, I hope that these emergent technologies afford us new ways to connect and emotionally relate with audiences and maybe usher in new ways of listening to music. In doing so, they might marginalise some older ways of music making, but does not every artistic breakthrough banish the previous fashions to the margins of cultural life?
How soon can we hope to see a concert tour of Sandeep Bhagwati in India?
Well, that does not entirely depend on me: you should ask cultural institutions, promoters, on sponsors in India. Tours apart, I do come to India regularly: with some musical friends in Pune, such as singers Sameer Dublay and Aparna Gurav, sitarist Sweekar Katti, shehnai player Pramod Gaekwad, percussionists Govind Bhilare and Charudatt Phadke and guest musicians, I have founded an ensemble for experimentations in Indian music called Sangeet Prayog. We have already produced one album called Dhvani Sutras, and we will again be in residence at Flame University, Pune, during the first two weeks of August, to prepare a new concert programme and record an album. I invite all musicians, observers, thinkers who are interested to develop new avenues for Indian classical music to come and visit us in Pune and maybe even work with us to make an Indian tour happen.
I would love to tour India not only with the work I have done elsewhere, but with Indian music that was developed here, that seeks untrodden ground, wider perspectives and richer soundworlds for Indian music of and by itself—without abandoning its deep erudition, nor its spiritual resonances.
