by Vivek Menezes
June 11th 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 4th 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.
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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.
**
“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 she promises to return each year to continue training singers, and has also promised to help them seek training abroad when merited.
**
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 24th of May 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 at 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)
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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
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