New Music Orchestra / Bhagwati / Other Realms of Sound - NOSPR

India’s musical culture successfully resisted the global ambitions of the European classical tradition, despite nearly a century of British rule. It did, however, readily enter into dialogue with African American jazz, with which it shares the important – often even predominant – role of improvisation. Composers who reconcile the musical traditions of South Asia with the Western vision of sonic modernity remain few and far between, for it is an exceptionally challenging union. Reena Esmail simply weaves melodies derived from ragas into the fabric of an almost classical choral idiom. Shirish Korde, by contrast, chose to precisely imitate traditional improvised runs within the sonic and harmonic context of modern chamber music. Explaining his own artistic practice, he often referred to the ancient Indian concept of rasa: ‘It is the elusive quality of a work of art, difficult to express in words, that evokes a profound emotional response in the listener. It was precisely this that I found lacking in modernist music’.

The same idea lies at the heart of the opus magnum of the Germany-based composer Sandeep Bhagwati. In the title of his monumental composition, he even devised his own personal decoding of the ancient concept, treating RASAS as an acronym for Ritual and Sophisticated Areas of Sound. In practice, this takes the form of an ever-expanding cycle of miniatures for chamber orchestra, in which familiar European sonorities and motifs seem to emanate an energy originating from another world. Or perhaps simply – from another culture.

Michał Mendyk

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