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Passion for percussion
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Rohan Krishnamurthy has designed a more user-friendly mridangam
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Michigan mridangist Rohan has taken the mridangam where it’s never gone before
When most of his friends were poking around the insides of their cool new electronic gadgets, Rohan Krishnamurthy was busy taking apart and putting back together his mridangam.
And it paid off too. The 20-year-old mridangist from Kalamazoo, Michigan recently came up with a more user-friendly design for the ancient instrument, and his paper on the design was published in the music journal Percussive Notes.
“I’ve replaced the through and through strapping of the mridangam with a nuts and bolts system,” explains the youngster who was recently in Chennai, performing for his 10th consecutive music season. “This allows you to tune and replace the heads of the mridangam more easily.”
And his new design doesn’t alter the sound of the instrument; Rohan’s checked. The senior at Kalamazoo College spent his summer doing research on the acoustics of the design—he was actually supplementing work done by Nobel Laureate C.V. Raman in the 1930s—and won the best student paper award when he presented his findings at a recent conference.
Rohan’s love affair with the mridangam began at the age of eight, when he started taking lessons from Damodaran Srinivasan, a graduate student and a family friend. Damodaran had to move away after just a couple of months of classes, but that wasn’t going to stop teacher or student. They just hooked up external speakers to their phones on either end, and kept playing. “I knew the basic strokes by then, so I could play what I heard over the phone and he would critique it,” Rohan says. “I didn’t realise just how unconventional it was until later!”
One year later, good fortune came Rohan’s way in the form of a chance meeting with well-known mridangist Guruvayur Dorai in Michigan. “I was very lucky that things just clicked and he asked me to drop in on him when I came to Chennai,” Rohan recalls. Since then, Rohan has taken lessons from Dorai whenever possible.
In the meantime, he’s taken the mridangam to the symphony orchestra. It all began when Dr. Barry Ross, professor and assistant conductor of the Kalamazoo Symphony Orchestra heard Rohan perform briefly, and decided he would like to include a piece for the mridangam in the orchestra. And so, Rohan began working closely with Dr. Elizabeth Start, a composer and cellist in Michigan on Echoes, probably the first mridangam concerto ever written, fully scored in Western notation.
Echoes premiered successfully in 2006 and this year, Rohan has been invited to perform the piece (now with a companion piece Early Reflections included) as a soloist with various professional orchestras. Come March, he’ll also be doing a concert tour in Mid-Western U.S. with violinist Iyano Ninomiya from Budapest, another first of its kind collaboration. “Really, the possibilities for this cross-cultural sharing are infinite,” says Rohan.
From new easy-to-use designs to mridangam concertos, it certainly seems like this Michigan mridangist is intent on exploring as many of those possibilities as he can.
DIVYA KUMAR
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