The weather was warm and damp and a crowd of over 40,000 had gathered at Madison City Square at the Wisconsin State Capitol grounds. They had been arriving from mid-morning for the 7 p.m. concert, to spread blankets on the lawn or set up chairs on the sidewalks so that they may savour the high-voltage ambience.
The Concert on the Square is no ordinary affair; it is a 30-year-old annual tradition in Madison with six shows over two months. The surrounding streets are closed to traffic, scores of vendors set up food carts, filling the air with spices and fragrances from around the world, and a mega sound system ensures that the music is heard within a two block radius.
A few weeks ago, Concert on the Square turned to India. The Wisconsin Chamber Orchestra (WCO), with conductor maestro Andrew Sewell, performed with special guest artiste Chitravina N. Ravikiran. The performance was based on the revolutionary concept of Melharmony, which attempts to unite the musical systems of the West and the Carnatic world by finding common ground between melody and harmony, even as it embraces the distinctions between them.
Maestro Sewell included Western works from the late 18th and early 19th century composers Mozart and Beethoven to highlight the comparison to their South Indian contemporary, Muthuswami Dikshitar (1775-1835). The opening piece, Beethoven’s Coriolan Overture, Op. 62, set the tone for the evening. The next was a creation of the noted 20th century composer, Vittorio Giannini, perhaps to showcase another contemporary composer from the East, Ravikiran. The orchestra’s interpretations under maestro Sewell’s direction were enthralling.
Just before the third piece, the emcee (Norman Gilliland of Wisconsin Public Radio) revealed to the audience that some of Dikshitar’s compositions were actually influenced by the music played by Western bands in Fort St. George in Chennai during the 18th and 19th centuries.
As a Western European, classically-trained string teacher, I find the study of Carnatic music new and exciting. What makes it even more interesting is the way Ravikiran brings together the melodies and scales of Carnatic music with the harmonies and chord changes of Western music.
Most attempts at East-West fusion in classical, contemporary or even film music try to merge Indian with Western classical music or jazz. This can make the music interesting or exotic, at best, and befuddling at worst. Melharmony’s success lies in its ability to blend the aesthetics of Carnatic and Western classical sounds because of its fidelity to the principles of both.
The large crowd was intrigued by the rich sound of the Chitravina, a 20-string instrument with sympathetic strings that Ravikiran has made his own. The sound can be compared to the sitar but the instrument is closer in structure to the Hawaiian guitar, and is fretless. Ravikiran joined with WCO to perform his arrangement of Dikshitar’s ‘Master of the Mountain’ (in the pentatonic raga Hamsadhvani ). And when it ended with an allegro typical of the West but in 6/8 time signature ending with a Carnatic style cadenza or korvai , the audience jumped to its feet. In ‘Snow Princess’ (raga Hemavati ), the composer took a solo turn after which the orchestra made a grand entrance with its own prelude parts for the piece ‘Shree Kantimateem’. Ravikiran seamlessly wove in solfa improvisation ( kalpana swaras ) into the piece, with the orchestra supplementing key areas with chords and also joining in during the refrain. The finale to the piece and to the first part of the evening was a long Ravikiran passage with mridangam player Ramesh Srinivasan.
Mozart’s overture to Cosi fan tutte set the tone for the second part of the concert and paved the way for another Melharmonic piece, ‘Spring Energy’, based on Dikshitar’s ‘Shree Saraswati Hitae’ in the typical but rare raga, Maanji . Carnatic cognoscenti might wonder whether a raga like this with oscillations counter-intuitive to Western musicians could be harmonised but Ravikiran was able to create preludes and interludes with Western flavours and also get the strings and woodwinds to play certain oscillated passages that highlighted the melodic nuances of Maanji . The performance wound down with Beethoven’s Symphony No. 4 Mvt. 4 and Mvt. 3 of Haydn’s Symphony No. 79 in F major.
Nancy Dunn Kurr is a teacher of strings in the Waunakee Community School District.
