very weekday for the past seven months, come hail or hurricane, Warren Senders has stood for an hour on a roadside in his hometown in the Boston area in the U.S. carrying a placard with a warning about the dangers of climate change. But he doesn’t stand idle as he executes what he calls his “daily act of conscience,” an initiative he has dubbed ‘Man with Sign’. The khayal singer, versatile musician and social activist uses this time to do his riyaaz to the beat of iTabla, the popular tabla app for the iphone.
“If I were a specialist in polar bears, I’d be talking about polar bears,” he says just before his first recital in India, a baitak at Mumbai’s Volte Gallery in Worli, last week. On a one-week concert tour of India, Senders performs again in the city tomorrow. “But because I know enough science, I can see that it’s not just our biodiversity that is in danger from climate change but also our human cultural diversity,” says Senders. “Social justice musicians’ songs are all about these issues. That is not my training. I can’t sing songs about climate change because the khayal idiom itself does not permit that. But that is not an excuse. It just means that I have to find a different way.”
‘Man with Sign’ is just one of those different ways Senders has found. At every concert, he makes a two-minute announcement, as he did at his baitak that day. In 2014, he began an online project called The Climate Message, in which he uploads videos of musicians not only performing but also making a statement about climate change. The site theclimatemessage.com now has 200 such videos featuring musicians from all over the world.
Senders began his campaign against climate change in 2009, when he began daily responding to the worst news about the topic by writing a letter to the editor of the publication in which the item had appeared. At the end of four years, he had written 1,461 letters that were printed in publications all over the world, from Greenland to the Solomon Islands, from Pakistan to Ireland. He stopped after that, because he found the news too depressing. But he then found other ways through which he could integrate his environmental activism with his music.
“In Hindustani music, as in other classical traditions, music is more than just a form of entertainment,” said Senders. “It’s a way for succeeding generations of human beings to speak to one another. If I sing a song that’s 300 years old in a raga that’s 600 years old, then I am in communication with those past generations.”
“But someone should still be there to take that song 300 years in the future,” he said. “It’s our obligation as exponents and followers of this music to carry it into that future. When the future is threatened, it’s an existential threat to all the work that human beings do in creating meaning and beauty.”
Since 2009, Senders has also been producing two climate change benefit concerts a year for 350.org, an international climate change advocacy group. These concerts feature artistes from traditions from all over the world.
Indeed, while Senders is primarily a performer and teacher of khayal music, he has always had a deep interest in jazz and world music. Growing up in the Boston area, he learnt the upright bass violin and guitar, the latter from D Wood, the jazz musician who has lived in Mumbai for the past three decades. Senders became interested in Hindustani music after listening to a record of Ravi Shankar’s music festival from India, and he got Wood hooked too.
Today, Senders is a khayal singer of a high calibre, with a refined gayaki , or style, a highly developed aesthetic sense and a vast repertoire. He is also a scholar of music, with expertise in acoustics, music theory, music history, world music and ethnomusicology, all of which he studied as an undergraduate in Beacon College, where he designed his own major called Music Systems.
The outer framework of his gayaki comes from the Gwalior gharana , but like many thinking musicians, he has incorporated elements that appeal to him from other traditions, such as some amount of bol-baant, or rhythmic play with the composition’s words, from the Agra gharana , as well its nom-tom alaaps (also known as Poornang-alaap ) for some ragas, and the Jaipur gharana ’s fine, laya- based elaborations (when each beat is emphasised in the vilambit or slow elaboration) for other ragas.
Much of this was evident at his first baitak , which attracted a small but highly sophisticated group of listeners that included several musicians, such as Neela Bhagwat, Shrikant Waikar and Shashwati Mandal. His renditions of taans are particularly noteworthy for their aesthetic appeal. Instead of taking the tempting route of showing off all that he can do, which makes the taan renditions of far too many musicians sound too much like riyaaz , he picked one or two ideas to develop for every raga. Showing that knowing what to leave out is as crucial as deciding what to include, Senders ended his elaborations even when the listener sensed he could go on for a little bit longer.
He surprised the audience with a rendition of Chandramukhi Kanada, a rare raga that he had learnt from his main guru, the late Shreeram Devasthalee, a student of the great Gajananbuwa Joshi. Senders was a student of Devasthalee for about 10 years from 1986, intensively for the first few years, then in between trips to the US.
Senders began learning khayal from Kalpana Mazumdar, a Kirana gharana singer in Boston. In 1985, he won a fellowship to study with Bhimsen Joshi in Pune. In that first year, he absorbed a lot through osmosis by travelling with Joshi to concerts and attending baitaks , but had to wait for a teacher like Devasthalee to translate this initial experience into actual singing competence.
In Devasthalee, who was largely unknown and is perhaps still under-recognised, Senders found an intellectual soulmate, who was able to tailor his teaching to suit the American’s special needs as an outsider to the culture. A teacher of Indian languages by profession and the son of a highly respected Sanskritist, Devasthalee combined traditional methods of taleem with a highly analytical approach that suited Senders’ Western educational background.
During those years, Devasthalee exclusively taught Senders and his then fiancée Vijaya Sundaram (now wife), giving them as much attention as he could. “It was the old style of taleem , but because he was a teacher of such extraordinary ability, he would not say, just sing back what you heard, but would analyse deeply what I had sung. He was an unbelievably powerful teacher. In 1994, when he developed signs of Parkinsons’ disease, he said, ‘I am going to teach you all I know. If I had a concert between now and the day I die, I would not run out of things to sing.’”
Warren Senders will perform at Bandra Base on March 23 at 8.30 pm. Tickets are priced Rs 350
The author is a freelance journalist
Senders has been producing two climate change benefit concerts a year for 350.org
“When the future
is threatened, it’s an existential threat
to all the work that human beings do
in creating meaning and beauty.”
