Ten minutes into a choral concert in the pale-gold church of St Francis of Assisi in Old Goa, the audience is about to erupt into claps when Santiago Lusardi Girelli signals for a pause. The conductor then continues to sway and punctuate the air for the next half hour, guiding the roughly 50-member choir through dramatic shifts in the mood and pace of the piece being performed: the Misatango, a misa (Latin for “mass”) composition that features an unexpected amalgam of vintage tango and church music. When his hands fall quietly to his sides at the end, the viewers, who had understood not to interrupt the flow of the performance, offer a prolonged applause.
This recital on the final day of the Ketevan World Sacred Music Festival in the heritage city of Old Goa was the conclusion of a busy season of performances for the Goa University amateur choir, the only one of its kind to have been nurtured in an Indian university. Its Italian-Argentinian founder Girelli, who holds the Western Music chair, has been guiding the musicians towards paths both established and uncharted. The choir performed Beethoven with the Symphony Orchestra of India at the NCPA in Mumbai recently, and with the Oxford University-Somerville College choir in Goa, before premiering an ambitious acousmatic composition as well as Argentinian composer Martin Palmeri’s Misatango. Since he launched it in 2013, the choir has sung in nearly 20 languages.
Girelli has also managed in this time to start and direct four editions of the Ketevan festival, which features sacred music traditions from the West and the East, and is themed on the idea of “co-existence”. The seeds for this fascination with plurality and sacredness were planted in Girelli’s formative years in Buenos Aires, where his father followed the ultra-orthodox Catholic organisation Opus Dei, and his mother was inspired by Paramahansa Yoganand. So the five-year-old Girelli took yoga and meditation lessons twice a week, while also attending Christian school. “I grew up in the middle of that mess, a particular kind of chaos. My life has been an effort to co-exist between two very different concepts of understanding spirituality and religion.”
This effort led him to engage with a multitude of belief systems, and even create one of his own. His doctoral thesis involved applying Buddhist phenomenology and Hindu ritualism to Western music. “I tried to use those processes in the interpretation of what we do as artists of music.” Goa is only the most recent stop in Girelli’s travels, which have included a stint as a monk in a French monastery. In Venezuela, he worked with El Sistema, a free programme in classical music for young children from impoverished backgrounds. In Bolivia, he worked with indigenous orchestras in remote towns. For a while, he ran a community, Sadhana, which practised “art as religion.”
He identifies now as a “Christian-Buddhist”. By his own estimation, he is more “a musician, than a philosopher or theosophist”. But the conductor’s engagement with all three of those fields is apparent in his language, as much as in his work and education history. For instance, when he says: “My understanding of sacred music is very open. Every sound is sacred. It is an expression of nature and reality, and, for me, reality is sacred.” The strong pull towards music had its roots in family too: his grandfather was a violinist. He has studied orchestra conduction, composition, and choral conduction.
Still, he only hesitantly ventured to compose a Passion on the life of Christ three months ago. “Johann Sebastian Bach wrote big Passions so it is an ambitious thing for a composer. It felt uncomfortable but I had to break that barrier.” Girelli’s Passion Landscapes featured a Hindustani singer, acousmatic sounds such as using a hammer on the strings of a piano, and vocal elements including shouting, speaking, laughing and screaming.
Girelli is not easy to reach closer to performance days and, from the sidelines of the festival, it is clear why. He remains energetically preoccupied with rehearsals, unperturbed by the sun shining mercilessly on the ruins of the St Augustine Tower. At all times, even when he has carved out an hour for a conversation, he is attuned to sound. When a microphone squeals in the distance, he stops mid-sentence to exclaim: “Ooof!” Between performances, he appears more satisfied making tweaks in the sound-control booth, rather than mingling with guests or performers. By nightfall, people, armed earnestly with hand fans, begin to fill the 500 seats. They enjoy music with origins in the Caucasus, West Asia and the Indian subcontinent. Truly, for those 180 minutes, only beauty is discernible and no one thinks of weapons or bad world leaders.
The Goa University choir comprises a mix of students, teachers and visiting musicians. It also collaborates with members of other Western music ensembles in India including The Bangalore Men. His role as conductor makes him feel like an alchemist, explains Girelli. “You receive (the musicians’) trust and commitment. They give you their sound, on which they have been working for long years.” It is an experience at the end of which he is usually “exhausted but happy”.
Since first visiting Goa in 2012, the scope of his activities in India has grown. “Goans love music as everybody does, but in some way they feel they have received something special that others haven’t, they feel they are particularly more Western … and they attach themselves to Western music,” he observes. “That is probably also because we are based in the Christian community here.” He works for nearly eight months a year with the university now, where he used to visit for only a month earlier. Beyond stage performances, his festival programmes interactions and demonstrative sessions in schools and care homes across the state.
The choir recently recorded music for a documentary on the life of the activist Aquino Braganza who fought against Portuguese colonial interests in Goa and Africa. “I think India is quite limited in contemporary music. It is dominated by the classical like Beethoven, Bach and Wagner but nobody goes further because the audience may not like it. Even in the West sometimes the audience doesn’t like it but we need to go further,” says the conductor. His next project is to revive some 1,000 pages of original music by the late Goan musician Anthony Gonsalves, after whom the chair he currently holds in the university is named. Gonsalves, a prominent music arranger in Hindi films, is popularly remembered as the man who inspired the name for Amitabh Bachchan’s character in Amar Akbar Anthony (1977).
People have occasionally confused Girelli with the many hippie-spirited tourists in Goa, given his long hair gathered up in a bun and the scarf casually draped around his neck, but he clarifies he is not one. He does not suffer from grand illusions of togetherness or of changing the world. “The idea behind the festival is just the celebration of ‘co-existence’, which in reality is quite difficult, and it is a mystery.” Indeed, Girelli has the gift for an enigmatic art form which may be humanity’s best hope for such demystification. As Guy de Maupassant once described music: “Precise as algebra and vague as a dream, this art made out of mathematics and air.”