In harmony

Cello and sitar, Western and Indian classical, merge on stage and off. Subhra Mazumdar meets a musical couple.

On stage, Shubhendra Rao and Saskia Rao de-Haas set off a susurration. After all, theirs is an unusual partnership — he a Bangalore-based sitar player, she a cellist from the Netherlands. But the murmur dies down as soon as the husband-wife duo strums the first notes of the instruments.

Rao, 47, comes from a musically-inclined family — his father, a sitar player, was a disciple of Ravi Shankar (Rao is named after Shankar’s son), and so was Rao. He is also, like his guru, a composer. His wife, on the other hand, trained in Western music, but opted to learn Hindustani classical music under Hariprasad Chaurasia.

 

The cello is associated mainly with Western classical music. Rao-de Haas had to make a lot of changes to adapt to playing Hindustani music. She went back to her cello-maker, Eduard van Tongeren of Holland, to make changes to the instrument. “The new cello is a five-string — that is, with one higher string included. Its body has been made shorter, wider and thicker so that the same resonance is upheld and it is comfortable to play while seated. Also, [van Tongeren] added 10 sympathetic strings to achieve resonance, so essential to Indian music. It is, therefore, the only cello of its kind in the world. It travels on the seat beside me and is not booked as luggage.”

There were other changes — the regulation black evening dress made way for the sari. The traditional Western classical style of sitting on a chair did not fit the Indian classical format, either. “I adopted the [Indian] seating posture right from the first lesson,” she recalls. “My guru was seated on the floor, I was on a chair and I knew I had to change that equation! For 10 years after I began to learn Hindustani music, I did not hear any Western music. My guru told me that I must develop a style of my own as there’s no other [Hindustani classical] cello player before me.”

The couple has played around the world, not just at concerts but also at universities and prestigious festivals like Edinburgh and Dover Lane in Kolkata. They play classical ragas as well as compositions, many of them their own, inspired by Western classical music and folk traditions.

“Journey through Life”, which they played at their recent concert at the Kennedy Center in Washington DC as part of the month-long Maximum India Festival, was one such fusion of East and West. For that piece they were accompanied by a Bharatanatyam performance by a mother-daughter duo from Minneapolis, disciples of Alarmel Valli. They also interacted with schoolchildren, at an event that was telecast live across schools and colleges in the US.

And finally, there was a full evening concert at which, says Rao, “our attempt was to show where we come from through a contrast of ragas to depict a variety of moods. The first half was in pure Indian classical tradition; the latter half had compositions inspired by folk traditions from Greece, Turkey, Ireland, Scotland, India and Japan, as these forms, like ours, are based on the pentatonic scale.”

Do they not fear angering purists with their fusion compositions? For Rao, presenting a musical tradition different from the one he trained in required a psychological shift. “The main change for me was to reorient my thinking. As a composer I stuck to the idea that ‘a good sitarist borrows, a great sitarist steals’. I needed to live that music and not think of performing it.”

Says Rao-de Haas, “The creativity of Indian music drew me. Though I was aware of the strict rules that guide the playing of this music, I realised that improvisation and freedom to create can only follow after one has put in hard work to learn the rules.”

That their individual adaptations have been accepted by listeners and the cognoscenti was shown when Rao-de Haas received the Pandit Jasraj Award this year for cross-cultural promotion of Indian music. “We do not perform this music,” her husband says, “we live it.”