Classical at the crossroads

Sebanti Sarkar
31 August 2006

Hindustani classical music has not changed much over the past 300 years, but the radically changing world is posing problems for its practitioners.

A seminar organized by ITC Sangeet Research Academy on Hindustani Raga Music – Future Responsibilities sought to identify some of the problems.

The panel for the seminar, held on Tuesday and Wednesday, included musicians Girija Devi, Tanmoy Bose, Aswini Bhinde Deshpande, Bikram Ghosh, Amit Mukerjee, Vijay Kumar Kichlu, Buddhadev Das Gupta, Dipali Nag, Tejendra Narayan Majumdar, Suvarnalata S. Rao, Sanjoy Bandopadhyay, Falguni Mitra, Satish Vyas, Shankar Ghosh and S. Selhar.

They were accompanied by Radio Gandharv (a 24 hour Hindustani classical music channel on satellite radio service Worldspace) programme director Geeta Sahai, the Future Foundation School principal Ranjan Mitter, Mala Mukerjee of the Institute for Career Studies, Lucknow, and La Martiniere for Boys’ teacher Susmita Chakrabarty.

The panelists agreed that not only are cultural and social changes marginalising classical musicians, technological developments, too, are forcing them to keep pace.

“In the past 50 years, so many new gadgets have come into being that the style of teaching music has changed. There is, of course, no alternative to the guru-shishya parampara. Students can now make recordings and playback the lessons umpteen number of times. They can listen to all kinds of music and train hands on at our recording studios,” said executive director of the academy Amit Mukerjee.

According to him, scholars coming to the institution are more educated that before and had clear ideas about their careers, but aspired for too much in too short a time.

Mukerjee rued the fact that both television and radio were providing little space to classical music. He said he was hoping to collaborate with Worldspace to promote classical music.

Samarnath Nagarkar, a resident scholar under Ulhas Kashalkar, felt that Indian music was too rich to need any “modernisation”.