NYT: Ravi Shankar, Who Brought Sitar Music to the West, Dies

[Frank Forman]

His record with Yehudi came out when I was in college, iirc, but I didn't
buy it until maybe 1980 for about a dollar. I listened to it several
times, but it never did click with me.

Ravi Shankar, Who Brought Sitar Music to the West, Dies
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/13/arts/music/ravi-shankar-indian-sitarist-dies-at-92.html

By ALLAN KOZINN

Ravi Shankar, the sitar virtuoso and composer who died on Tuesday at
92, created a passion among Western audiences for the rhythmically
vital, melodically flowing ragas of classical Indian music--a
fascination that had expanded by the mid-1970s into a flourishing
market for world music of all kinds.

In particular, his work with two young semi-apprentices in the 1960s
--George Harrison of the Beatles and the composer Philip Glass, a
founder of Minimalism--was profoundly influential on both popular
and classical music.

And his interactions throughout his career with performers from
various Asian and Western traditions--including the violinist
Yehudi Menuhin, the flutist Jean-Pierre Rampal and the saxophonist
and composer John Coltrane--created hybrids that opened listeners'
ears to timbres, rhythms and tuning systems that were entirely new
to them.

Mr. Shankar died in San Diego, at a hospital near his home. He had
been treated for upper-respiratory and heart ailments in the last
year and underwent heart-valve replacement surgery last Thursday,
his family said. His final performance was a concert with his
daughter, the virtuoso sitarist Anoushka Shankar, on Nov. 4 in Long
Beach, Calif. He was also the father of the singer Norah Jones.

Mr. Shankar, a soft-spoken, eloquent man whose own virtuosity
transcended musical languages, was trained in both Eastern and
Western musical traditions. Although Western audiences were often
mystified by the odd sounds and shapes of the instruments when he
began touring in Europe and the United States in the early 1950s,
Mr. Shankar and his ensemble gradually built a large following for
Indian music.

A Beatle Was Intrigued

Western interest in his instrument, the sitar, exploded in 1965 when
Harrison encountered one on the set of "Help!," the Beatles' second
film. Harrison was intrigued by the instrument, with its small
rounded body, long neck and resonating gourd at the top, and its
complexity: it has 6 melody strings and 25 sympathetic strings,
which are not played but which resonate freely as the other strings
are plucked. He soon learned its rudiments and used it that year on
a Beatles recording, "Norwegian Wood."

The Rolling Stones, the Animals, the Byrds and other rock groups
followed suit, although few went as far as Harrison, who recorded
several songs on Beatles albums with Indian musicians rather than
with his band mates. By the summer of 1967 the sitar was in vogue.

At first Mr. Shankar reveled in the attention his connection with
popular culture had brought him, and he performed for huge audiences
at the Monterey International Pop Festival in 1967 and at Woodstock
in 1969. He also performed, with the tabla virtuoso Alla Rakha and
the sarod player Ali Akbar Khan, at an all-star concert at Madison
Square Garden in 1971 that Harrison had organized to help Mr.
Shankar raise money for victims of political upheaval in Bangladesh.

But his reach went much further. He composed for films (including
the score for Richard Attenborough's "Gandhi" in 1982), ballets,
electronic works and concertos for sitar and Western orchestras. As
his popularity spread, societies for the presentation of Indian and
other traditional music began springing up--the largest one in New
York is the World Music Institute--and a thriving world music
industry was soon born.

Last week Mr. Shankar was told he would receive a lifetime
achievement Grammy Award in February, said Neil Portnow, president
of the National Academy of Recording Arts & Sciences.

Though linked with the early rock era by many Americans, Mr. Shankar
came to regard his participation in rock festivals as a mistake,
saying he deplored the use of his music, with its roots in an
ancient spiritual tradition, as a backdrop for drug use.

"On one hand," he said in a 1985 interview, "I was lucky to have
been there at a time when society was changing. And although much of
the hippie movement seemed superficial, there was also a lot of
sincerity in it, and a tremendous amount of energy. What disturbed
me, though, was the use of drugs and the mixing of drugs with our
music. And I was hurt by the idea that our classical music was
treated as a fad--something that is very common in Western
countries.

"People would come to my concerts stoned, and they would sit in the
audience drinking Coke and making out with their girlfriends. I
found it very humiliating, and there were many times I picked up my
sitar and walked away.

"I tried to make the young people sit properly and listen. I assured
them that if they wanted to be high, I could make them feel high
through the music, without drugs, if they'd only give me a chance.
It was a terrible experience at the time.

"But you know, many of those young people still come to our
concerts. They have matured, they are free from drugs and they have
a better attitude. And this makes me happy that I went through all
that. I have come full circle."

Ravi Shankar, whose formal name was Robindra Shankar Chowdhury, was
born on April 7, 1920, in Varanasi, India, to a family of musicians
and dancers. His older brother Uday directed a touring Indian dance
troupe, which Ravi joined when he was 10. Within five years he had
become one of the company's star soloists. He also discovered that
he had a facility with the sitar and the sarod, another stringed
instrument, as well as the flute and the tabla, an Indian drum.

The idea of helping Western listeners appreciate the intricacies of
Indian music occurred to him during his years as a dancer.

"My brother had a house in Paris," he recalled in one interview. "To
it came many Western classical musicians. These musicians all made
the same point: 'Indian music,' they said, 'is beautiful when we
hear it with the dancers. On its own it is repetitious and
monotonous.' They talked as if Indian music were an ethnic
phenomenon, just another museum piece. Even when they were being
decent and kind, I was furious. And at the same time sorry for them.
Indian music was so rich and varied and deep. These people hadn't
penetrated even the outer skin."

Mr. Shankar soon found, however, that as a young, self-taught
musician he had not penetrated very deeply either. In 1936 an Indian
court musician, Allaudin Khan, joined the company for a year and set
Mr. Shankar on a different path.

'I Surrendered Myself'

"He was the first person frank enough to tell me that I had talent
but that I was wasting it--that I was going nowhere, doing
nothing," Mr. Shankar said. "Everyone else was full of praise, but
he killed my ego and made me humble."

When Mr. Shankar asked Mr. Khan to teach him, he was told that he
could learn to play the sitar only after he decided to give up the
worldly life he was leading and devote himself fully to his studies.
In 1937 Mr. Shankar gave up dancing, sold his Western clothes and
returned to India to become a musician.

"I surrendered myself to the old way," he said, "and let me tell
you, it was difficult for me to go from places like New York and
Chicago to a remote village full of mosquitoes, bedbugs, lizards and
snakes, with frogs croaking all night. I was just like a Western
young man. But I overcame all that."

After studying with Mr. Khan and marrying his daughter, Annapurna,
also a sitarist, Mr. Shankar began his performing career in India.
In the 1940s he started bringing Eastern and Western currents
together in ballet scores and incidental music for films, including
Satyajit Ray's "Apu" trilogy, in the late 1950s. In 1949 he was
appointed music director of All India Radio. There he formed the
National Orchestra, an ensemble of Indian and Western classical
instruments.

Mr. Shankar became increasingly interested in touring outside India
in the early 1950s. His appetite was whetted further when he
undertook a tour of the Soviet Union in 1954 and was invited to
perform in London and New York. But it wasn't until 1956 that he
began spending long periods outside India. That year he left his
position at All India Radio and toured Europe and the United States.

Through his recitals and his recordings on the Columbia, EMI and
World Pacific labels, Mr. Shankar built a Western following for the
sitar. In 1952 he began performing with Menuhin, with whom he made
three recordings for EMI: "West Meets East" (1967), "West Meets
East, Vol. 2" (1968) and "Improvisations: West Meets East" (1977).
He also made recordings with Rampal.

Coltrane had become fascinated with Indian music and philosophy in
the early 1960s and met with Mr. Shankar several times from 1964 to
1966 to learn the basics of ragas, talas and Indian improvisation
techniques. Sitar performances are partly improvised, but the
improvisations are strictly governed by a repertory of ragas
(melodic patterns representing specific moods, times of day, seasons
or events) and talas (intricate rhythmic patterns) that date back
several millenniums.

Coltrane named his son Ravi Coltrane, also a saxophonist, after Mr.
Shankar.

Mr. Shankar loved to mix the music of different cultures. In 1978 he
collaborated with several prominent Japanese musicians--Hozan
Yamamoto, a shakuhachi player, and Susumu Miyashita, a koto player
--on "East Greets East."

In 1988 his seven-movement "Swar Milan" was performed at the Palace
of Culture in Moscow by an ensemble of 140 musicians, including the
Russian Folk Ensemble, members of the Moscow Philharmonic and the
Ministry of Culture Chorus, as well as Mr. Shankar's group of Indian
musicians. And in 1990 he collaborated with Mr. Glass--who had
worked as his assistant on the film score for "Chappaqua" in the
late 1960s--on "Passages," a recording of works he and Mr. Glass
composed for each other.

"I have always had an instinct for doing new things," Mr. Shankar
said in 1985. "Call it good or bad, I love to experiment."

Though many listeners became familiar with Mr. Shankar mainly
through his cross-cultural, style-blending experiments, his film
scores and his concertos, his main love remained the ancient
Northern Indian Hindustani style in which he was trained as a young
man.

Throughout his career he toured the world with a variation on the
traditional Indian ensemble: himself as the sitar soloist, backed by
a pair of tamburas--string instruments that provide a backing
drone--and tabla, a sublimely tactile percussion instrument that
produces rounded, subtly bending pitches.

Often his tabla player was Alla Rakha, who became a renowned soloist
in his own right. At times, Mr. Shankar also shared the spotlight
with Ali Akbar Khan, a master of the sarod, another Indian stringed
instrument. These concerts, including an annual performance at
Carnegie Hall, adhered to traditional forms, in which the musicians
would improvise on a raga, often ecstatically, for about an hour per
piece.

A Lasting Friendship

Western listeners who were sensitive to the techniques that Mr.
Shankar and his musicians were using to expand on the ragas found
the music entrancing and Mr. Shankar's inventiveness and dexterity
startling. Many sought out the music of other sitar, sarod and tabla
soloists, as well as Indian vocalists, and branched out to other
forms of world music, from China, Japan, Indonesia and eventually
African and Latin American countries.

Mr. Shankar maintained his friendship and working relationship with
Harrison, who released a recording of a 1972 performance by Mr.
Shankar on the Beatles' Apple label. In 1974 Harrison also produced
a recording on his own Dark Horse label by a group billed as Shankar
Family and Friends performing in a more popular style--short,
bright-edged songs with vocals, rather than expansive instrumental
improvisations.

The "friends" included Harrison, listed in the credits as Hari
Georgeson, as well as the bassist Klaus Voormann, the pianist Nicky
Hopkins, the organist Billy Preston and the flutist Tom Scott. Mr.
Shankar toured the United States with Harrison the same year. They
last worked together in 1997, when Harrison produced Mr. Shankar's
"Chants of India" CD for EMI.

After Harrison's death in 2001, Mr. Shankar contributed a new
composition to the "Concert for George," a starry celebration of
Harrison's music staged at the Royal Albert Hall in London in 2002.
The new piece, "Arpan," was performed by an ensemble of Indian and
Western musicians led by Anoushka Shankar.

Protecting the Heritage

Mr. Shankar continued to be regarded in the West as the most
eloquent spokesman for his country's music. But his popularity
abroad and his experiments with Western musical sounds and styles
drew criticism among traditionalists in India.

"In India I have been called a destroyer," he said in 1981. "But
that is only because they mixed my identity as a performer and as a
composer. As a composer I have tried everything, even electronic
music and avant-garde. But as a performer I am, believe me, getting
more classical and more orthodox, jealously protecting the heritage
that I have learned."

Mr. Shankar was a member of the Rajya Sabha, the upper house of the
Indian Parliament, from 1986 to 1992--one of 12 "nominated
members" chosen by the president for their contributions to Indian
culture.

Mr. Shankar taught extensively in the United States and founded a
school of Indian music, the Kinnara School, in Los Angeles. He was a
visiting professor at City College in New York in 1967. Recordings
of his lectures there were the basis for "Learning Indian Music," a
set of cassettes. Mr. Shankar was the subject of a documentary,
"Raga: A Film Journey Into the Soul of India," in 1971, and
published two autobiographies: "My Music, My Life" in 1969 and "Raga
Mala" in 1997.

In 2010 the Ravi Shankar Foundation started a record label, East
Meets West Music, which began by reissuing some of his historic
recordings and films, including "Raga."

Mr. Shankar's first marriage, to Annapurna Devi, ended in the late
1960s. They had a son, Shubhendra Shankar, who died in 1992. He also
had long relationships with Kamala Shastri, a dancer; Sue Jones, a
concert producer, with whom he had a daughter, Ms. Jones, in 1979;
as well as Sukanya Rajan, whom he married in 1989. Ms. Shankar, the
sitar virtuoso, is their daughter, born in 1981. He is survived by
his wife and two daughters, as well as three grandchildren and four
great-grandchildren.

"If I've accomplished anything in these past 30 years," Mr. Shankar
said in the 1985 interview, "it's that I have been able to open the
door to our music in the West. I enjoy seeing other Indian musicians
--old and young--coming to Europe and America and having some
success. I'm happy to have contributed to that.

"Of course now there is a whole new generation out there, so we have
to start all over again. To a degree their interest in India has
been kindled by 'Gandhi,' 'Passage to India' and 'The Jewel in the
Crown,' " he added, referring to popular Western films and TV shows.
"What we have to do now is convey to them an awareness of the
richness and diversity of our culture."
Galina Vishnevskaya, Russian Dissident Soprano, Dies at 86
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/12/arts/music/galina-vishnevskaya-electrifying-soprano-dies-at-86.html

By JONATHAN KANDELL

Galina Vishnevskaya, an electrifying soprano who endured repression
and exile as one of the postwar Soviet Union's most prominent
political dissidents, died on Monday in Moscow. She was 86.

Her death was confirmed by a spokesman for the Vishnevskaya Opera
Center in Moscow.

Ms. Vishnevskaya, the wife of the celebrated cellist and conductor
Mstislav Rostropovich, was renowned both as an emotional singer with
a polished technique and as a charismatic actress. She had performed
in operettas and music hall revues before joining the Bolshoi
Theater of Russia, the country's premier opera company.

At the Bolshoi she breathed new life into stodgy Soviet-era
productions with dynamic interpretations of Tatyana in Tchaikovsky's
"Eugene Onegin," Marina in Mussorgsky's "Boris Godunov" and Natasha
Rostova in Prokofiev's "War and Peace." In 23 years at the Bolshoi,
from 1952 through 1974, she performed more than 30 roles.

Though Ms. Vishnevskaya was rarely allowed to sing in the West at
the height of her powers in the 1960s and '70s, she drew rave
reviews when she did. "Galina Vishnevskaya's appearances at the
Metropolitan Opera are like a comet's, sudden, infrequent, capable
of lighting up the sky," Raymond Ericson wrote in The New York
Times, reviewing her performance in the title role of Puccini's
"Tosca" in 1975.

In the mid-1970s, Ms. Vishnevskaya and Rostropovich were hounded by
the Soviet authorities for their liberal political views and their
friendship with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the Nobel laureate novelist
and dissident.

In 1978, while traveling abroad, the couple were stripped of their
Russian citizenships by the Kremlin. They were allowed to return to
the Soviet Union and regain citizenship only in 1990 at the behest
of President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the last head of state before the
collapse of the Communist regime a year later.

By then, Ms. Vishnevskaya had already retired from opera. In 1984
she published a memoir, "Galina: A Russian Story," which recounted
the repression, squalor and humiliation endured even by cultural
luminaries like herself and her husband under a corrupt political
system that claimed to exalt classical music and the opera. She was
forced to live in a communal Moscow apartment "swarming with people
and bedbugs," she wrote.

Nor was fame any protection from the politically powerful. In 1955,
she wrote in her memoir, Premier Nikolai Bulganin made passes at her
in front of her husband and pressured Rostropovich unsuccessfully to
agree to let her become his mistress in exchange for better housing.
But Ms. Vishnevskaya was by then inured to such indignities. Her
earlier life had been far more harrowing.

Galina Pavlovna Ivanova was born in St. Petersburg, then known as
Leningrad, on Oct. 25, 1926. As a 3-year-old she sang to house
guests while her mother strummed a guitar. She was brought up mostly
by her grandmother after her father, an alcoholic, tried to kill her
mother with an ax. At 10, she was given a recording of Tchaikovsky's
"Eugene Onegin." It was the first opera she had ever heard, and she
played it again and again on her grandmother's hand-cranked record
player.

"I was in a fever for days," Ms. Vishnevskaya recalled. "I noticed
nothing around me, I forgot to eat, I no longer ran out into the
street to play with the boys."

During the Stalinist purge of the 1930s, entire families in her
building were hauled off to Siberian camps and almost certain death.
Then came World War II, with the 872-day siege of Leningrad by the
German Army that left more than a million people dead from
starvation, disease and combat injuries.

When the siege was finally broken in 1944, she successfully
auditioned for the Leningrad Operetta Theater and joined a music
hall revue that entertained Russian troops. During this period she
married twice--briefly to a young alcoholic sailor, Georgi
Vishnevsky, whose surname she took, and then to a violinist, Mark
Rubin, who was 22 years her senior.

Ms. Vishnevskaya began studying opera under a prized voice teacher,
Vera Garina, in 1951. But her career and life were almost cut short
by tuberculosis. Doctors told her she could survive only if she
allowed them to collapse her infected lung--the conventional
treatment in those days, when antibiotics were scarce. But at the
last moment she balked because the procedure would have prevented
her from singing professionally again. She recovered with injections
of adulterated streptomycin purchased on the black market.

Then, in 1952, she won a competition to join the Bolshoi in Moscow.
Her first starring role there was as Tatyana in "Eugene Onegin" in
October 1953. She had almost been passed over after complaining that
the traditional production was boring. But she was allowed to offer
her own, more animated interpretation of Tatyana, and it became her
signature role. In Paris 29 years later, she sang the part in her
farewell appearance.

As her star rose, she left her second husband in 1955 to marry
Rostropovich, with whom she had her two daughters, Olga and Elena.
But Ms. Vishnevskaya's fame and dark beauty soon attracted unwanted
admirers in the Kremlin. She was forced to attend drunken parties
for Politburo members.

"Most loathsome was to be expected to sing toward the end of a
reception," she recalled. "People drink and chew, their backs turned
to you." She added, "In that huge pigsty you sing for their pleasure
like a serf girl."

The Soviet authorities allowed her to perform abroad, most notably
in recitals with the U.S.S.R. State Symphony Orchestra on a
two-month tour of the United States in 1959, and again in 1961, when
the impresario Sol Hurok arranged a 46-day American tour, during
which she sang four "Aidas" and one "Madama Butterfly" at the Met
and 11 solo concerts across the country. Rostropovich also performed
in more than 25 concerts on the second trip.

Tours of Western and Eastern Europe followed for the couple.

A turning point in their lives came when they were in Prague, at the
start of a tour, on Aug. 21, 1968, the day Soviet troops invaded
Czechoslovakia to put an end to the Communist reform government
there. "It seemed the most disgraceful act in the history of the
Russian state," she wrote.

Ms. Vishnevskaya and Rostropovich began associating with Soviet
dissidents like Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Sakharov, the eminent
nuclear physicist who became a human-rights activist. The couple
allowed Solzhenitsyn, who had come under attack by Soviet
authorities, to live and write in their country home outside Moscow
from 1969 to 1973.

Ms. Vishnevskaya received the highest prize in the Soviet Union, the
Order of Lenin, in 1971. But within months the government,
apparently regretting the award, ordered a media blackout. "The
major newspapers simply stopped writing about me, and my voice could
no longer be heard on radio or television," she wrote.

When the couple criticized the lack of artistic freedom in the
Soviet Union during a tour abroad, the Kremlin proclaimed them
"ideological renegades" and revoked their citizenships. Before it
was restored in 1990, they lived in Europe and the United States.

In addition to her daughters, survivors include six grandchildren.

In 2002 Ms. Vishnevskaya opened the Galina Vishnevskaya Opera Center
to promote young Russian singers. By then she had become
conservative in her opera tastes. A half-century earlier she had
fought the conservative Soviet cultural establishment in arguing for
a fresh version of "Eugene Onegin." But now a new production of the
opera at the Bolshoi in 2006 angered her--so much so that she
canceled her 80th-birthday celebration there and moved it to the
Tchaikovsky Concert Hall in Moscow. "I'll never enter this theater
again," she vowed.

The following year Rostropovich died in Moscow at 80.

[Joe Roberts]

You got both obituaries -- Shankar and Vishnevskaya -- in the same post.

- - -

I attended a Shankar concert in Providence in about 1975. He had Alla Rakha on tabla. By design, we had front row center seats, not more than twelve feet from the musicians.

After the first piece he spoke briefly to the audience, describing the various forms of raga. He finished by saying, with a smile, that when we observe the musicians looking at each other and wagging their heads sideways, left to right, we shouldn't think that meant they were disagreeing with each other. In the West it means "no", but not in Indian music. The Indian customary way of "grooving" on music was to sway the head sideways, sometimes but not always in rhythm to the music. So if we too in the audience would be shaking our heads, the musicians would take it as a compliment. Everybody had a good laugh.

It was powerfully emotional music. Several pieces brought folks to their feet, in addition to the standing ovation at the end of the evening.

Joe