Chelsea de Souza traverses the Silk Road on a musical quest

The East-West musical route

I recently heard two brilliant young teenage pianists in Bengaluru, winners of international awards, enrolled for summer workshops abroad, enthusiastically hopeful that their passion and talent will sustain a future professional music career. Not so different from Chelsea and Chloe de Souza, very talented sisters, who left Mumbai to study music in the U.S. and are currently touring India. But few performing artistes — even exceptional musicians, dancers and actors — can make a living solely from performing.

         Pianist Chelsea admits, “It’s certainly very difficult. Besides Music, I graduated in politics so I’m interested in how culture manifests in western classical music, how it can be used to convey one’s identity and culture, whether it’s conscious or unconscious; the hidden cultural interactions that go into the creation of a sound. I’ve been able to differentiate myself by fusing different genres. I strive to explore issues of identity and culture by including contemporary classical music … I explore jazz, hybrid music of the Indian diaspora, and world music theory. Yes, it’s tough and competitive, so it’s really important to find your niche, have something special to offer.” 

         Chelsea’s lecture recital, The Silk Road, at the BIC recently was certainly an exceptional offering. Trading routes connected past to present: not only did tea, silk, and porcelain carpets cross continents, camel caravans also carried the fleas of music, art, ideas, Buddhism, food …. In The Tale of Musical Trade between East and West, she established this Eurasian intermingling in western classical music, with a very unusual programme of modern and contemporary compositions that resists categorisation. She brilliantly deconstructed five composers, making them accessible to the audience, addressing them with charming informality.

French composer Debussy turned his back on the Germanic music tradition of Wagner Brahms, seeking to create a uniquely French sound, resulting in a musical style, the “impressionist” musical movement, more evocation than representation. A completely alien stimulus entered his work when he heard gamelan at the 1889 Paris World Fair. Playing a clip of the Javanese orchestra, Chelsea explained how this eastern music revealed a new aesthetic to Debussy: the percussion and timbre of its instruments, its musical dynamic moving at different speeds, creating unfamiliar overall textures that became part of Debussy’s new compositional language. As examples, she played Pagodes, and the less obviously eastern Reflections in the Water. The Javanese gong was replicated with a powerful bass chord, grounded with a sustained forte pedal, and in the latter the treble plinked and rilled with liquid intangibility. Debussy was also attracted by the eastern sense of timelessness and Nature cycles, the other common threads in the programme.

         Toru Takemitsu was a cultural shift in reverse, a Japanese trained in western music. He greatly admired Debussy and used atonality and dissonance in his compositions. Disapproving of his country’s role in World War II, he rejected his native musical tradition. When he later embraced it, it resulted in an east-west admixture imbued with Ma, that ineffable Japanese approach to time and space, sound and silence. Ma facilitated Takemitsu’s creativity, prompting variability in musical intervals in his compositions, with a density of sound in the number of notes played. This gives the performer freedom with the silences, which are as important as the notes, much as the unpainted surfaces are as meaningful as the brush strokes in a sumi-é painting. Gestural figuration was evident in Rain-Tree Sketch, with no harmonic progression, so that the melodic contour seems to grow towards a climactic moment, not through harmony but through density of sound, with its rise and fall of pitch or dynamic range.

         It was an interesting shift to the next composer, British-born Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji. Though his tonality is completely different from Takemitsu’s, the sense of temporal expansiveness is quite similar, with spill-over influences of Debussy, time and nature. With a Parsi father and English mother, Sorabji suffered racism while growing up in England in the early 1900s. Turning away from all things British, he changed his name from Leon Dudley, and attempted to reassert his eastern musical heritage. However, his efforts to connect with his Indo-Persian legacy were not truly internalised, resulting in superficial effects, rather than in authentic eastern musical elements. Though he claimed that his improvisatory melodies were reminiscent of the contours of Indian melodies, he doesn’t engage with the Indian raga. The French impressionist tradition — the absence of resolution and consonance — is perceptible in his harmonies. The Hothouse was his rendering of an exotic Bombay garden, steaming with tropical heat, festooned with creepers, and even a lurking snake, more Orientalist than definitively Indian.

The other composer of Indian origin was as cheese to Sorabi’s chalk. An Indian-American, 40-year-old Reena Esmail has had classical training in both traditions, returning periodically to India to study Hindustani music. She investigates the exchange between Hindustani musicians and Western composers, the processes and methods of the interchanges, and the challenges encountered in such syntheses. Her Rang de Basant continued the programme’s Nature motif. It was very positively received, converting many in the audience who were ambivalent about, or were even averse to, contemporary classical western music!