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Thu. May 21 7:00pm
Smita Nagdev (India, U.S. Debut)
Classical Indian Sitar Concert
The Asian Art Museum, 200 Larkin Street (@ McAllister)
Buy tickets at door.
Presented by SFIAF, the Sangati Center and the Asian Art Museum.
North Indian classical music's rising sitar player Smita Nagdev delivers her American debut performance. A protégé of the legendary sarod player Ustad Amjad Ali Khan, Smita draws from a deeply nuanced, improvisatory musical tradition in order to craft an experience of awakening and peace through music. She is accompanied on the tabla by Debopriyo "Bubai" Sarkar.
back to music
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ARTIST INFORMATION
Each piece Smita performs is shaped by the melodic and rhythmic modal systems of North Indian classical music-raga and tala. Smita's choice of raga is determined both by a traditional system correlating each raga with a particular time of day/night, season, and mood, along with her preference for ragas that offer ample scope for embellishment both rich and sonorous. Her careful navigation of the contours of each raga works to finesse the attention of her audience so that once rendered, it seamlessly ushers to artistic summits by her powerful and facile technique.
The structure of Smita's performances follows what has become a traditional suite of different compositional-improvisational forms in sitar repertoire. This overall structure is well-known to even the casual listener of sitar music. As such, the joy of performance lies not in revealing the creation of the macrostructure, but in the ability of the performer to build and bridge these familiar and very affective sections. The first of these-alap-establishes the melodic foundation of the chosen raga, first without the aid of any obvious reoccurring pulse or tempo, next by adding pulse, and finally through the quickening of this pulse, all the while exploring and utilizing techniques to help build musical momentum. The second section continues the progression of rhythmic complexity by introducing a cycle/meter and the instrument that specializes in this, the tabla. The structure of the chosen meter or tala provides the sitarist with a rhythmic canvas upon which traditional compositions and their improvisations can be presented. The final section is an instrumental rendition of a song taken from one of the many "light" or non-classical music genres, which typically utilize a particular set of ragas and talas.
Smita's vehicle for this musical journey, the sitar, is one of the most well-received Indian musical instruments throughout the world. Its construction and technique embodies more than two and a half centuries of synthesis between West and South Asian musical cultures. The type of sitar that Smita plays is distinguished by the inclusion of two low-pitched "base strings." Their use, especially during the most still and introspective moments of performance, reveals the legacy of another, more ancient Indian musical instrument, the ban. The bin (a stick-zither), although structurally distinct from the sitar (a lute), is one of the instruments from which sitar makers and players increasingly borrowed over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It was also common for bin player to teach sitar players, as was the case for the ancestors of Smita's first sitar guru Vasudev Ashtewale. Smita's unique style thus blends the bin-influenced sitar playing of the Ashtewales with the vocal-influenced style of her present guru Ustad Amjad Ali Khan.
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