Standing Rock Cultural Arts' "Around the World" Music Series presents the second virtual concert of its 2022 season, featuring the distinguished sitarist, composer, and educator Hasu Patel, an internationally recognized master of Indian classical music.
In this intimate presentation, which was filmed in the living room of her Westlake, Ohio home, Patel will share a selection of ragas that hold particular meaning for her, also sharing stories from her long and interesting career, as well as thoughts about the nature of music as it relates to spirituality and the cosmos.
About the artist:
Hasu Patel began learning music at the age of 3 in her hometown of Baroda, in the western Indian state of Gujarat.
Taking up the sitar at age 6, she devoted serious study to this instrument, spending 15 years with her first guruji, Professor N. B. Kikani. In the process, she received a firm grounding in the system of ragas, melodic structures which form the basis of Hindustani (North Indian classical) music, and serve as a springboard for extensive improvisation done according to complex unwritten rules.
In 1962 she received a master's degree in music from The Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, and went on to study with the renowned Ustad Vilayat Khan Sahib (1928-2004) of the Etawah (Imdadkhani) gharana, who taught her the gayaki ang style of playing. At the age of 21 she won the first prize in the state of Gujarat for the string instrument competition held by All India Radio.
Patel is one of only a few world-class female classical sitarists, and she is a master of gayaki ang, Vilayat Khan's personal style, which endeavors to replicate the human voice in its fluidity and nuanced tone. In addition to India and the United States, she has performed in Canada, mainland China, and Taiwan, and released 6 CDs of her playing, including both Hindustani ragas in pure classical forms and original compositions for sitar and symphony orchestra. Among her most notable concert appearances are performances for the 30th and 50th anniversaries of the Woodstock music festival, in 1999 and 2019, respectively (sitar great Ravi Shankar having performed at the original festival in 1969).
In addition to teaching Indian sitar, tabla, and vocal music at her Sursangam School of Music, Patel has taught at Oberlin College since 1995, and also teaches remotely, giving online private lessons, classes, and workshops from her home via Skype.
As a composer, Patel has created several large-scale cross-cultural works, including "Mangal Dhwani" and "Swara Mangalam" (both for sitar, tabla and orchestra) and "Swara Leela" (for sitar, tabla, chorus, and orchestra), in addition to numerous compositions for sitar in more traditional raga style. She is profiled in a chapter of the book "In Her Own Words: Conversations with Composers in the United States" by Jennifer Kelly (Univ. of Illinois Press, 2013).
Over the past several years she has also devoted herself to the completion of a comprehensive 10-volume textbook covering the fundamentals of Hindustani music (as yet unpublished), which includes a detailed exposition of no fewer than 50 of the most commonly used ragas, with two original compositions in each raga (in slow and fast tempos).
In recognition of her career in music, in 2018 the Ohio Arts Council awarded Hasu Patel an Ohio Heritage Fellowship Award for Performing Arts. In the same year, she was presented with the Lifetime Achievement Award for Extraordinary Service to Humanity by the International Institute of Integral Human Sciences, a non-governmental organization affiliated with the United Nations Department of Public Information.
Hasu Patel official website:
https://hasupatel.com/
