epic choir performs at cleveland thyagaraja festival

EPIC Choir at Cleveland Thyagaraja Festival
| Photo Credit: Special Arrangement

Outside the transit gate at the Salt Lake City airport, 50-year-old marketing professional Bharadhwaj Lakshminarayanan was trying to perfect a gamaka, an embellishment applied to notes in Carnatic music. His 12-year-old daughter, Mahathi, corrected him. Moments later, a group of people waiting to board the same flight joined in, singing a Carnatic kriti.

Soon, a mini kutcheri unfolded, with curious onlookers wondering about the genre of music being performed.

This is a scene from mid April this year, when Bharadhwaj and Mahathi, along with many other Carnatic students, were on their way to the Cleveland Thyagaraja Festival. First celebrated in 1978, it is now considered the largest Indian classical music fest outside of India.

At the festival, this group from Bay Area joined several other smaller groups, who had practised the same set of songs. Together, they came to perform for EPIC Choir, Chennai-based Sishyakulam’s signature choral ensemble.

This year’s performance featured over 250 performers, aged five to 60, sharing a stage before an audience of over 2,000, in an hour-and-a-half long event that is perhaps the largest Indian music choral ensemble ever assembled.

“It was like a musical vacation,” said Bharadhwaj over a call, “There is an energy when we all sing together which cannot be described in words. For us, as much as the actual performance, the journey to it was very rewarding.” He was referring to the months leading up to the event, when Carnatic music gurus in the Bay Area including Hari Devanath, Akila Iyer and Kasturi Sivakumar reached out to their many students to participate in this endeavour.

EPIC Choir at Cleveland Thyagaraja Festival
| Photo Credit:
Special Arrangement

Conceptualised by Sishyakulam, an organisation founded by Neyveli R Santhanagopalan to promote Indian classical arts, the EPIC Choir was formed to foster a culture where children across the US dedicate hundreds of hours to learning Indian classical music.

“It gives these students immense musical growth and exposes them to songs beyond traditional kritis. They also learn harmonies and chords,” said musician Shankar Santhanagopalan, CEO of Sishyakulam, and son of Neyveli Santhanagopalan, a recipient of the Sangita Kalanidhi.

Track record

All this musical action unfolded at the Wolstein Center, which usually hosts basketball events. Over 250 students performed six compositions set to tune by Santhanagopalan.

The final track, ‘Aradhanai’, set in Nalinakanthi raga, was among the highlights of the performance, with many children enthusiastically chipping in. “It’s become the theme song for the festival,” said Shankar, who also conducted the choir.

He added, “When I told people back home that I had organised a choir, everyone was surprised. But the rewards were rich, not just for the participants but their parents too. It helped normalise the idea of meaningful investment in the arts.”

For participants like eight-year-old Sabarish Rajagopal from New Jersey, playing the mridangam on such a big stage was exciting. He learns virtually from Chennai-based Patri Satish Kumar. “I made many friends and jammed along with them too,” said Sabharish, whose father drove them to Cleveland, an eight-hour car journey during which he played the kanjira to some Carnatic tracks. “I also learnt a lot of new musical ideas,” he added.

With this year’s choir bringing together over 250 classical music students and their families, the hope for a similiar event next year is soaring. Shankar promises to be more ambitious in the forthcoming years with this exercise. He said, “We might try to bring together over 300 students and their families, and maybe even apply for an official record, like the Limca Book or Guinness. The sky is the limit.”