Warren Senders has been devoted to Indian classical music since he first heard it as a teenager. Senders is now an internationally recognized vocalist, composer and performer who has studied and rendered Hindustani music for over 40 years. The leader of the indo-jazz ensemble Anti-Gravity, Senders is a member of the New England Conservatory faculty and a Learning Through Music specialist who applies a rich background in Indian, African, and Western music toward cross-cultural aspects of learning through music programs in public elementary schools. He also leads the world’s only one man climate change activism through Hindustani classical music. Senders spoke to Grin about his unique journey.

Warren Senders at one of his beloved mehfils. (Photo by Jiten Chheda.)

What brought to you Hindustani classical music? When did you start learning? How did you start learning?

At the most basic level, there are two stories that people can tell in response to this question, regardless of their origin. Story One is that of someone who was born into a musical family, brought up in a musical atmosphere, and continued the family tradition. Story Two is that of someone whose family had no special musical orientation, but who fell in love with it thanks to some fortuitous exposure, and carried on from there.

Mine is Story Two. My parents were academics and scientists, not musicians. I heard many different kinds of music growing up, and knew early on that the exploration of organized sound was how I wished to spend my life. Indian music is a major facet of this, but not the only one.

I first encountered Hindustani music as a teenager and was immediately captivated. Shortly thereafter I found my way to Kalpana Mazumder, a khyal singer and teacher residing in the Boston area. I began formal study with her and continued for the next eight years, as I gradually ironed out the kinks in my voice and deepened my understanding of the music.

During this time I was also active in studying jazz, Western music theory, African music, and a great many other aspects of music. Throughout my career I have never been exclusively focused on a single genre or idiom.

In 1985 I was awarded a fellowship to go to India and study with a famous vocalist who lived in Pune. After almost a year in which I was part of his entourage and heard a great many concerts but received virtually no actual instruction, I was introduced to Pandit S. G. Devasthali, who became my true guru of khyal vocal music.

Pt. Devasthali took me on as a personal project. When we first met, he asked me, ‘What do you want to accomplish in this music?’ My response was, ‘I want to sing in the mehfil,’ an answer which pleased him greatly, for the intimate atmosphere of the house concert is where the synergy between tradition and innovation that drives Hindustani music really becomes palpable.

Devasthalibua gave me daily taleem (instruction) sessions which often lasted for longer than four hours. Teaching in a basically traditional back-and-forth style, he built lessons around the importance of self-diagnosis and a thoughtful attitude towards problem-solving — characteristics which I have had occasion to observe are far from universal in Hindustani pedagogy.

I gave my first professional recital in New Delhi in 1991 and since then have performed Hindustani music in India, North America, and Europe.

2. Which or which ones among the many ragas has appealed to you the most and why?

I’ve been doing this music for over four decades. It’s occupied my days, my nights, my months and years. I’ve given scores of interviews with people who asked me whether I liked spicy food and how I found India. I call these ‘talking dog’ interviews, because they focus on the superficial novelty of my situation as a Hindustani musician of non-South Asian origin. Woof, woof.

Some days I like music that’s full of tensions. Other days I like music that’s simple and direct. Some days I need cacophony and dissonance, crunch and bitterness. Other days I want consonance and sweetness. At any given moment, the song I’m singing is the one that appeals to me the most. Else why do it? I came to music because I recognized in it a way of apprehending the world that made meaning out of its buzzing, blooming, multiplicity, not because my heart was captivated by a particular sequence of notes or rhythms.

Sometimes I sing a Jaipur-Atrauli jod raga and savor the intertwining of two or three identifiable melodic strands; sometimes I sing Raga Yaman and linger in its atmosphere of sweet and sad nostalgia. Sometimes I sing Raga Darbari Kanada and seek to evoke the sorrow attendant upon ultimate responsibility, and sometimes I sing Raga Malashri and explore how many different patterns can be generated from three simple notes. And sometimes I sing Stardust, because Hoagy Carmichael and Mitchell Parrish’s masterpiece of American art song answers a different need.

The world is endlessly changing. No two instants are ever the same. I love the variety, the interweaving polysemicity of it all. Would a gardener have a single favorite blossom?

3. How has your journey through Hindustani classical music changed your life?

There have been many times over my life in music when I felt like giving up. My first year in India was frustrating and demoralizing, for even as I was hearing wonderful singing in concerts I was receiving no meaningful training. But I’m stubborn and persistent. I began my life in Hindustani music as a teenager, and I’ll be sixty in a few months. I learned from a master teacher, and the imprint of his personality is manifested in my own singing, my own thinking, and my own teaching. When I teach or perform, I feel a communion with my own Guru, and this is a big part of what keeps me moving forward. If I’d done something different when I was eighteen, I’d be a different person now — and I’d STILL be unable to answer that question.

4. What must artistes and teachers do today to attract new generations of listeners to Hindustani classical music?

All art forms move between periods of popularity in which their practitioners seek to cultivate the attention of new audiences, and periods of retrenchment in which traditional values are reassessed and reevaluated in the light of changed societal circumstances. The ecosystem of Hindustani music is no different in this regard.

Artists and teachers should keep performing and teaching, and the art form will evolve, oscillating from one set of values to another. If they are offering material which has intellectual integrity and emotional veracity, if they are teaching out of a genuine desire to sustain and nourish the tradition — then the tradition will continue. If they don’t, it will first become a museum piece, incapable of further change, and then it will die.

More important for the health of the music is for people involved in the tradition to be active in calling attention to the crisis of planetary climate change. The beauty of Hindustani music (and indeed of all musical forms) is contingent on a stable climate. Climatic disruption is increasingly likely to trigger crop failures, droughts, rising sea levels, catastrophic collapses of infrastructure — and these will wreak far more havoc on the artistic life of our civilization than anything else we can imagine.

5. What are the new performances and projects that you are working on?

I continue working on Hindustani music as a teacher and performer. A great deal of my time now is given to environmental activism for the reasons given above. My days include an hour-long vigil at a nearby intersection, where I face the heavy morning rush-hour traffic with a sign saying Climate Change Is Real. While I stand, I do my riyaaz; this initiative is now midway through its third year of consistent daily presence, and can be followed here.

Other projects crop up intermittently, in particular a long-running exploration of ways to make music more effective in conveying sensitivity to multiple timescales, which I have presented under the title Singing The Long Now. This can be heard on my website at: http://www.warrensenders.com/journal/singing-the-long-now-concert-videos/

I regularly produce benefit concerts for the environmental awareness organization 350.org, and its Massachusetts chapter, 350MA.org. I am far more concerned about the fate of my species and its extraordinary cultural expressions than about my own career as a performer.

6. Hindustani classical music has had a long tradition of gharanas which treat the same ragas very differently. How do you see the notion of the individual artiste, or individuality, as seen by the Hindustani classical music? Is there a underlying tradition of exploring the idea of free will in Hindustani classical music that connects to wider ideas of Indian philosophy and architecture. You mentioned a correlation with the Ellora temples.

Individuality in the context of a traditional art form like Hindustani music exists in a complex and nuanced relationship with the notions of fealty to one’s own lineage. It’s a delicate balancing act, in which an aspiring artist must simultaneously demonstrate a mastery of traditional practice while establishing a unique personal approach.

Too much to one side, and the artist becomes a mere mimic (one epigone in mid-80s Pune earned the sobriquet “His Master’s Voice” for his faithful recreations of his mentor’s renditions); too much to the other, and the artist becomes disconnected from the historical context which makes the art meaningful in the first place.

The old traditional forms were the “property” of hereditary musical lineages, and in these temporally-extended family organizations, the boundaries between members were pretty permeable. Disciples were expected to embody the intellectual and musical approaches of their masters in ways that blurred and ambiguated their particularity; this gharana-focused thinking has been in decline for the last five decades or so, as technology and changing economic circumstances have transformed the ways in which musicians and listeners relate to one another.

At some level, all art is an expression of the collective unconscious of a society. The atmosphere of the traditional baithak or mehfil is a powerful demonstration of the interplay between collective and individual impulses, as listeners reinforce shared aesthetic values through their responses to the performer’s expressive initiatives. The listeners influence what the singer chooses to present, and the singer channels the group imagination into the expressive gestures of a single voice.

7. How do Hindustani classical music and Western classical music differ in the way they consider the time-space relationship? In your teachings, how do you get your students to interact and with overlap with these two forms of music?

Music is the art form which does the most to codify and express each individual culture’s approach to the passage and nature of time.

Because Indian conceptions of time are very strongly oriented to cyclical models — as witness the endless iteration and reiteration of the four massive “yuga-s” in Hindu cosmology — it is no surprise that Indian musical structures reflect this interest in recurrence. Individual phrases are repeated over and over, differentiated by minor but cumulative variations. These are superimposed on repetitive rhythmic cycles, and the gradual accelerations and transition in performance to faster and shorter cycles likewise mirrors the shortening of yuga-s over cosmological time.

Western classical music at least through the end of the 19th century clearly reflected Western notions of predominately linear temporality, not to mention the Christianist eschatology (in which the faithful presumably spend eternity at the right hand of the conductor after a series of apocalyptic final chords!). Jazz, by contrast, is conceived as a conversation with continually-shifting leading voices; participants in jazz improvisation are construed as partners in a collective exploration — a conception which is very distinct from Indian music’s deep hierarchical structure, in which a single individual is the focal point of all musical excursions.

These differing temporalities are reflected as well in the music’s pedagogy and the epistemological constructs which inform it: Hindustani oral tradition endlessly covers the same material in fractally-varied ways, while artifactualized Western instruction is conceived as a step-by-step progression to an apotheosis of competence. Other world musical traditions have their own ways of embodying the temporalities of their parent cultures in pedagogy and performance, and all are perfectly valid pathways up the mountain!

I’m lucky to be a musician and a teacher, to spend my days and nights exploring this way of understanding our universe. Hindustani music has been good to me. There is an aphorism to the effect that ‘to learn another language is to gain another soul’. I think this is even more true in the case of music.

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