Hindustani violin
San Francisco, California
The name “Kala” means “art” in Sanskrit, and as her guru Pandit Jasraj declared, Hindustani violin phenomenon Kala Ramnath “stands true to her name in every way.” One of the youngest people ever to receive India’s highest honor for performing artists, the Sangeet Natak Academy Puraskar, she is also the first Indian violinist to be featured in The Strad, the “Bible” of the classical violin world, and has thrilled audiences from the London Philharmonic to the Sydney Opera House. Appearing in Richmond in a traditional trio backed by tabla (percussion) and tanpur (a bowed drone), Kala Ramnath plays her instrument with the precision, style, and emotional fluency that make her one of the world’s great violinists.
Kala Ramnath represents the seventh generation of an illustrious musical dynasty that began with leading performers in the royal court of Travancore in the state of Kerala, in southwestern India. While southern musicians generally play the ancient Carnatic style typical of the region, Kala’s grandfather, the violinist Vidwan A. Narayan Iyer, was celebrated for his mastery of both the southern Carnatic and northern Hindustani styles. Choosing to follow the northern path, Kala Ramnath has become the world’s foremost artist of Hindustani classical violin.
Both Carnatic and Hindustani classical music come out of the Vedic-Hindu-Sanskritic musical traditions, but they branched apart in the 12th century. In the cultural crossroads of northern India, Hindustani music was inexorably enriched by Buddhist, Islamic, and especially Persian cultural influences. Building on ragas, the foundational structures of Indian classical music’s signature improvisations, Hindustani musical tradition has a unique and complex vocal style that is a beautiful match for the violin; as Kala says, “it is an instrument which can do all that a voice can do and even more.” While the violin descends from the ancient Indian instrument called ravanhatha, its modern form returned to southern India with 17th-century European traders and was only incorporated into northern Indian music in the 20th century through the visionary work of violin masters like Kala Ramnath’s aunt, Dr. N. Rajam.
Growing up in Chennai, on India’s southeastern coast, Kala Ramnath began to study violin at age two under the tutelage of her grandfather, and later her aunt. She was held to exacting standards, and also respected as an artist from a very young age. “Music was so important in my house,” she says, that the house fell silent when someone played. “My mother wasn’t allowed even to pump water while I was practicing.” By her teens, Kala was celebrated for her mastery of the family legacy, but she took seriously the suggestion of tabla legend Zakir Hussein that she should find her own sound. She asked legendary singer Pandit Jasraj to become her guru, and then moved to Bombay where she trained with him for the next 15 years. “Learning from him helped me create a unique style of reproducing the voice on the violin,” she notes. Now based in the Bay Area, Kala is pushing Hindustani music’s embrace of microtones to fantastic ends, and her astonishing vocalized violin technique has earned her the laudatory sobriquet, “the Singing Violin.”
Kala Ramnath’s appearance at the Richmond Folk Festival is supported in part by the Department of Music at the University of Richmond, where she will be conducting an artist residency.