By Tina Eshleman
Like an angel in human form. That’s how renowned composer Terry Riley describes Hindustani (North Indian) classical violinist Kala Ramnath.
“A lot of it has to do with her presence when she’s playing,” he says. “It seems otherworldly to me, the state that she’s in and that she’s able to put her listeners in. She’s one of the most relaxed performers I have ever witnessed.”
Known for her lyrical style, Ramnath, who will perform at this fall’s Richmond Folk Festival, encourages a spiritual connection to her music. She considers the performance stage a sacred space, one to be approached with humility and respect. It is a seat of knowledge, the realm of the goddess Saraswati, who represents music, art, wisdom, and nature.
Following Hindu tradition, Ramnath typically performs sitting not in a chair but on a riser covered with carpet and a white sheet. She says, “We touch the floor and then climb on the riser and say a prayer: ‘If there are any mistakes, they’re ours. If it goes well, it’s yours.’”
When she plays, the scroll of the violin rests on her ankle, while the base sits below her collarbone. This positioning allows her left hand to move along the strings without having to support the neck of the instrument.
“I’m able to do those glides and slides with ease. In the Indian style, there is a continuity between notes,” she says. “If Western classical music is on the notes, Indian classical music is in between the notes. That is where microtones come into play.”
Ramnath’s tranquil approach to playing stems from the deeply ingrained expertise she acquired through a training regimen that began at age 2 1/2. She comes from a line of classical Indian vocalists going back seven generations who sang in the royal court of Travancore, encompassing most of the current state of Kerala in South India. After kingdoms were abolished and India became a republic in 1950, her grandfather took up the violin and taught music to his children and to Ramnath.
As a child, when she was not attending school, doing homework, eating, or sleeping, Ramnath practiced music. Her grandfather would entice her by setting out a row of candied cumin seeds in different colors and saying, “If you play this 10 times, then you can pick whatever you like.”
To sharpen her focus as she grew older, he would challenge her to play the same exercise 10 times correctly. If she made a mistake the ninth time through, she would have to start over again. In time, that increased to 25 times, then 50, then 100.
Years later, he told her that he was amazed at how quickly she could learn a raga or raag—a melodic framework similar to a scale in Western music that forms the foundation of Indian classical music. As Ramnath explains, a raga has musical motifs, ornamentations, and tempo, and is used as a basis of composition and improvisation.
“Because of my grandfather’s training, whenever I hear a chord or melody, within a fraction of a second I can pick up all the notes that are in that scale and I’ve already related it to a raga in Indian music,” she says. “This all happens so fast that if I jam with somebody, I’m right into it. I don’t have to think.”
Finding her own voice
When Ramnath was 14 years old, a conversation with acclaimed tabla musician Zakir Hussain challenged her to rethink her goals as a violinist. While visiting Ramnath’s family to pay his respects after the passing of her father, Hussain asked to hear her play the violin. Afterward, he commented on how closely her playing resembled that of her aunt.
“My aunt was my idol,” Ramnath says. “She was a woman playing the violin when it was a male-dominated field and she made a name for herself. I looked up to her a lot.”
But why, Hussain asked Ramnath, would people want to listen to her imitating her aunt?
“That set me thinking,” Ramnath says. “Then I said, ‘I’ll have to do something about this.’”
Around that time, she performed her first concert, presented by master Hindustani classical vocalist and teacher Pandit Jasraj, whose singing had mesmerized her since childhood. An idea came to her: Why not use the violin to capture the sound of his voice? Several years later, after she finished school, Ramnath asked Jasraj if she could study with him and he happily agreed.
Kala Ramnath accompanying Zakir Hussain at the 2010 Richmond Folk Festival. Photo: Skip Rowland
For more than a decade, he became her guru. During that time, she stayed at his residence for five months and immersed herself in music almost around the clock. She would sit in on classes when he taught student vocalists. At dinner time or while traveling in the car, he would share a melody and ask her to remember it. As she listened to Jasraj’s recordings, she experimented with her fingering and bowing to express his vocal phrasing.
“I would try to reproduce every phrase that was sung,” she says. “If you had a phrase with three or four notes in one syllable, I would play the three or four notes in one bow. Then I would change direction for the next syllable. Sometimes it could be 10 or 12 notes, and I would fit it in one bow.”
By translating her guru’s singing to the violin, she found her own voice as a musician. But it wasn’t until Jasraj heard his student playing in a national radio broadcast that he realized what she had been doing.
“He just couldn't believe it,” Ramnath says. “He kept telling his wife, ‘Can you believe in five months she's changed completely? She’s playing like I'm singing.’ He called all his friends and said, ‘You have to listen to her.’”
“When I discovered her playing, I was really moved by it,” he says.”
Ramnath’s signature technique and her intuitive ability to interact with other musical genres have made her a sought-after collaborator for musicians from Ray Manzarek of the Doors to the London Symphony Orchestra.
She was one of the musicians invited to play during a three-day celebration organized by the Kronos Quartet in honor of Terry Riley’s 80th birthday at the SF Jazz Center in 2015. Riley, who is best known as a pioneer of the minimalist movement, has studied Indian classical music since the 1970s. He says he and Ramnath share “an openness to explore music with like-minded souls.”
“When I discovered her playing, I was really moved by it,” he says.
The single superstar
Indian American composer Reena Esmail first worked with Ramnath in 2017 on her composition “Amrit,” which Esmail arranged for the Kronos Quartet’s 50 for the Future series. A graduate of the Juilliard School and Yale School of Music, Esmail also studied Hindustani music as a Fulbright scholar in India.
“Because I have that kind of knowledge of both systems and also the knowledge of the ways in which they connect, I’m able to be that conduit in between the two cultures,” Esmail says.
After their first project, Ramnath and Esmail co-wrote a climate-themed violin concerto for the Seattle Symphony that is based on Ramnath’s idea of a composition using Indian ragas associated with the ancient belief in five elements of nature—space, air, fire, water, and earth.
“Her thesis was that if all of these elements are aligned with one another, they can create beauty, but if any of the elements are misaligned with one another, they can create destruction and disaster,” Esmail says. “Essentially, that is what is happening in our climate.”
The Concerto for Hindustani Violin & Orchestra premiered in the spring of 2022 in Seattle, where Esmail had been a composer-in-residence, and Ramnath will join the symphony to perform it again this October after the Richmond Folk Festival. Each movement is based on a melody Ramnath created, representing a different element.
“She gave them to me, and I built them out each into a movement that’s for Indian classical violin and orchestra,” Esmail says.
“Her thesis was that if all of these elements are aligned with one another, they can create beauty, but if any of the elements are misaligned with one another, they can create destruction and disaster,” Esmail says. “Essentially, that is what is happening in our climate.””
While Indian ragas have been passed down through generations, they are not documented like Western classical music is.
“A lot of times when you notate a tradition that’s improvised, the issue is that it looks so crazy on the page that people get very stressed out by it,” Esmail says. “You have to make something that has a certain visceral feeling in a Hindustani instrument look on the page like it has that same lightness.”
Esmail considers Ramnath the foremost artist playing in the North Indian Hindustani classical tradition as opposed to the more typical South Indian Carnatic tradition.
“I think she is just the single superstar,” Esmail says. “It’s an honor to work with her because she’s a legend in this field.”
Sharing and preserving knowledge
This fall, Ramnath will make her first appearance as a featured performer at the Richmond Folk Festival, but not her first overall; in 2010 she accompanied Zakir Hussain, the musician who had started her on a new path during her teenage years.
Before the festival, she will spend a few days as an artist-in-residence at the University of Richmond, which is co-sponsoring her festival engagement. Andy McGraw, an associate professor of music and chair of the music department, says Ramnath will work with students in his music theory classes.
Sharing knowledge is important to Ramnath, who teaches students in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she lives. She also has launched a website, indianclassicalmusic.com, to catalog Indian ragas in an online library so they don’t become lost. There should have been as many as 4,840 ragas, she says, but because they weren’t documented, many have been lost.
“Today, we have 500 or 600 left, and only 100 to 150 are in circulation,” Ramnath says. “There is a need to preserve this and take care of what we have.”
A member of the festival’s programming committee, McGraw hopes to pique his students’ interest in going to the event to see Ramnath perform with her trio.
“That helps remind students that the tradition that they’re studying isn’t the end all and be all of what music can be,” McGraw says. “It’s a door to show them that there are many, many ways to create and understand music.””
“When people are majoring in music at an American university, most of the time they spend in class is focusing on a very, very narrow slice, temporally and geographically, of human music-making,” McGraw says. “In terms of music theory, it's overwhelmingly the classical style—Bach to Beethoven—and increasingly, popular music and jazz.”
Meeting a musician such as Ramnath exposes students to a classical tradition that is just as deep and sophisticated, but has different core principles, he says.
“That helps remind students that the tradition that they’re studying isn’t the end all and be all of what music can be,” McGraw says. “It's a door to show them that there are many, many ways to create and understand music.”