Anoushka Shankar wants you to hear the sitar differently
Throughout her career, Anoushka Shankar has resisted people putting her music into a box.
As the daughter of the legendary sitar virtuoso and composer Ravi Shankar, Anoushka is often confronted with the expectation that she'd only make traditional Indian classical music. But since the late '90s, the Grammy-nominated sitar player has pushed the boundaries of her instrument, incorporating symphonic, electronic, jazz and pop music into her sound.
"I feel with every increasing year, I chafe just that little bit more around what feels like a restrictive perception around my instrument: the sitar," Anoushka tells Q 's Tom Power in an interview. "If you think of a guitar or you think of a piano … you don't necessarily automatically think of a genre — you think of the instrument. It can be used to dig into any number of genres and it could be a part of those."
WATCH | Anoushka Shankar's full interview with Tom Power:
For most people around the world, Anoushka says the sitar conjures a very specific set of images, such as the 1960s, incense, flying carpets or meditation. "Those things are a part of its history, they're a part of its journey, but the instrument is also broader and bigger than that and has so many other possibilities."
Recently, Anoushka released Chapter III: We Return to Light, the final chapter in a trilogy of mini-albums she started two years ago. The album was inspired by Goa, India, and the trance music and raves she found there in her 20s.
I would just be on dance floors till morning or I'd be out in Goa at a rave for two days. - Anoushka Shankar
"Throughout my 20s, I kind of felt like I lived a sort of double life," she says. "I was touring with my dad as a teenager, and then I was touring on my own. I was on all these classical stages, and I was playing ragas…. Then I'd kind of get things out of my system by … having this completely other life where I'd be with friends and DJs and artists. I would just be on dance floors till morning or I'd be out in Goa at a rave for two days."
WATCH | Anoushka Shankar performing New Dawn:
In her mid-20s, Anoushka started to merge those different interests through her music. On her 2016 album, Land of Gold, she started looping, layering and touring with a pedal board for the first time.
"It's another part of how I've changed the way I think with my instrument, because suddenly you can be a bit more orchestral or a bit more layered in the way that we play a linear melodic instrument," she says.
"Coming back to the Indian classical music that the sitar comes from, it's a system based on melody and rhythm — or ragas and talas — not harmony and counterpoint like Western music. So our instruments simply aren't designed to play chords and those kind of broad textures in an accurate way. It's more lead melody stuff, even if we have resonating strings to make it sound fuller."
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Toronto Star
13 hours ago
- Toronto Star
Kendrick Lamar performs in Toronto for first time since explosive Drake feud. Here's everything to know
For over a year, Canadians have watched with anxiety as a brazen figure from south of the border, unconcerned with decorum, steadily gained momentum and trampled timid expressions of resistance. This figure is, of course, Kendrick Lamar — the Compton hip hop superstar with 21 Grammy wins and a Pulitzer — who handily vanquished hometown hero Drake in the most high-profile rap feud of the century last summer. The beef sparked a series of diss tracks, tested famous friendships and culminated with Lamar performing his chart-topping 'Not Like Us' at the Super Bowl.
Winnipeg Free Press
a day ago
- Winnipeg Free Press
Corinne Bailey Rae's first children's book, ‘Put Your Records On,' draws upon her musical past
NEW YORK (AP) — Corinne Bailey Rae is working on a children's picture book that draws upon her early memories of music. The Grammy-winning singer-songwriter has a deal with Rocky Pond Books, an imprint of Penguin Young Readers, for 'Put Your Records On.' Named for her signature hit and illustrated by Gillian Eilidh O'Mara, the book is scheduled to come out March 3, 2026, and tells the story of a young girl's initiation into her great aunt's record collection. Weekly A weekly look at what's happening in Winnipeg's arts and entertainment scene. 'When I was a child, music helped me find myself. Through songs I discovered that others felt what I felt,' Rae said in a statement released Wednesday. 'Playing music grew my confidence and writing and performing my own music allowed me to fully express myself. I want every child to know that they have music in their heart and a voice that should be heard.' Rae, 46, has sold millions of records worldwide and won two Grammys — as a contributor to Herbie Hancock's 2007 tribute album to Joni Mitchell, 'River,' and for her cover in 2011 of Bob Marley & The Wailer's 'Is This Love.'
Vancouver Sun
3 days ago
- Vancouver Sun
London's V&A Storehouse museum opens its massive art warehouse to public
LONDON — A museum is like an iceberg. Most of it is out of sight. Most big collections have only a fraction of their items on display, with the rest locked away in storage. But not at the new V&A East Storehouse , where London's Victoria and Albert Museum has opened up its storerooms for visitors to view — and in many cases touch — the items within. The 16,000-square-metre (170,000-square-foot) building, bigger than 30 basketball courts, holds more than 250,000 objects, 350,000 books and 1,000 archives. Wandering its huge, three-story collections hall feels like a trip to IKEA, but with treasures at every turn. The V&A is Britain's national museum of design, performance and applied arts, and the storehouse holds aisle after aisle of open shelves lined with everything from ancient Egyptian shoes to Roman pottery, ancient Indian sculptures, Japanese armor, Modernist furniture, a Piaggio scooter and a brightly painted garbage can from the Glastonbury Festival. Plan your next getaway with Travel Time, featuring travel deals, destinations and gear. By signing up you consent to receive the above newsletter from Postmedia Network Inc. A welcome email is on its way. If you don't see it, please check your junk folder. The next issue of Travel Time will soon be in your inbox. Please try again Interested in more newsletters? Browse here. 'It's 5,000 years of creativity,' said Kate Parsons, the museum's director of collection care and access. It took more than a year, and 379 truckloads, to move the objects from the museum's former storage facility in west London to the new site. In the museum's biggest innovation, anyone can book a one-on-one appointment with any object, from a Vivienne Westwood mohair sweater to a tiny Japanese netsuke figurine. Most of the items can even be handled, with exceptions for hazardous materials, such as Victorian wallpaper that contains arsenic. The Order an Object service offers 'a behind-the-scenes, very personal, close interaction' with the collection, Parsons said as she showed off one of the most requested items so far: a 1954 pink silk taffeta Balenciaga evening gown. Nearby in one of the study rooms were a Bob Mackie-designed military tunic worn by Elton John on his 1981 world tour and two silk kimonos laid out ready for a visit. Parsons said there has been 'a phenomenal response' from the public since the building opened at the end of May. Visitors have ranged from people seeking inspiration for their weddings to art students and 'someone last week who was using equipment to measure the thread count of an 1850 dress.' She says strangers who have come to view different objects often strike up conversations. 'It's just wonderful,' Parsons said. 'You never quite know. … We have this entirely new concept and of course we hope and we believe and we do audience research and we think that people are going to come. But until they actually did, and came through the doors, we didn't know.' The V&A's flagship museum in London's affluent South Kensington district, founded in the 1850s, is one of Britain's biggest tourist attractions. The Storehouse is across town in the Olympic Park, a post-industrial swath of east London that hosted the 2012 summer games. As part of post-Olympic regeneration, the area is now home to a new cultural quarter that includes arts and fashion colleges, a dance theater and another V&A branch, due to open next year. The Storehouse has hired dozens of young people recruited from the surrounding area, which includes some of London's most deprived districts. Designed by Diller, Scofidio and Renfro, the firm behind New York's High Line park, the building has space to show off objects too big to have been displayed very often before, including a 17th-century Mughal colonnade from India, a 1930s modernist office designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and a Pablo Picasso-designed stage curtain for a 1924 ballet, some 10 meters (more than 30 feet) high. Also on a monumental scale are large chunks of vanished buildings, including a gilded 15th-century ceiling from the Torrijos Palace in Spain and a slab of the concrete facade of Robin Hood Gardens, a demolished London housing estate. Not a hushed temple of art, this is a working facility. Conversation is encouraged and forklifts beep in the background. Workers are finishing the David Bowie Center, a home for the late London-born musician's archive of costumes, musical instruments, letters, lyrics and photos that is due to open at the Storehouse in September. One aim of the Storehouse is to expose the museum's inner workings, through displays delving into all aspects of the conservators' job — from the eternal battle against insects to the numbering system for museum contents — and a viewing gallery to watch staff at work. The increased openness comes as museums in the U.K. are under increasing scrutiny over the origins of their collections. They face pressure to return objects acquired in sometimes contested circumstances during the days of the British Empire Senior curator Georgia Haseldine said the V&A is adopting a policy of transparency, 'so that we can talk very openly about where things have come from, how they ended up in the V&A's collection, and also make sure that researchers, as well as local people and people visiting from all around the world, have free and equitable access to these objects. 'On average, museums have one to five percent of their collections on show,' she said. 'What we're doing here is saying, 'No, this whole collection belongs to all of us. This is a national collection and you should have access to it.' That is our fundamental principle.'
