THURSDAY, APRIL 25, 2024
The New Year began in Goa with a small storm in an even smaller teacup: the statement made by Padma Shree Award-winning singer-composer Shankar Mahadevan on a visit here, that “Goa lacks proper music learning facilities”. “We need a music institution where we can attract international students”, he was quoted as saying, and he added that Goa should set up performance venues.
Predictably, there was much outrage among the music fraternity across genres, defending Goa’s existing infrastructure of both pedagogy and performance.
Some even took up cudgels on my behalf and of our music education charity Child’s Play India Foundation www.childsplayindia.org, thirteen years old now.
While I’m flattered to be acknowledged among those who are contributing to music education in Goa, I have to say that I actually agree with Mahadevan and am very glad he said what he did.
Since I wasn’t present at the event where Mahadevan made his statement, I have to deduce its context from the press
reportage.
It seems to me that he was making a general point about music performance and instruction, or perhaps about the genres of music (Hindustani, Carnatic, jazz, fusion. Bollywood and other Indian film music) in which he has made attained such renown.
Goans, regardless of our faith or background, pride ourselves for our deep love of music and what an integral part music has in our culture and identity. Due to our colonial history, western influences in that musical legacy have deeper roots here in Goa than anywhere else on the Indian subcontinent.
Furthermore, as Mahadevan correctly pointed out, Goa is regarded as a “cultural hub” (it sadly has acquired the notoriety of a hub for much else but I’ll not digress).
It would have seemed only logical that Goa should have had the finest performance venues in the country for all kinds of music. Indeed, when the Kala Academy’s Dinanath Mangueshkar indoor auditorium had its acoustic shell, it was certainly a step in the right direction. It had issues which could have been ironed out. But if memory serves me right, around the mid-1990s, that acoustic shell was removed (long story) and never replaced, and things went downhill from there.
Currently, nationwide, the best performance venues are at Mumbai’s NCPA (National Centre for the Performing Arts), with its two bigger venues (the Jamshed Bhabha and Tata theatres) and ancillary smaller venues as well. This is one of the big reasons why when the major world orchestras go on tour in Asia, they deign to perform just in Mumbai. Contrast this with China, where there are world-class concert halls in most of major cities and even in smaller ones.
The truth of the matter is, if one builds a concert hall with the acoustic specifications for western classical music, it can be used for all other purposes. It doesn’t work the other way around. The NCPA’s major concert halls have admirable acoustics for unamplified performances, and a look at their concert calendar demonstrates the versatility of those venues: world-class performances of not just western classical music, but also everything else, from Indian classical to Sufi, jazz, pop, dance and much else.
We can get as defensive as we like about our existing infrastructure, but Goa doesn’t have a performance venue of such a high standard.
Even the open-air Kala auditorium, which once used to have performances of sterling quality of all genres, fell into disuse even before everything was shut down for this current ‘renovation’ and ‘tender’ controversy. It is the reason why jazz and pop performances have shifted location to hotels (often at unaffordable prices for most) in more remote parts of Goa.
I know first-hand how difficult it is to organise a western classical music concert which isn’t deemed “sacred “music (which is a huge chunk of the repertoire) in Goa. While there are churches and other religious venues galore for sacred music, the rest of the repertoire gets short shrift, and so a whole generation is growing up with less exposure to such music.
As Mahadevan said, music is not just an “extra-curricular activity”; it is a crucial element in a child’s development and a vital source of nourishment to a society.
India is part of BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa), the five leading economies of the world. All the other four nations have invested heavily in music infrastructure to match their growing stature on the world stage. Admittedly, Russia (and to some extent Brazil) had a head-start for historical reasons, but the other nations have made up for lost time.
Where India today has just one solitary professional symphony orchestra (the SOI, Symphony Orchestra of India) that can be deemed world-class, the other four nations have several. Goa ought to have been the natural choice for the thoughtful, methodical setting up of such a world-class symphony orchestra, and a satellite ecosystem of smaller high-calibre ensembles and chamber groups, string and piano trios and quartets. But so many decades post-Liberation have been frittered away basking in an imagined or real glorious past and its catchphrases of ‘Rome of the East’.
This is not to diminish the efforts of many individual teachers or institutions that are doing exceptional work. But for the most part, the standard of teaching has a long way to go before it can be called world-class. We’d be living in denial if we didn’t acknowledge this.
Performance is inextricably tied to pedagogy. I remember a time back in 1989 when visiting Professor from Wake Forest University, North Carolina, Dr. George Trautwein, who was on a long-term teaching stint in Goa) was summoned to the Secretariat (which ironically is where Kala’s western music department has currently been plonked) and told to organise such a high-quality performance that it would attract top-notch teaching faculty from around the world. Trautwein gently asserted that person that he had got the issues back to front: You first need to have the teachers, and some years later, it will yield fruit and only then you have high-quality performances.
Trautwein was then asked to draw up a detailed plan on how this could be achieved. The poor man painstakingly did so, but the file is probably gathering dust somewhere.
More recently, less than a decade ago, I was asked by Goa University to help them set up a “department of music”. I quickly realised that the template they wished to follow (a diploma course of a few weeks, after which one was supposed to emerge with a qualification!) was flawed from the get-go, and I pulled out.
With Goa’s endemic political instability, we should look beyond the government and at the private sector, as Mumbai has done.
Many on social media accused Mahadevan of having a “hidden agenda” of wanting to parachute his own music academy here. Whether this is true or not, to me, is immaterial. If we take the sting out of his remark, which I think was well-intended, and accept that there is collective room for improvement on both fronts, performance and pedagogy, the very admission of this can embolden us to start thinking seriously about a taking a new path.
(Dr Luis Dias is a physician, musician, writer and founder of Child’s Play India Foundation. He blogs at luisdias.wordpress.com)
