TāReKiŢa - Reena Esmail - Harmonium Choral Society Chamber Singers

Open Hearts - June 2022
Under the direction of Dr. Anne J. Matlack
Harmonium Choral Society Chamber Singers
Our Lady of Sorrow, South Orange, NJ

Indian-American composer Reena Esmail @reenaesmailcomposer works between the worlds of Indian and Western classical music, and brings communities together through the creation of equitable musical spaces. Esmail’s work has been commissioned by numerous ensembles including the Los Angeles Master Chorale, Kronos Quartet, Imani Winds, San Francisco Girls Chorus, Juilliard415, and Yale Institute of Sacred Music. She is the Los Angeles Master Chorale’s 2020-2023 Swan Family Artist in Residence, and Seattle Symphony’s 2020-21 Composer in Residence. Esmail holds degrees in composition from The Juilliard School (BM ’05) and the Yale School of Music (MM ‘11, MMA ‘14, DMA ‘18). She received a Fulbright-Nehru grant to study Hindustani music in India. Her Hindustani music teachers include Srimati Lakshmi Shankar and Gaurav Mazundar, and she currently studies and collaborates with Saili Oak. Her doctoral thesis, entitled Finding Common Ground: Uniting Practices in Hindustani and Western Art Musicians, explores the methods and challenges of the collaborative process between Hindustani musicians and Western composers. Esmail is currently an artistic director of Shastra, a non-profit organization that promotes cross-cultural music connecting music traditions of India and the West. https://www.reenaesmail.com/
TāReKiŢa is a vibrant joyful piece in a Raga (राग, an Indian classical melodic framework) called Jog (जोग), which incorporates both major and minor modalities into a single scale. The text syllables are onomatopoetic vocalizations of the sounds produced by Indian instruments.

Program notes: http://www.harmonium.org/
Video/audio production: http://www.showfocused.llc

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