Sitar on Fire | Raag Lalit (Part 1) | Pandit Budhaditya Mukherjee | Music of India

#darbarfestival | “Then came the realization of responsibility. When that hits you, it feels like an earthquake...However, my sitar recognises me. And that’s what I live for.” (Budhaditya Mukherjee)
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Budhaditya Mukherjee is revered for his extraordinary command of the sitar and surbahar, with many counting him among the world’s leading exponents of both - at age 22 veena maestro S Balachander described him as the ‘sitar artist of the century’. He first started learning from his father Bimalendu Mukherjee, an eclectic musician who studied under sitarist Enayat Khan as well as a plethora of singers, beenkars, percussionists, and sarangi, esraj, and sursringar exponents.

Budhaditya achieved success early, winning various competitions while also pursuing academic work (he graduated with a first class degree in Metallurgical Engineering, and it is said that he barely made a key exam on time after flying straight in from a performance). In his youth he sought to replicate the distinctive sound of Vilayat Khan (“my goal, the shining star, and the sun in whose ambience I too wanted to bathe”). He began to tour internationally, and holds the curious distinction of being the first musician to perform in the British House of Commons. Always seeking to broaden his musical vocabulary, he is considered to be the first sitarist to capture the intricacies of tappa vocal music - a semi-classical style derived from Punjabi camel-riders replete with fast, distinctively angular melodies, typically depicting the emotional outbursts of a lover.

He has customised his sitars using his engineering knowledge, and brings new imagination to playing them with a fine-lens command of the Imdadkhani gayaki ang [singing style]. He is notoriously uninterested in self-promotion, and prides himself on musical self-control, not allowing his near-unrivalled speed to distract from the underlying shape of a melody (“speed in sitar music is an incidental decoration, not the core on which aesthetics of sitar music stands”). A stellar performance career has not prevented him from living out a strong commitment to teaching - he is among India’s most respected gurus, with students including Dhruv Bedi and Gagandeep Hothi. He has also held academic positions in Rotterdam and Venice, and tours the world, enrapturing audiences of newcomers and old connoisseurs alike. Listen to more of Budhaditya here:
-Mian Ki Malhar | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFenlzgBEns
-Lalit | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s99vvMH02oI
-Todi | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72MCEY57_Q4

Lalit is an oddly-shaped raga intended for performance around the time of sunrise. Its modern form takes the notes SrGmMdNS, with shuddha Ma as the vadi [king note]. Note the absence of Pa, and the adjacent use of both tivra and shuddha Ma in descent - a rare, perhaps even unique feature (twin-swara ragas typically permit one version of the note in ascent and the other in descent). This leads some to say that the tivra Ma functions as a kind of komal Pa in practice - something supposedly forbidden in Hindustani classical (although the concept is mentioned in ancient texts such as the Natya Shastra). Different traditions may use either a komal or a shuddha Dha, and others hold that it is in fact a microtone somewhere between these two tones. It is similar to Carnatic Raga Lalitha, suggesting a common source. Hear more of Lalit here:
-Jyoti Hegde (rudra veena) | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JdCoisYLIRM
-Rajendra Prasanna (bansuri) | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YujHFr-LaG4
-Indrani Mukherjee (khayal) | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILCGidVPFxQ

Recorded at Darbar Festival 2017, at London’s Southbank Centre:
-Budhaditya Mukherjee (sitar)
-Soumen Nandy (tabla)

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