The piece of music that I selected for this song share is tilted Traveller, by Anoushka Shankar. I came across this piece while searching for examples of Hindustani instrumental raga on YouTube, specifically searching for performances done by women. Just as I did in my previous song share, I wanted to incorporate some inspiring women in the piece I found and this song did just that. The composer and sitar player of this piece, Anoushka Shankar, is a British-Indian musician and is one of the leading sitar players in the world. She is actually the first ever Indian musician to perform live and present at a Grammy Awards Ceremony. I had never heard of Shankar before hearing this piece, but I find her to be very inspiring, due to her ability to dominate a genre and instrument strongly influenced by male performers. This is something that really drew me to pick one of her performances for this assignment.
This musical piece itself is a little bit of a more unique interpretation of Hindustani instrumental raga. It consists of many of the traditional concepts of the Hindustani raga, as in it is solely instrumental and it contains a few of the traditional instruments. Yet Shankar also incorporates some outside influence as well in her piece. She added to the instrumentation some Southern Indian instruments such as the nadaswaram, which is a double reed instrument often used in Carnatic classical songs. Along with this, Shankar did something fairly unique with this piece in particular and combined with the classical Indian influence some Spanish musical traditions. Shankar describes this piece as a cross cultural journey. This specific performance took place in Spain, which I assume inspired this connection. For me it seems that Shankar swapped the rhythmic structure of the traditional Hindustani ragas with the consistent upbeat feel of a Spanish flamenco.
Another unique aspect of this piece is that some of the music is made with the help of a dancer in front of the musicians. Much like my song share for Ch. 4, this piece incorporates the use of a percussive instrument on the dancers body to add more depth to the song and performance. The female dancer, who is performing a form of bharatanatyam, which is a traditional form of Southern Indian dance, has strings of bells wrapped around her ankles. When the dancer taps her feet or moves her legs a certain way she is able to ring the bells and add to the texture of the music while also adding beautiful visuals to the performance.
I thought that there was something so fun about this piece, as both the musicians and the dance looked to be enjoying themselves while performing, which in turn made me quite enjoy the video. This performance along with the one from my Ch. 4 song share, inspires me to explore and use pieces that represent female talent and influence in my future song shares, while also trying to keep the theme of dancers being involved in the music making of the performance.
The Video:
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