Composer Reena Esmail to Speak on Campus

Renowned composer Reena Esmail will present a lecture titled “Composing Between Cultures: My Work between Hindustani and Western Classical Traditions” on Tuesday, Nov. 19, at 7:30 p.m. in Room 101 of the Joe Rosenfield ’25 Center.

Esmail, an Indian American composer, currently serves as composer-in-residence for the Los Angeles Master Chorale. She has received commissions from many of the world’s leading orchestras and choirs.

In both her work and her person, Esmail reflects the global diaspora. Her Indian mother, a member of India’s Portuguese-influenced Goan community, grew up in Kenya. Her father, also Indian, lived in Pakistan, where his family moved after Partition. Esmail herself was born in Chicago and raised in Los Angeles, but she always felt connected to her ancestral homeland. 

Midway through graduate studies at Yale, after earning an undergraduate degree in composition at Juilliard, she knew that she needed to learn more about Indian classical music. She spent 2011–12 in India on a Fulbright-Nehru Grant, studying under such masters as singer Srimati Lakshmi Shankar and sitarist Gaurav Mazumdar. Her doctoral dissertation at Yale outlined methods of collaboration between Western and Hindustani forms of art music.

As an artistic director of the nonprofit Shastra, she promotes music that links the cultural traditions of India and the West. This devotion to cultural syncretism carries over to her substantial catalogue, which includes orchestral, chamber, and choral works. 

This lecture is presented as preparation for the Dec. 8 performance of Reena Esmail’s This Love Between Us in Grinnell. This seven-movement work juxtaposes the words of seven major religious traditions of India (Buddhism, Sikhism, Christianity, Zoroastrianism, Hinduism, Jainism, and Islam), and specifically how each of these traditions approaches the topics of unity, brotherhood, and being kind to one another.

Each movement contains a unique combination of Indian and Western classical styles, running the continuum from the Christian movement, which is rooted firmly in a baroque style, to the Zoroastrian movement, which is a Hindustani vilambit bandish. Each of the other movements lives somewhere in between these two musical cultures in their techniques, styles, and forms.

But even more than uniting musical practices, this piece also unites people from two different musical traditions: a sitar and tabla join the choir and baroque orchestra. Each of the musicians is asked to keep one hand firmly rooted in their own tradition and training, while reaching the other hand outward to greet another musical culture.

The Dec. 8 concert will include the Grinnell Oratorio Society, the Grinnell Singers, and visiting orchestral musicians, as well as professional guests on tabla and sitar. The concert and Esmail’s visit are sponsored by the Department of Music, the Institute for Global Engagement, the Public Events Committee, and the Center for the Humanities.