Reena Esmail’s Residency Has Its Final Curtain

By Leilani Polk

Reena Esmail’s year of creative collaboration, composing, presenting, performing and instructing young artists as Seattle Symphony’s Composer in Residence all culminated in the Ram Tori Maya concert on May 13 at Benaroya Hall. This free community concert found Esmail joined by the talented young student singers of Swaranjali School of Music alongside other musical guests and a Seattle Symphony string quartet.

A quick show of hands revealed that the majority of attendees were experiencing a Symphony event for the first time, bringing visible delight to Esmail; her original intention for the concert and her work is to use her music to create connections between Indian and Western classical music. Esmail prefaced the performance by sharing that many classical music performers, including herself, are predominantly Western-trained and not often given the opportunity to interact with Hindustani classical music. During her own musical studies, she discovered a noticeable lack of dialogue between Hindustani and Western classical music. “Now I’m trying to bridge the two together.”

The concert opened with a few well-known crowd pleasers — Shankar Mahadevan’s Gananaayakaaya, a tribute to the Hindu god Ganesh, and Salil Chowdhury’s Dhitang Dhitang bole, a post-Independence song suffused with hope for a better future and written by a Bengali artist and filmmaking great, renowned for his fusion of Indian and Western classical music. An excerpt from Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik followed, which felt fitting because Mozart was an improviser, and Hindustani classical music incorporates much improvisation. 

The performance earned healthy applause from the crowd, but it was two Bollywood songs arranged by Esmail (Lalit-Jatin Pandit’s Kuch Kuch Hota Hai and Harris Jayaraj’s Zara Zara) that really got everyone going, with head-bobbing, dancing and plenty of claps and cheers ringing out for the young performers.

Swaranjali School of Music singers with drummer Rohan Sharma, tabla player Ravi Albright and keyboardist Preet Desai.

The 2021/2022 season has kept Esmail plenty busy, with the Ram Tori Maya performance closing out a year of powerful premieres and partnerships. Esmail’s residency kicked off in September with an Opening Weekend Concert featuring the world premiere of her first Seattle Symphony commission, RE|Member. “I wanted this piece to feel like an overture, and my guides were two favorites: Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro and Bernstein’s Candide,” she wrote in the program notes. “Each is breathless and energetic, with pockets of intimacy and tenderness. Each contains many parallel universes that unfold quickly. Each has beautiful, memorable melodies that speak and beckon to one another. I strove for all of this in RE|Member.”

In her review of the September concert for The Seattle Times, Melinda Bargreen wrote, “The surprise of the evening, for this listener at least, was the Esmail piece: evocative, imaginative and surprisingly powerful.”

Esmail views her work as an invitation for conversation, and the dialogue continued with a collaboration between Esmail and the Symphony’s Education and Community Engagement team, its outcome a thoughtful and vibrant instructional booklet on composing melodies paired with four educational videos, all offered for free this season to Washington State schools and educators for third through fifth graders. “To be asked by a Western classical institution to talk about melody and how to bring melody to young children, it felt to me like I was really going back to my own roots.” Her work didn’t stop there though; she was also among the guest instructors who offered wisdom and guidance to the 12- to 18-year-olds taking master classes in the Symphony’s Merriman-Ross Family Young Composers Workshop.

In March, her work with the Seattle Symphony and virtuoso Indian violinist Kala Ramnath came to a head in two concerts presented over a single weekend: an intimate performance in the Octave 9: Raisbeck Music Center and a world premiere as part of the orchestra’s annual Celebrate Asia concert. The former, Ragamala: A Journey into Hindustani Music, was focused on Indian classical music and improvisation; Ragamala means ‘garland of raags,’ where melody and modes are strung together into intriguing combinations. It opened with Ramnath delivering improvisations on Hindustani violin. Then, a Symphony string quartet staged Esmail’s modern String Quartet (Ragamala) with vocals by Ramnath. “[…]It’s exciting that Kala is playing something familiar in an unfamiliar way,” Esmail explained in an interview earlier this season. “Kala [plays] the same violin that Western violinists would play, but in her hands, it looks and sounds completely different, and I can imagine that people would want a closer look and want to engage more closely.”

Her Seattle Symphony commission and joint composition with Ramnath, Concerto for Hindustani Violin & Orchestra, had its world premiere during the annual Celebrate Asia concert. It was born out of Ramnath’s pandemic reflections on climate change and an environmental emergency (the wildfires in California). She envisioned a piece of music grounded in Indian and Western classical traditions, inspired by Indian ragas for the five elements — space, air, fire, water and earth — and reached out to Esmail to collaborate. Esmail quickly accepted the request.

“[Kala’s] lifelong exploration and incredible depth of knowledge of the Hindustani musical artform allowed me to delve so much deeper into new melodic concepts and rhythmic frameworks,” Esmail wrote in the program notes. “For each movement, we spoke about the element, about how climate change affected it, how Kala heard that process through the lens of raag and taal, and how I heard it through the lens of the symphony orchestra. In the end, we created a work that expresses the vast beauty of the natural world, acknowledges the gravity of our impact on it, and ultimately asks for forgiveness — with the hope that we might change our own actions before it is gone forever.”

Each of Esmail’s new works with the Symphony embodied her approach to bridging Western and Indian classical music traditions, but the Ram Tori Maya concert in May held special significance for her. "This was the concert I was so deeply passionate about,” Esmail admitted from the stage as the program began.

A Seattle Symphony string quartet composed of Associate Concertmaster Eduardo Rios (violin), Andy Liang (violin), Meeka Quan DiLorenzo (cello) and Olivia Chew (viola) at the Ram Tori Maya concert.

The final three pieces performed in the Ram Tori Maya concert — her last concert this season with the Symphony — were composed by Esmail herself. The first two (the second and fourth movements of her Ragamala String Quartet) were introduced as an opportunity for classically trained musicians to experiment with Hindustani music, a rarity because Hindustani music generally isn’t annotated and especially not for symphonic orchestras or chamber groups. To arrange these pieces, Esmail would sing phrases in the traditional Hindustani style, then transcribe them with sufficient annotation for Western-classically trained musicians to play the music, though not with the level of detail they’d ordinarily be accustomed to. Esmail explained to the audience that this merged style of music she writes is not necessarily easy for musicians with Western classical training to follow, but the Symphony players handled it with great aplomb.

The concert concluded with its namesake: Ram Tori Maya for Voices and String Quartet. Esmail wrote of the work, “This vibrant Hindustani bhajan is a beautiful portrait of [the Hindu god] Krishna dancing. My arrangement is designed with young musicians from both cultures in mind, with the aim to draw them towards one another, one step at a time.” Emblematic of the spirit of the musical exchange, the special performance notes explain that “Western string players need not have any Hindustani experience, and Hindustani singers need not have any Western music experience: you will figure this out together.” She was ultimately commissioned by Carnegie Hall to turn her Ram Tori Maya into a full symphonic work so youth orchestras all around the world will be able to engage with Hindustani music.

“Reena Esmail’s residency is a beautiful manifestation of the Symphony’s continued approach to community engagement and cross-cultural work,” remarked the Seattle Symphony’s Senior Director of Education & Community Engagement, Jérémy Jolley. “Commissioning composers for the full orchestra as well as creating a framework for the composer to collaborate with key partners, especially youth-serving organizations within a community, creates a unique concert experience for all involved — students, Seattle Symphony musicians and audiences. Together, we are taking steps toward what the future of orchestras can be.”

Overall, the outgoing Composer in Residence’s final curtain was a stunning, heartfelt, seamlessly cross-cultural affair, a concert experience that bridged the gap between Hindustani and Western classical music while introducing elements of both to a captivated audience and reflecting the goals Esmail had wanted to achieve in her tenure with Seattle Symphony. It felt like a tangible victory and fitting exclamation point to Esmail’s time in our city.
 

Reena Esmail's residency is generously supported by Parul and Gary Houlahan.

Eduardo Rios' position is generously underwritten as the Clowes Family Associate Concertmaster.

The Merriman-Ross Family Young Composers Workshop is generously underwritten by Pamela Merriman, Sonja Ross, and Kelley Ross.

Additional support for The Merriman-Ross Family Young Composers Workshop is provided by Patricia M. Davis, along with Michel and Christine Suignard.

Octave 9: Emerging Artists is supported by the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation.

Celebrate Asia was generously sponsored by Naomi and Yoshi Minegishi and Perkins Coie.

Reena Esmail's RE|Member, Ragamala: A Journey into Hindustani Music and Celebrate Asia were presented as part of the Seattle Symphony’s New Music WORKS initiative, which is supported in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.

The Seattle Symphony’s Family, School & Community programs are supported by 4Culture, Arakawa Foundation, Marco Argenti, The Klorfine Foundation, Merriman-Ross Family, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Seattle Office of Arts & Culture, the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation, Maryanne Tagney, the Atsuhiko and Ina Goodwin Tateuchi Foundation and individual contributions to the Seattle Symphony Annual Fund.