{"id":6017,"date":"2020-12-31T09:17:37","date_gmt":"2020-12-31T09:17:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/kathak.org\/?p=2203"},"modified":"2021-07-02T23:47:27","modified_gmt":"2021-07-02T23:47:27","slug":"blog-sarah-morelli","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/leela.dance\/devsite2\/blog-sarah-morelli\/","title":{"rendered":"The Making of the California Gharana: Sarah Morelli"},"content":{"rendered":"

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The Making Of the California Gharana<\/h2>\n

Sarah Morelli<\/h4>\n

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\"\"You studied with two of modern India\u2019s greatest masters of North Indian classical art –\u00a0 Ustad Ali Akbar Khansahib and Pandit Chitresh Das. Can you talk about how this came to be?\u00a0 How did you discover and encounter each of them and end up being able to study both sarod and kathak so intensely with these great gurus?\u00a0 \u00a0<\/span><\/strong><\/h4>\n

I\u2019m taking a deep breath as I begin because this story is a bit involved. My path to studying with these two master artists was fairly long and winding, but all of those experiences informed my capacity to learn from them, so I\u2019ll do my best to be succinct! Growing up in the 1970s, it turned out that a few of my best friends were among the first generation of kids born to Indian immigrants following the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act\u2014a momentous piece of legislation that opened the US to immigration from much of Asia for the first time in almost 50 years. Lots of early experiences with those friends encouraged my interest in India and Indian culture. In the summer after sixth grade, for example, my friend Sri visited my mom\u2019s Sunday School class to talk about Hinduism; afterward, as we played on the swing set behind the church, he taught me how to count to ten in Hindi, which I thought\u2014and still think\u2014was incredibly cool!<\/span><\/p>\n

I planned to study abroad in India during college, and by chance, one of the music professors, Dr. Beth Bullard, was offering a course on Indian music in the second semester of my freshman year. It was the class that set my path for the many years since. She introduced me to the music of so many great artists! The internet was still in its infancy, so to hear more, I had to go to the library and make cassette copies of LP records, like one performance of rag Malkauns by shehnai master Bismillah Khansahib\u2014I wore that tape out. Especially meaningful for me was a field trip we took to Swarthmore College on a cold winter evening to see a performance by Ken Zuckerman (sarod) and Zakir Hussain (tabla). That experience left me buzzing with excitement for days and cemented my intention not just to study in India, but to study <\/span>music<\/span><\/i>!<\/span><\/p>\n

A year and a half later, I was heading to India for the very first time. The study abroad program my college was affiliated with, called SITA (an acronym for \u201cSouth Indian Term Abroad\u201d), was based in Madurai, Tamil Nadu. And, of course, the classical music prevalent in South India is Karnatak, not Hindustani music. So while I was in Madurai in 1993 and again in 1995, I studied Karnatak vocal music and the veena. I wrote a senior thesis with Prof. Bullard comparing Hindustani and Karnatak music theory and practice. It wasn\u2019t until graduate school at Harvard in 1998 that I again took a course in Hindustani music\u2014called \u201cR\u0101g and T\u0101l,\u201d taught by Professor Carol Babiracki. I realized that even if I wasn\u2019t going to focus my own research on Hindustani music, it might be a kind of \u201cbread and butter\u201d course for a professor with a focus on South Asia. Hopeful for my own career in academia, I decided it would be good to get some hands-on experience. I\u2019ll never forget Prof. Babiracki\u2019s advice: \u201cif you really want to understand r\u0101gs, you should go to <\/span>George Ruckert<\/span><\/i>.\u201d I was a little surprised because his was one of the few non-South Asian names she mentioned. I quickly learned that he was one of the senior disciples of Ali Akbar Khansahib and set an intention to take lessons from him. Soon after that, when I was flying to Austin for the Society for Ethnomusicology\u2019s annual meeting, I ran into a friend from the MIT bhangra team who was waiting to board the same flight. He mentioned, as luck would have it, that George Ruckert was also on the plane too(!) and pointed him out to me. Something came over me, and I asked the person sitting next to him if I could please exchange seats. I had to ask twice and was embarrassed that I was being a <\/span>little bit<\/span><\/i> pushy, but it somehow felt so<\/span> important. Sitting next to Georgeji, I talked with him through the whole flight, and as the plane landed, he suggested we begin lessons the following week. And thus, my studies began in earnest.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"Among the mentors I\u2019ve mentioned already and others, I especially have to thank Georgeji for setting in motion my studies with Khansahib and with our Guruji. During one lesson, he asked me if I had ever thought of studying kathak. I replied simply, \u201cno,\u201d which makes me laugh today. Georgeji suggested I take part in an introductory kathak workshop his wife, Gretchen Hayden<\/a>, was teaching at the Dance Complex in Cambridge. She, of course, is the senior-most disciple of Pandit Chitresh Das. I loved that experience and began studying kathak with Gretchenji on a weekly basis.<\/span><\/p>\n

In the meantime, during my Hindustani vocal lessons, Georgeji occasionally made comments like, \u201cYou know, Baba\u2019s not getting any younger\u201d\u2014suggesting that if I wanted to study with the great Ali Akbar Khansahib, I should find a way to get myself to California as soon as possible. I had been exploring other possibilities for a dissertation topic, but the more I studied Khansahib\u2019s vocal compositions with Georgeji, listened to recordings of Khansahib\u2019s performances, and began developing a small understanding of his genius, the more I wanted to study with Khansahib while he was still teaching. So I decided to go to California for a three-month \u201cpilot study\u201d to explore dissertation possibilities. I bought my first car and drove across the country to California, seven years after my first trip to India. Three months became a full three years in the San Francisco Bay Area, during which I tried to absorb as much as I could from these artistic masters. It was an intense three years, and yet the time was impossibly short. But I\u2019m still learning from them.<\/span>
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\"\"What were some of the benefits as well as challenges of your simultaneous experiences of learning from both Pandit Chitresh Das and Ustad Ali Akbar Khansahib?<\/span><\/strong><\/h4>\n

In this tradition, music and dance are part and parcel of the same artistic whole, so the studies naturally complement one another. It\u2019s beneficial for any dancer to study music and vice-versa. And yet, studying with two genius artists in their respective fields was simply an embarrassment of riches. I was inspired on a daily basis, and I knew that it was an extraordinary period in my life.<\/span><\/p>\n

Developing a personal connection with the teacher or guru is a deeply ingrained aspect of these traditions. I talk about the nuance of these relationships a bit in <\/span>A Guru\u2019s Journey<\/span><\/i><\/a>: \u201cIn addition to logistical complications and limitations of physical and mental energy, serious study in more than one area of the North Indian classical arts is made problematic by the concept of guru. George Ruckert describes a guru as a teacher of the kind \u2018one sees daily for years and years … with whom one lives nearly as a family member\u2019 (1994, 2). … \u2018No one can have two gurus,\u2019 Pandit Das once said, … \u2018Having two gurus is like having two husbands or two boyfriends; your heart cannot be in two places at once.\u2019 At the time, Pandit Das was referring to dancers studying with more than one kathak teacher; however, I experienced a similar pull between my kathak and Hindustani music studies\u201d (2019, 22).<\/span><\/p>\n

I was fortunate to develop close teacher-student relationships with Khansahib and with Pandit Das, and I was completely immersed in both studies for my three years in the Bay Area. It was such an artistically nourishing time, and I tried my best to absorb everything I could. When I returned to Boston, I continued studying Hindustani music and kathak, again with my first teachers, Georgeji and Gretchenji. While writing my dissertation though, the intensity of my academic work focused primarily on kathak, and my artistic work eventually shifted in that direction as well. But it\u2019s not like I chose one and discarded the other. All dancers need to study music, after all! As I continued visiting the Bay Area for performances and further research, Guruji welcomed me and, in fact, <\/span>pushed<\/span><\/i> me to continue to take my dance practice seriously–to work towards becoming the kind of artist-scholar that I still aspire to today.\u00a0<\/span>
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\"\"<\/strong><\/span>In addition to being a student, performer, and educator of Hindustani classical music and kathak dance, you also have a PhD in ethnomusicology and wrote your dissertation at Harvard University on Pandit Das\u2019s life work.\u00a0 Why did you decide to become an ethnomusicologist and how did you choose your dissertation topic?<\/span><\/strong><\/span><\/h4>\n

As an undergraduate, I had studied abroad in Russia as well as India and focused primarily on music, language, and culture. I wanted to do more of the same as a graduate student. When I thought about ethnomusicology, I was thrilled by the possibilities to continue to study contemporary cultures of the world and various ways music is meaningful to people.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

As I mentioned earlier, I was compelled to go to California primarily by a desire to learn from Ali Akbar Khansahib while he was still teaching. I hoped that a clear dissertation topic would emerge. At the time, there were a few recent ethnographies of western conservatories, their cultures, and the musical values they transmitted; I thought I might conduct a similar study of \u201cconservatory culture\u201d at the Ali Akbar College of Music. It turns out that another of Khansahib\u2019s students, Cliff Winnig, wrote an MA thesis on that basic topic! But, that didn\u2019t actually influence my dissertation focus. Most ethnomusicologists\u2019 topics change through the course of their research. Even though we might come to our fieldwork with particular ideas, it\u2019s essential to pay attention, adapt, and adjust to what we experience from those around us. For me, there were a few key moments that encouraged me to adjust my plans.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

First, about a year into my study with Khansahib, I went to his home to formally ask him for his blessing to write my dissertation on the Ali Akbar College of Music. Rather than telling me yes or no, he asked me, \u201cWhat can you write about music that is as beautiful as the music itself? Practice, practice!\u201d I left that meeting confused and somewhat distraught about my next steps. Without Khansahib\u2019s blessing, I certainly wouldn\u2019t write about the College. But what then? Should I leave my Ph.D. program and focus on my music practice? I definitely wanted to continue studying with Khansahib, but leaving my doctoral program didn\u2019t seem like a wise choice. In the meantime, I was becoming more and more involved in kathak classes\u2014dancing and accompanying. And Chitreshji would say to me sometimes, \u201cYeah, you should write about what we are doing too!\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Because I was in an ethno<\/span>music<\/span><\/i>ology program and dance studies were then somewhat uncommon in the discipline, I was still blinded by the artificial distinction between music and dance that I keep talking about in this interview, and I hadn\u2019t fully embraced the possibility of focusing on kathak. But then\u2014and this leads me to the second experience I want to share\u2014I had to go back to Harvard to give a presentation on my research. Following my presentation, discussing the \u201ctwo worlds\u201d of Indian classical music and dance in Northern California in which I was involved, <\/span>all<\/span><\/i> the questions I got were about kathak, about Chitreshji, and especially about his practice of kathak yoga. I had shared a video clip I had taken of him in practice: playing tabla, reciting, singing, dancing, and even holding dumbbells and moving them about gracefully. These experiences helped shift my thinking, and by the next time Guruji said, \u201cyou should write about us too,\u201d I was ready to reply that with his blessing, I would like to write my dissertation on kathak and his teaching and artistry. The rest, as he might say, is history.<\/span>
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\"\"How did you approach your studies in the artforms, both as an ethnomusicologist and as an artist? How do these approaches differ?\u00a0<\/span><\/strong><\/h4>\n

There are so many ways to answer this question, but what comes to mind here is to share a general scenario: say Guruji was giving a lecture in class, with very pointed comments about me or another dancer. Wearing my student hat, I might go home and reflect deeply on what lesson he was trying to convey. How might it help me mature in my attitude, grow in my approach to learning, improve in some specific aspect of my dance, or evolve my general understanding? If I were wearing my scholar hat, I might instead reflect on how that critique related to broader issues of teaching Indian classical dance in the US to an ethnically-diverse group of students. In other words, I’d think about how that specific lesson could be contextualized or understood more broadly. In all honesty, it was sometimes helpful to zoom out and think about larger questions (related to culture, pedagogy, identity, etc.) because it could be a painful process to apply his lessons to one\u2019s own life. But staying present during these raw moments is also so crucial for our personal and artistic growth.<\/span>
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