Dear supporter

Our fundraising is chugging along and we have just about reached 30% of the goal, thanks to the families that have mailed a check or donated online. 

If you are a parent whose child is learning music, it is clear that you not only appreciate the art, but also believe in what it can do for your child. The benefits of learning music is not a matter of debate anymore. Study after study has demonstrated the indelible and lasting effect that music leaves on the student. And off all musical forms, Carnatic music is among the most difficult to learn because of its nearly open-ended creativity - the manodharma quality.

While learning a structured art form is hard enough, one that offers unlimited creativity is an order of magnitude more challenging. Even if one listens to top quality music all the time, a life time does not suffice to appreciate, comprehend, assimilate, imbibe and implement the nuances of the art. Students of music, especially, must make it a point to listen to as many live concerts as possible, since it is one of the best avenues to learn what it takes to be on stage and what it takes to be a good artist - the stage dynamics, body language of the artists - including mutual eye contact on stage and their gestures - the spontaneous exchange of creative musical ideas, the mutual admiration of the artists for each other on stage, the rapport between the artists and the audience, the ambience and so on!

Hamsadhwani is proud to make such live concerts available and accessible. What is more, our first concert of the year is coming up next weekend. With Thamayee Krishnamurthy as the vocalist, Kamalakiran Vinjamuri on the violin, and Vignesh Venkataraman on the mrudangam, the concert promises to be a musical treat to the senses. Please join us, along with your children, between 3 pm and 6 pm on February 7, 2016 at the Simi Valley Senior Center.

The fundraising needle is moving slowly but surely. If you haven't already, please take a few minutes to do your part to support the community and musicians. Your donations will be matched dollar-for-dollar by local employers such as Amgen, Bank of America, Union Bank, PNC Bank, etc.

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HCMA Board of Directors
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Dear rasikas

The 2016 fundraising campaign has been off to a sluggish start compared to previous year's campaigns. We have barely reached about 23% of the goal at this point. If you've been thinking about contributing but have been putting it off, please take a few minutes to step in and show your support!

One thing you will notice in any Carnatic music concert is the unique way the audience reacts to it. Invariably, a section of the audience is completely engrossed in the performance, shaking heads in various unpredictable directions, acknowledging the musician's delicate touch in unison, or playing the thaaLam with such thundering fervor that you would think the performer's life is dependent on it. There is another section of the audience that is perhaps oblivious to the goings on with grudging acknowledgement that there is some special language being spoken that seems just beyond reach. If you identify with the latter, please note that appreciating Carnatic music is a skill by itself, but can be learned with some level of effort and diligence.

For instance, recognizing raagas is a skill that unlocks the potential to appreciate Carnatic music at a much deeper level. A raaga is not only a collection of notes, but also involves singing/playing the notes in specific patterns that invoke emotions in the listener. Once the concept of a raaga pattern is learnt, it becomes easy to abstract the concept and learn many raagas. With the awareness of the raaga, one gets engaged deeply with the performance, resulting in nothing short of an exhilarating experience. Music lovers swear by that Eureka moment when the raaga name flashes in the mind, and that feeling is just priceless! Intrigued? Interested in learning more? Check out Hamsadhwani's primer on raaga identification on our blog.

Did you know that a series of award-winning young musicians are performing at Hamsadhwani in 2016? There is Kruthi Bhat, winner of the Madras Music Academy's Best Concert of the Year 2015, Manasa Suresh, winner of Times of India's Thyagaraja Awards 2015, Carnatic Music Idol 2015 winner - Vivrd Prasanna, and Ashwin Srikant, winner of the Advanced Pallavi Competition at the 2014 Cleveland Aradhana! Get ready to listen to these budding celebrities of the Carnatic music world, performing right here in your backyard.

Of course, this is only made possible by contributions from you. Please consider making a donation today if you haven't done so already.

Thank You
HCMA Board of Directors
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Ashwin is currently a disciple of Smt. Charumathi Ramachandran, the seniormost disciple of Dr. M.L.V and recipient of the prestigious Kalaimamani title from Govt. of TamilNadu. Ashwin was initiated into music by Sri. Mohan Ayyar
and Smt. Sangeetha Ayyar in Sydney. In the US, Ashwin continued his music education under Smt. Hema Sista, disciple of Dr. M.L.Vasanthakumari. Ashwin has participated and won several awards at the prestigious Cleveland Aradhana including awards in the Advanced Pallavi and the Concert Competition. He won the 2014 Advanced Pallavi competition and had the
privilege to give a concert in 2015 Cleveland Aradhana where he was accompanied by Sri. Trivandrum Sampath on violin and Sri. Trivandrum Balaji on Mridangam. Ashwin was selected as an IndianRaga Fellow in 2014. He has been performing in the Chennai Music Festival for the past 4 years in several
prestigious Sabhas such as Karthik Fine Arts, Brahma Gana Sabha and Nungambakkam Cultural Academy to name a few. He has also performed in LA, North Carolina, New Jersey, Sydney and in various venues around the Bay Area. Ashwin Srikant is a Sophomore studying Bioinformatics at UC San Diego, California.

Vivrd Prasanna is a seventh grader at Pine Valley Middle School , San Ramon, California USA and has been learning vocal music for the past 8 yrs. Vivrd started learning vocal carnatic with Smt. Geetha Iyer (Geetha Vidyalaya) and is now learning from Sri Neyveli Santhanagopalan. Vivrd also learns to play the Veena from Sri Srikanth Chary and Mirudangam from Sri Ramesh Srinivasan. Vivrd also plays piano in his school orchestra band.Vivrd has participated in several Bay Area music events and won several prizes at music events in Cleveland Aradhana, Osaat, Papanasam Sivan festival. Vivrd is also the winner of Carnatic Music Idol USA(Junior Category), 2015.
Vivrd will be performing at Hamsadhwani on May 21 2016. Do not miss it....

Kruthi Bhat, born into a family of musicians, she showed her interest towords music as a toddler and was initiated into Carnatic Music by her grandmother, Smt. Krishnaveni. She is under the tutelage of her mother Vidushi Rajarajeshwary Bhat and her uncle Vidwan Vittal Ramamurthy. She has had the privilege to learn from the legendary Padmabhushan Sri Lalgudi G. Jayaraman and Sri T. R. Subramanyan. She is also under the tutelage of Sri Neyveli Santhanagopalan and Smt. S. Sowmya. Kruthi is a recipient of numerous awards in India as well as the United States. Kruthi was recently declared as the "Best Female Vocalist" form the MADRAS MUSIC ACADEMY as part of the Spirit of Youth Series. She is a recipient of the IndianRaga Fellowship from MIT Boston 2013; she was awarded a Tamboora at the Cleveland Thyagaraja Aradhana 2013 for winning the Concert Competition, received the title, Saptami Super Star at the Dallas Saptami Festival and also recently won the Carnatic Music Idol USA Season 3 from Maximum Media Jaya TV. She was also awarded "Best Vocalist" by Sri Parthasarathy Swami Sabha, Chennai 2013. Her contributions towards society includes her concert in 2009 for Carries Heart, a school of special-needed children and a program for the Sandeepani Trust of India to bring Medical facility to rural India in 2012. She has given multiple concerts in India and The United States. She also plays Violin, a disciple of her uncle Vidwan Vittal Ramamurthy and Vidushi Smt. Lalgudi Vijayalakshmi. She is also an exponent of Western violin, Pastel Art, and Bharatnatyam. ​

                Recognizing raagas is a skill that unlocks the potential to appreciate Carnatic music at a much deeper level. A raaga is not only a collection of notes, but also involves singing/playing them in specific patterns that invoke emotions in the listener. The patterns are governed by rules that themselves undergo transformations over a period. 

                The basis of raagas are swaras. A Carnatic singer can choose a base pitch that he or she is comfortable with and that becomes his/her sruthi. An octave is the range of frequencies that start with this base pitch and end at twice the frequency, at which point the next octave starts. Good artists try to demonstrate their range by singing in three octaves. Each octave is further divided into twelve perceptible frequencies or swaras (notes). They are S, R1, R2(=G1), R3(=G2), G3, M1, M2, P, D1, D2(=N1), D3(=N2), and N3. S and P are immutable frequencies and other notes have different frequencies.
               
                The second aspect of the raaga is the gamaka through which emotion is invoked. In simple terms a gamakam is an oscillation from one note/pitch to another and a return to the original note. This means that mutable notes could be sung with slightly varying frequencies, but there are rules to be followed. Not every swara is "shaken" in a raaga. Each raaga has its own set of "jiva" swaras and the embellishments are focused around these to bring the life of the raaga.
               
                All these make identifying a raaga a complex task that comes with training the brain towards pattern recognition. Humans have an advantage over machines when it comes to raaga recognition. A concert recording can have many instruments, ambient noise etc., from which a signal processor should be able to isolate the frequency that is playing the melody, which follows a raga. After this is achieved, the base sruthi of the singer has to be determined from the set of frequencies sung by the singer, to identify swaras. Finally, raagas can be identified by patterns and phrases of notes, rather than by notes with absolute frequencies. This may require a huge volume of training data and pattern matching algorithms. Raaga identification programs using machines are still in their infancy.
               
                The best way to learn to identify raga is to listen to a lot of music. Effort should be made to find out the raaga of the song. The song and mood should be associated with the raaga. After a few days, some songs would appear to be similar. Repeated listening to same raaga by various artists would eventually etch the pattern to memory. For beginners, the following pentatonic ragas (ragas with five notes) are suggested to start with

• Hamsadhwani
  
• Mohanam
  
• Hindolam
  
• Amirthavarshini
  
• Revathi

               Once the concept of a raaga pattern is learnt, it becomes easy to abstract the concept and learn many raagas. Music students have more exposure to the technicalities of a raaga. Apart from knowing the arohanam and avarohanam, students learn the prayogams and sancharas. Practicing akaaram helps with memorizing the pattern of a raaga. Learning music theory makes the process of identifying raagas more methodical. Knowledge about how raagas are constructed, the swaras behind them, arohanam and avarohanam helps the listener to derive a raaga. The base swara could be derived from the drone or the sruthi box and with the knowledge of identifying swaras, it becomes easy to derive the raga.
               
                There are several resources available on the Internet that can explain aspects of ragas and play list of songs, including references to popular light music. Sangeethapriya.org is a popular website for Carnatic fans to listen to content uploaded by other fans. Carnatic radio app brings Carnatic music 24x7 to mobile phones. The best part is that these resources are free.
               
                At Hamsadhwani, students and rasikas alike can benefit from the wealth of live and recorded concerts, interacting with the artists, various workshops and presentations. Recorded songs are carefully coded with the name of the raaga in the title, to make it easy for the patrons to listen and appreciate raagas in Carnatic music. Effort is taken to display raagas during live concerts. Attending live concerts and having discussions about the concerts helps in raaga appreciation. 
               
                All these strategies combined will help one in slowly becoming proficient at identifying raagas. Learning is not easy and it is time consuming, but it could be very rewarding and helps one fully appreciate the beauty of Carnatic music. With the awareness of raaga, one gets engaged deeply with the performance, resulting in an exhilarating experience. That Eureka moment when the raaga name flashes is priceless!

Dear rasikas

It is week two of our fundraising campaign and we are close to 20% of our goal! Thank you to all those who've contributed so far. Your support is especially crucial as it motivates others to pitch in as well.

Malcolm Gladwell, in his New York Times bestseller, 'Outliers', arrives at the conclusion that it takes roughly ten thousand hours of effort to achieve mastery in a field. This is not just another hypothesis. Psychologists have found a direct statistical relationship between hours of effort and achievement. No shortcuts. Not natural talent. Not a matter of luck or chance. 

This point is nailed home by Sanjay Subramanyan, the prodigal Carnatic vocalist and recipient of the Sangeetha Kalanidhi award from The Madras Music Academy. If you haven't done so already, please watch the video or read the summary on our blog. Sanjay provides a rare and delightful insight into his student life and the environment that he grew up in. According to Sanjay, several qualities should come together to elevate a performing artist to a level of mastery where she performs without inhibition and a spirit of freedom. It encompasses the environment and people that one grows up with, exposure to concerts, quality discussions, critical analysis, dedicated gurus, disciplined learning and training, personal interest, supplemental skills, and most importantly a platform to launch oneself and thrive through public performances. 

Hamsadhwani not only provides such a platform for aspiring artists, but also brings families and students together to listen, dissect, criticize and analyze performances. It goes without saying that it is the community of rasikas that makes this possible. Pitch in with your support today! Donations can be made online or via postal mail too!

Thank You
HCMA Board of Directors
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