South Asia Institute is excited to welcome Saraswathi Ranganathan back for her first solo performance at SAI after years of presenting her various musical collaborations and projects. Saraswathi is digging into her roots and presenting a traditional South Indian Carnatic concert. Saraswathi will be accompanied by Harsha Mandayam Bharathi on mridangam, a double-headed, barrel-shaped drum that is the main percussion instrument of Carnatic music.
Carnatic music has been the common thread connecting diverse cultural communities in South India for thousands of years. The veena, a 24-fretted lute made with two resonating gourds, is the primary stringed instrument of this classical tradition. Representing Chicago, the great midwestern metropolis that is literally and figuratively thousands of miles from South India, veena player Saraswathi Ranganathan has been winning accolades and fans for her mastery of the ancient instrument.
Musical education was a given in the community where Saraswathi Ranganathan grew up in Bangalore, in southern India. For Saraswathi it was never a second choice to play the veena. Her studies began at age 6 under the tutelage of her mother, Shantha Ranganathan, a musician of exceptional skill who just happened to have won as a competition prize a finely crafted, child-size veena, which quickly became Saraswathi’s musical voice. By age 11, Saraswathi was performing publicly. As early as her teenage years, Saraswathi’s skill had developed to the level that she also took on her own students. She has continued teaching in the decades that she has lived in Chicago, where she founded the nonprofit Ensemble of Ragas school, offering both private instruction and educational outreach. As both a performer and teacher she’s beloved in the Chicago area; the city recognized her skills with several artist grant awards and in 2018 with a coveted Chicago Music Award, making her the first Indian American woman and first veena artist to be so honored. Nowadays performances take her to concert and festival stages across the U.S. and India. The Surabhi Ensemble, a music collective she founded, brings the message of “living as one family” to people from all walks of life. The 12 member Chicago ensemble recently toured India and Vietnam. In all of her work, Saraswathi Ranganathan aims to break through the fear of difference and to find connections; using her veena and her deep knowledge of Carnatic music, she works towards her mission: “One Stage. One Music. One Community.”
Harsha Mandayam Bharathi is a carnatic percussionist who plays the mridangam primarily and he has been learning since the age of 4. He was under the tutelage of Vidwan Poongulam Subramanian and Vidwan S.J. Arjun Ganesh for 14 years and has been receiving advanced lessons from Dr. Patri Satish Kumar for the past 6 years. He has been performing in concerts, ensembles and arangetrams across India and the US for the past 9 years. He is currently pursuing his Ph.D. in Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics at the University of Chicago.
More about the artist: https://saraswathiveena.com/