Delhi-based Dutch cellist Saskia Rao-de Haas and her husband, composer and sitar player Shubhendra Rao, have had a busy 2020 so far. Confined to their home, they - along with their 14-year-old pianist son Ishaan Leonard Rao - managed to reach out to a global audience through various online streaming platforms.
On International Yoga Day, they collaborated with Sri Sri Ravi Shankar's Art of Living Foundation, while World Music Day had the mother-son duo give a virtual performance titled 'From Bach to Bhupali' as part of Alliance Française de Delhi’s Fête de la Musique.
The family believes that music as entertainment is usually the only part that people see. It is underused in mental healthcare, education, cultural diplomacy and other areas of society, they think. "Listening to and performing music is a great way to help people during this time. In essence, it’s a musical meditation. Indian classical music helps a listener go within and focus on each small musical detail," explains Saskia.
The concert at Alliance Française de Delhi took listeners on a journey through different music traditions. "Rather than fusing them, we portrayed the essence of each of them clearly to the audience, along with our own take on it," says Saskia.
In May, this exceptionally talented family also curated the Music for Hope benefit concert in collaboration with social platforms such as, democracy.in and change.org.
Through this initiative—for which they sought help from many of their musician friends—they were able to raise some funds for migrant workers. This year, the family is also celebrating 250 years of Ludwig van Beethoven’s birth anniversary.
To commemorate the same, Ishaan has created a medley of some of the German composer’s best known pieces—from the Pathétique Sonata to the 5th Symphony—in the traditional western classical form of a rondo.
A protégé of Bharat Ratna Pandit Ravi Shankar, Shubhendra is known not only as a master of his instrument but also as a thinking musician. He is constantly endeavouring to build a musical bridge across cultures. In this effort, he is ably supported by his wife Saskia. She trained as a Western cellist, but changed direction in 1993 and studied under Pandit Hariprasad Chaurasia.
The flute maestro speaks of her as “someone who has been taught by God”. Together the couple has composed a symphony of Indian musical instruments around their book Vadya, a musical story of ‘Tara the Sitar’ who lives in the country of Vadya with her family, the string instruments, in Tat valley. For this dream project, they collaborated with some of India’s best artists.
Tabla maestro Tanmoy Bose has designed the percussion and actor Rahul Vohra is the sutradhar or storyteller. The couple have also started a crowdfunding campaign to ensure that they can pay the artists they are collaborating with. "To make classical music accessible, it is important to change the narrative around it," says Saskia.
Little wonder that they have succeeded in introducing music as a subject in many schools in Delhi-NCR, Gujarat and Punjab. They designed over 300 lesson plans for the seven primary years, resources for the classroom and a teacher training programme.
The couple’s holistic approach to music education looks at the overall development of a student. It is their aim to promote the joy and benefits that Indian classical music can bring to children.
Over 20,000 children have already benefitted from the Sangeet4All course - a curriculum for music education from nursery level to high school. In fact, the curriculum recently went online and in the past four months, they have also helped teachers to take the programme online.
The curriculum has got good response in India, the US and the UK. Saskia, an author of six books on music and an equal number of books on instrument learning for children, says, "I did not choose Indian classical music. It chose me."
The couple’s holistic approach to music education looks at the overall development of a student. It is their aim to promote the benefits that Indian classical music can bring to children. Over 20,000 kids have already benefitted from the Sangeet4All course—a curriculum for music education