Google has honoured with a doodle Pandit Ravi Shankar, the sitar
virtuoso who is credited with the spread of Indian classical music in
the West in the 1960s.
Brought out in honour of Shankar’s 96th birthday, the centrepiece of the doodle is a sitar.
“Shankar, evangelised the use of Indian instruments in Western music,
introducing the atmospheric hum of the sitar to audiences worldwide,”
the search engine giant said.
Born Robindro Shaunkor Chowdhry in 1920 to a Bengali family in Varanasi,
the musician and composer spent his younger days touring the country
with his elder brother Uday Shankar’s dance troupe.
He gave up dancing to study sitar playing under court musician Allauddin
Khan. He went on to become the music director of All India Radio and
the musician also worked as a composer, creating the music for the ‘Apu
Trilogy’ by Satyajit Ray.
He performed frequently with the violinist Yehudi Menuhin, and composed a
concerto with sitar for the London Symphony Orchestra. Shankar also
taught George Harrison of the Beatles to play the sitar, and widely
influenced popular music in the 1960s and 70s.
Shankar’s music popularised the fundamentals of Indian music, including
raga, a melodic form. Raga, as Shankar explained, has “its own peculiar
ascending and descending movement consisting of either a full seven-note
octave, or a series of six or five notes in a rising or falling
structure.”
“The distinctive character of Shankar’s compositions attracted the
attention of composer Philip Glass, with whom Shankar wrote the 1990
album Passages,” Google said in a statement.
The legendary musician who passed away in 2012 at the age of 92 has been
conferred with a Bharat Ratna, the Padma Bhushan and Padma Vibhushan.
No comments:
Post a Comment