Rajna Swaminathan - Part 1

For Good Measure, by Ensemble for These Times (E4TT)
Episode 165: Rajna Swaminathan - Part 1

In this week’s episode, we talk to Rajna Swaminathan about her various college degrees and interests, and her path to music. If you enjoyed today’s conversation and want to know more about Rajna Swaminathan, check her out here: https://www.rajnaswaminathan.com/. This episode was originally recorded in January 2024.

This podcast is made possible in part by a grant from the California Arts Council and generous donors, like you. Want to support For Good Measure and E4TT? Make a tax-deductible donation or sign up for our newsletter, and subscribe to the podcast!

Intro music: “Trifolium” by Gabriela Ortiz, performed by E4TT (Ilana Blumberg, violin; Abigail Monroe, cello; Margaret Halbig, piano),  as part of “Below the Surface: Music by Women Composers,” January 29, 2022
Outro music: “Lake Turkana” by Marcus Norris, performed by E4TT (Margaret Halbig, piano), as part of “Alchemy,” October 15, 2021

Transcription courtesy of Otter.ai.
Buzzsprout: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1903729/episodes/17564890

Producer, Host, and E4TT co-founder: Nanette McGuinness
Co-producer and Audio Engineer: Stephanie M. Neumann
Podcast Cover Art: Brennan Stokes

Chapters

• 0:22 In this week's episode, we're joined by Rajna Swaminathan, who we spoke to in January 2024.
• 0:35 You have degrees in French, anthropology, and music, and you wrote your dissertation on diasporic queer resonances, to paraphrase a bit... Can you tell us more about your overall path and the different strands in it, and how you wandered along it...

Transcript

Nanette McGuinness  00:00

[INTRO MUSIC] Welcome to For Good Measure, an interview series celebrating diverse composers and other creative artists, sponsored by a grant from the California Arts Council. I'm Nanette McGuinness, Artistic Executive Director of Ensemble for These Times. In this week's episode, we're joined by Rajna Swaminathan, who we spoke to in January 2024. [INTRO MUSIC ENDS]

Nanette McGuinness  00:29

Thank you for agreeing to do this. Really looking forward to it.

Rajna Swaminathan  00:34

Likewise.

Nanette McGuinness  00:35

You have degrees in French, anthropology, and music, and you wrote your dissertation on diasporic queer resonances, to paraphrase a bit. That's a fascinatingly rich background. Can you tell us more about your overall path and the different strands in it, and how you wandered along it and found your way?

Rajna Swaminathan  00:55

Sure. So I ended up majoring in anthropology and French, partly because I couldn't major in music, so I went to the University of Maryland, and I, you know, was really trying to get involved with the music department there. I went to multiple professors, and it just, unfortunately, was a kind of conservatory system where they weren't quite set up to have somebody like me with a different musical background come in and be able to take they had a very kind of rigid framework. That isn't to say I didn't try. I really did try. You know, I was like Jazz Studies, anything, percussion, minor, anyway, it was, it was a little bit difficult to get that to work, but I had kind of stumbled upon anthropology as a field because I was interested see both of my parents are were scientists, and my mom worked for NASA. My dad also worked as a physicist, and ended up doing a lot of projects for NASA. And so I was initially thinking, okay, maybe I'll do that. I'll be a physicist, and I'll do music, and I can balance the two, but I just had seen how difficult that actually was in practice for my parents, and so I was trying to find a field that would be maybe more complementary to pursuing music and anthropology came up as a way to kind of think about culture and thinking across different cultures. And you know, French was mostly because I had been taking French in high school and wanted to continue, and was sort of kept going long enough to get a second degree. But anthropology was actually it ended up being a kind of a perfect field, because I found a mentor at the University of Maryland, Laurie Frederik, who is an anthropologist and does performance studies, which is sort of this field at the intersection of theater and anthropology, and there's a lot of thought about what performance means, you know, in a very broad, abstract way, but also thinking inter culturally about performance. So it gave me a language to start thinking academically about how to write about my own journey with music, which at that point, you know, I had been primarily working on the mrudangam in South Indian classical music contexts and in dance contexts. So it was around that time that I was entering college that I really wanted to open up and explore other kinds of music, and think about how that would fit into a kind of compositional voice. So thinking about questions of identity and form across cultures, it just was a nice thing to be studying and to develop a language to articulate that in my undergrad. And I actually, you know, I wasn't set on pursuing an academic path after I graduated. I really just wanted to move to New York at that point. I had met some folks from the jazz scene, and I was just excited to be a full time musician and to just kind of play around and see who I could collaborate with in New York, mostly to learn and to kind of absorb different musical styles and rhythmic approaches, to expand my own knowledge. And it was, I think it was the day that I was graduating from undergrad, that that my mentor, Vijay Iyer, called me, and he was like, well, there might be this program at Harvard that I might be getting involved with. And he was, I can't tell you too much about it, but would be interested. And at that time, I remember saying, No, I'm not going back to school. I'm ready to work. And. I'm gonna, you know, rough it out as a freelance musician. But, you know, a couple years later, I think, after living in New York for a while and finding that, well, first of all, there's not a lot of people writing music that involves the mrudangam, and I needed to, sort of, you know, I essentially created my own band and project to start exploring what the what this instrument could do in a kind of intercultural ensemble context. After spending about three years in New York, I'd say I was starting to get to this point, which I think maybe a lot of people do in New York, where just there's so many things going on, yeah, you find it. It can be confusing. It can be like, Okay, well, I'm taking on all these gigs just to kind of pay my bills. And you know, at what point do I focus and really find what, you know, what is my approach and what is important to me, and sort of develop a philosophy about it. So of course, I reached out to Vijay again. I was like, Are you still running that thing? Are you still interested in having a graduate student? Because I think I'd like to apply, because I need, I need a break from New York, and I need some time to think and really figure out, esthetically, culturally, what, where I'm going with this. And so that's, that's kind of how I found my way to Harvard and to doing that program, which is called creative practice and critical inquiry. So that that's sort of my background, academically at least. And was at Harvard for six years, at first student in that program, as it turned out, and was able to shape it, and also just learn a lot from what it meant to bring that kind of a program into that kind of a department where things had been done a particular way for a long time, and it was at times frustrating, but also at times just nice to see the openness that the department kind of brought to having performers and improvisers come in and really make the place quite vibrant. So yeah. [laughs]

Nanette McGuinness  07:17

So here you are. [laughs]

Rajna Swaminathan  07:19

So here I am, I guess, yeah. [laughs]

Nanette McGuinness  07:21

Yeah, no, that's cool. It's interesting... I think it does happen, especially in New York, that it's overwhelming in a beautiful, wonderful way, and that at a certain point you kind of either plant your feet or have to do something to figure out how you're going to fit into that flow.

Rajna Swaminathan  07:40

Yeah. And, you know, I did continue going back and forth to New York when I was living in Cambridge. So it was, it just allowed me to be a bit more focused in my approach. And obviously, just logistically speaking, you have to kind of plan the trips there and, like, you know, prioritize certain things. So that helped me kind of just figure out, okay, well, this is the kind of work I would like to do, and this is what I'm gravitating towards, is what I'm curious about. So...

Nanette McGuinness  08:11

Yeah, no, that's true. And in very traditional programs, what you're talking about might have fallen under ethnomusicology, in some kind of larger umbrella, but that's a very traditional landing place for it. And not all departments or music departments even have an ethno branch.

Rajna Swaminathan  08:31

Sure, and it's still quite like an academic field, in that you know...

Nanette McGuinness  08:36

Yes.

Rajna Swaminathan  08:36

...in a lot of places performance is discouraged, you know composition is discouraged. You're so focused on doing field work and really pursuing an academic career that I didn't want that I kind of knew that I didn't...

Nanette McGuinness  08:49

[laughs]

Rajna Swaminathan  08:49

...quite fit in that path, and this program offered a kind of new opportunity where I could draw on the expertise of of a field like ethnomusicology, but still channel all that knowledge into creative work.

Nanette McGuinness  09:02

Yeah, almost... almost like he was thinking of you when the opportunity came, you know, even though that's looking backwards with the rear view mirror. But still...

Rajna Swaminathan  09:12

Yeah

Nanette McGuinness  09:13

...it's great that that happened.

Nanette McGuinness  09:14

[OUTRO MUSIC] Thank you for listening to For Good Measure and a special thank you to our guest, Rajna Swaminathan, for joining us today. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe to our podcast by clicking on the subscribe button and support us by sharing it with your friends, posting about it on social media, and leaving us a rating and a review. To learn more about E4TT, our concert season online and in the Bay Area, or to make a tax-deductible donation, please visit us at www.e4tt.org. This podcast is made possible in part by a grant from the California Arts Council and generous donors like you. For Good Measure is produced by Nanette McGuinness and Ensemble for These Times, and design by Brennan Stokes, with special thanks to co-producer and audio engineer Stephanie M. Neumann. Remember to keep supporting equity in the arts and tune in next week "for good measure." [OUTRO MUSIC ENDS]