Rajna Swaminathan - Part 4

For Good Measure, by Ensemble for These Times (E4TT)
Episode 168: Rajna Swaminathan - Part 4

In this week’s episode, we talk to Rajna Swaminathan about her performance experience in India and how her performance practices have evolved with her interests. 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/17616995

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

Interns: Renata Volchinskaya, Sam Mason, Yoyo Hung-Yu Lin

Chapters

• 0:22 In this week's episode, we continue our conversation with Rajna Swaminathan, who we spoke to in January 2024.
• 0:31 I would love if you're willing, for you to circle back and talk more about what it was like being in India, both the culture and the tradition that you were wanting to be a part of, and decided to incorporate, rather than being mainstream for yourself...
• 2:52 Does one instrument or practice call to you more strongly, or is that fairly fluid?
• 4:47 So did you play all three? Play for the voice, all three simultaneously, really simultaneously, or did you lay down each track?
• 6:30 So circling back a little bit, do you want to talk any about being in India or what that was like, or...

Transcript

Nanette McGuinness  00:00

[INTRO MUSIC BEGINS] 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 continue our conversation with Rajna Swaminathan, who we spoke to in January 2024. [INTRO MUSIC ENDS]

Nanette McGuinness  00:30

I would love if you're willing, for you to circle back and talk more about what it was like being in India, both the culture and the tradition that you were wanting to be a part of, and decided to incorporate, rather than being mainstream for yourself. And what led you to that decision, and more about that, please.

Rajna Swaminathan  00:50

Sure, I think it was just growing up and sort of realizing that, you know, my interests were, were more in a kind of hybrid space, you know, not because I had been studying piano, but also I was just exposed to a lot of different kinds of music, and had a curiosity about all that. And I had been writing songs when I was a teenager, and, like, it was just very personal for me. But at some point I thought, well, you know, I have these compositional ideas. I can do something with them, and I don't need it to be this, like, side project or, you know, don't take seriously. I think I can take it seriously. And I think that, you know, starting to work with folks in the jazz scene helped me come out of my shell a bit and really see that as not just like, Okay, I'm a classical mridangam artist who dabbles on the side with some, you know, crossover work, but rather really finding a home in the in the creative music scene in New York, and seeing that as my primary sort of community. Because I found that I could relate culturally and in terms of curiosity with these musicians that I was meeting in New York, where the conversations could really be open and it didn't have to be well, how does this then fit into this traditional way of doing things? But, you know, and not to create like a dichotomy either. You know, it's not that the galnetic tradition is super traditional or anything. It's, it's evolving in its own way. And it's, it's, you know, people experiment there too, and it's just a different kind of experimentation. 

Nanette McGuinness  02:35

Yeah.

Rajna Swaminathan  02:39

 I just found myself drawn to intercultural collaborations more and more, and found myself growing in those spaces and developing a kind of compositional voice that drew on many different forms of music.

Nanette McGuinness  02:52

Yeah, yeah. Does one instrument or practice call to you more strongly, or is that fairly fluid?

Rajna Swaminathan  02:57

I would just say it shifts. You know, I think, you know, professionally, I think I've centered the mrudangam a lot. But as I go deeper into into finding what I'm curious about, you know, and which changes over time, I think there's different things that I end up practicing more like these days, I find myself really curious about the guitar - composing on the guitar - because it just offers a different perspective from the piano. So it just keeps shifting. I mean, I haven't really played guitar in a performance context yet, but who knows, maybe one day, but I think it's just constantly shifting. I think I do feel probably like the deepest anchor in the mrudangam. But, you know, each instrument offers different kinds of expressivity. And over the over the pandemic, actually wrote a piece where I play mrudangam, piano, and sing sort of simultaneously, and that was also really fun to explore that just mostly to see to juxtapose these different ways of expression and notice that my my body responds differently to each one, and bringing them together creates an interesting kind of conversation, an embodied conversation that you know causes you to contend with certain things are not in in alignment quite you know, and other things work together quite well in unexpected ways. So I would like that to keep being fluid. I think maybe just you know, my my relationship to the mridangam is unique, so it ends up getting centered in a lot of ways, which I'm okay with.

Nanette McGuinness  04:45

Yeah, no, that makes sense. So did you play all three? Play for the voice, all three simultaneously, really simultaneously, or did you lay down each track?

Rajna Swaminathan  04:55

Oh, no, I did perform it. This was for the Bang on a Can marathon in 2020, which was a virtual one. And, you know, they had, right, they had sort of commissioned me to write a piece for myself. And I was in the mountains in Oregon, and, like, there was this beautiful chapel space with a piano in it. And I just really fallen in love with the piano. So I was like, "Well, I want to do something with this piano." And so then one day, I just brought the mrudangam, and I was like, let me see how I would even do this. And I just started creating these sketches that, I mean, you know, in some places, obviously two instruments are a little bit more dominant than the third. 

Nanette McGuinness  05:19

Yeah [laughs]

Rajna Swaminathan  05:19

There's some places where it's more like these smaller duos. But I tried as much as possible to have them interlocked, so that I'm really actively playing all three and dividing my attention in the way that I need to for that. So it was, it was sort of, it's, there's link of it on. 

Nanette McGuinness  05:55

Great. 

Rajna Swaminathan  05:55

Yeah, pretty much play all three at once, which I haven't done so much of since then, but it did...it did allow me to open up more to singing while playing the mrudangam. So I do that more now in the music that I write, I love more space for that to happen.

Nanette McGuinness  06:18

Interesting. Yeah, no, please do send me the link and we'll include it maybe in the show notes or in the in the publicity for the interview. That'd be great, and I'd love to hear it myself anyway. So circling back a little bit, do you want to talk any about being in India or what that was like, or...

Rajna Swaminathan  06:35

Right, yeah, I'm realizing I'm skipping over something. [laughs]

Nanette McGuinness  06:39

[laughs]

Rajna Swaminathan  06:44

You know, I mean, I was just really traveling there for about a month every six months or something. And there's this huge festival there in Chennai, which is sort of the hub of the Carnatic music scene. And I used to go there every year for this December season, as they call it, which takes place in Chennai, and there's like hundreds of concerts going on in the city at any given moment. And I go and actually play 30 or 40 concerts in that month, and it was quite an intense experience, because I had to take off time from school to do that. 

Nanette McGuinness  07:26

Right. 

Rajna Swaminathan  07:20

My parents would actually withdraw me from high school and then, like,  re-enroll me when I got back, because they didn't want the...

Nanette McGuinness  07:27

Wow. 

Rajna Swaminathan  07:28

...on their record. So that's what I did throughout high school. And I would take my homework and textbooks with me and kind of learn calculus by myself. [laughs] 

Nanette McGuinness  07:39

[laughs] Wow. 

Rajna Swaminathan  07:41

So that part was, was quite intense. And, you know, it's like each instrument has a different pitch range, and you're playing with singers with different kind of pitch, sort of pitches that they use for the performances. And and also, the other thing is that you usually meet on stage. There's no rehearsal involved, you know. So it was really quite a thrill to, like, go meet all these different musicians. Usually you just meet right before you go on stage, and then you play like a two-hour concert together. And, you know, there's a lot of standard repertoire. So in that way, it shares kind of elements with jazz where, you know, there's, there's a known repertoire that you kind of go in, and there's conventions to playing that, but it really kind of gave me a lot of experience accompanying different people, just being able to improvise in different situations, with people who have different kinds of time feel and different approaches to the music. Some people are very expressive. Some people were very, like, rhythmically complex oriented, and just gave me just like, quite a wide range of experiences playing on the mrudangam. And that's sort of how you learn, you know. And at that point, even, like going to take lessons with my teacher, he was just like, well, at this point, it's no longer about lessons. It's about you just performing and gaining experience that way. So that was, it was, it was just quite an intense experience, and not, not one that very like I could even really talk about to my friends, because they would just be like, What are you talking about when you perform 30 or 40 concerts, and you come back and you, you still get an A on your physics test or whatever [laughs]. So it was, it was just a, yeah. It was an intense few years for sure. And then, you know, as I got into college, I was, I was just thinking about, well, what, what do I really want to do professionally, and does it make sense to keep going back, and so I kind of just took some distance from it. The other thing is that if you keep playing in a particular form, you develop habits. You develop a kind of autopilot mode...

Nanette McGuinness  07:41

Yep.

Rajna Swaminathan  09:31

...which actually so much of my curiosity was about undoing, you know, and it was about almost unlearning the things that. Become automatic, so that I could create space for something different. So, yeah, I think it's always, it's, I'm always seeking a new kind of balance with it. You know, I think I, for some time, I spent a lot of time working with this, with dance companies and with Bharatanatyam dancers who were doing sort of contemporary work that drew on this tradition, but also was intercultural in many ways. So I've tried to keep a foot in that world in whatever way that makes sense at the time. And you know, and I do still play kinetic concerts from time to time. It's just not my regular thing. But that stuff never leaves you. You know, if you do those concerts, hundreds of concerts like that, when you're young, it's just sort of embedded in you. And so if someone called me to play a carnetic concert tomorrow, I could do it. It's just in me somewhere. But yeah, it was quite it was quite a an immersive experience in that way.

Nanette McGuinness  11:03

I think immersive is probably the right word for it, and I imagine it really would have felt different. You'd have a different level of maturity going back because you'd been basically a professional performing musician, and then you'd go back to everybody worrying about Mean Girls, bullies and grades and all the things that a 10th grader, 11th grader would would worry as the prime thing. And so I must have been very I don't want to use the word schizoid, because that isn't quite right, but I bit of a bifurcated existence,

Rajna Swaminathan  11:36

Definitely. Yeah, Anjna, I used to call it kind of like a double life.

Nanette McGuinness  11:42

You'd have to, you'd have to go into a different skin when you came back.

Rajna Swaminathan  11:46

Definitely, yeah, yeah, definitely, a different, like, set of sort of language and customs and everything. It's different,

Nanette McGuinness  11:55

Yeah, interesting. 

Nanette McGuinness  11:56

[OUTRO MUSIC BEGINS] 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]