Future Resonance Festival – SWARA SUTRAS

*World Premiere Commissioned by New Music Concerts with the support of The Ontario Arts Council

SWARA SUTRAS (engl: Rules Around Sounds)

Swara Sutra is a collaborative creative project, in which the musicians themselves develop the rules that let them make a new kind of music together, a music which draws on each of their histories and traditions and yet opens up to something beyond their individual experience and tastes. It is a project for musicians who are open and eager to listen to other musicians, who are curious to expand their habits and to learn from each other.

Each new project by Bhagwati begins with personal encounters; he speaks and listens to each musician individually, to learn about their way of playing, their musical likes and dislikes, their experience and their musical aspirations.
Then, in a first workshop phase, the musicians enter into a process of games and stories, facilitated by Bhagwati – guided listening improvisations, imitations of each other, musics, sounds, stories about their instruments and their tradition are exchanged. Hopefully, in these first workshops, we will find some common themes, some common musical interests - and a throughline which can lead to a plan for the concert.

Then follow some weeks of thinking, remembering and imagining of ideas that grow out of these workshops, and possible pieces that can embody these ideas. Finally, in the days before the concert, during long rehearsals these ideas grow into pieces, the instincts and emotions are transformed into rules, melodies, rhythms all can follow to make this concert a true account of these encounters we found with each other…

NMC’s newly-created Future Resonance Festival serves to address and sustain the discourse on curating diversity in contemporary music. Imagined as a confluence of concerts, lectures, workshops, and discussions, the Festival celebrates the limitless power of music to bring diverse groups together. The Festival also explores and addresses new directions in notational systems, rehearsal processes, contractual negotiations, and strategies for curation with the goal of questioning and providing alternatives to Eurocentric power structures in contemporary music and sound art.

This year’s Future Resonance Festival honours the work of German-Indian composer, creator, and director Sandeep Bhagwati. Bhagwati is NMC Curator in Resonance for 2021-2023 and this season is the creative facilitator of the NMC Swara Sutras project – a collective creative process spanning several months where he will work with a diverse group of outstanding Toronto musicians to produce an hour-long work celebrating many musical roots and containing wonderfully unexpected sound worlds. The Swara Sutras event at The Music Gallery will be complemented by other festival activities such an open-rehearsal workshop and a solo lecture-performance by Bhagwati titled, Dhvanivala - A Merchant of Sounds.

Since 2001, Bhagwati has initiated and led many collaborative musical projects that have assembled musicians from different music traditions. Born in India and trained in the Western avant-garde tradition, he has initiated and led trans-traditional ensembles in various cities around the globe. Through these projects, Sandeep gathers indigenous, traditional, and folk musicians from numerous traditions and countries, such as India, China, Korea, Japan, Vietnam, Iran, Canada, Uzbekistan, Turkey, Israel, Syria, Egypt, Algeria, Senegal, Cote d’Ivoire, Ruanda, South Africa, Taiwan, Australia, Bulgaria, Spain, Bavaria, Austria, Switzerland, Finland, and Norway in sustained and equitable musical explorations.