Fellowship of the string: Bhanuj Kappal writes on pathbreaking violinist L Subramaniam
He's performed with George Harrison, Yehudi Menuhin; taken the Carnatic violin around the world; created a new formula for music. We must try new things,he says
He was only six when he performed live for the first time.
L Subramaniam wasn’t the least bit prepared for the open-air concert in Jaffna, because he hadn’t known it was going to happen. No one did.
His father, the noted violinist and musical educator V Lakshminarayana, was the one performing. He suddenly stopped and declared, “Now my son is going to play”.
“I was in shock. The organisers were staring at me and I knew they didn’t want me to play,” says the violinist and composer, laughing. “But I also knew that I had to play, and play well, because my father was very strict.”
Somehow, “with God’s grace”, he says, he delivered a good performance.
It was an early lesson in overcoming creative fears, says Subramaniam, 77, speaking from his home in Bengaluru. And it is a lesson that has stood him in good stead.
Over his seven decades as a musician, he has taken the Carnatic violin all over the world, graced some of its biggest stages (Madison Square Garden, the Bolshoi Theatre, the Champs-Elysees Theatre) and collaborated with titans from Yehudi Menuhin to Herbie Hancock to Alla Rakha.
He has also, fearlessly, fit it into new spaces and sonic paradigms.
Adopted by Carnatic musicians in the late 18th century, the instrument is almost identical to the Western violin, but is played with different tunings and techniques.
Subramaniam’s orchestral compositions — with their distinctive blend of Carnatic ragas and the Western classical tradition — have been performed by the Mariinsky Theatre Orchestra in St Petersburg, the Swiss Romande Orchestra in Geneva, and the Berlin State Opera.
His biggest achievement, he says, has been fulfilling his father’s dream “of making the Indian violin globally known”.
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Growing up in Jaffna, where his father taught music at the city’s university, Subramaniam was surrounded by sound. In addition to his father, his mother Seethalakshmi sang and played the harmonium and the veena (though only at home). His elder brother, L Vaidyanathan, was a violinist too.
In fact, Lakshminarayana had decided that his middle son would be a vocalist. “He probably thought we could be a family band, with two violinists, one vocalist, something like that,” says Subramaniam. But a bout of respiratory diphtheria at the age of two laid all plans of singing to rest. The boy tried out the sarangi and mridangam, but had his heart set on the violin. His father eventually relented.
The three brothers would all eventually be violinists (L Shankar, the youngest, would go on to be a notable fusionist too). They were soon performing alongside some of Sri Lanka’s greatest musicians.
This idyllic existence was shattered when anti-Tamil riots erupted across Sri Lanka in 1958. Subramaniam was 11 at the time. His elder brother, then 16, was chased with a knife. The well in their home compound was poisoned. When a neighbour whispered to Lakshminarayana that his house and family were going to be targeted that night, the family fled, taking only what they could carry.
“My father wanted to go to the bank and withdraw his money, but he was told that was too dangerous too,” Subramaniam remembers. “People were waiting outside banks, killing (those) who did this, and taking all their money.”
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The family moved to Chennai, and slowly rebuilt their lives.
His father resumed teaching music. One of his pupils would include a young Ilaiyaraaja.
Subramaniam and his brothers began performing together again, as The Violin Trio, a group conceived of and managed by their father. This was the first time that the Carnatic violin was placed front and centre, Subramaniam says, rather than used as an accompaniment.
“Nobody else had the vision to say we’ll completely change the violin technique and bring it to the level of a solo instrument,” he says. “My father had that determination, and thanks to him, The Violin Trio became a great success.”
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In between training and performances, Subramaniam earned a degree in medicine from Madras Medical College. Having had to rebuild once, after Jaffna, his parents wanted to ensure that their children had a sturdy fallback plan.
Even when he was offered a full scholarship to study music in Germany, his mother insisted that he finish his MBBS first. “She said, ‘Until you’ve registered as a medical doctor, you cannot leave the house’,” says Subramaniam.
After graduation, he sent tape-recordings of his music to a few American universities, and was offered a full scholarship to study Western classical music composition — between his father and elder brother’s record collections, he had developed a diverse sonic palette — at the California Institute of the Arts.
“There were other offers, but I selected California because it was on the West Coast and everyone had told me the East Coast would be very cold, with a lot of snow… That’s not my kind of weather,” he says, laughing.
This was the early 1970s, soon after Ravi Shankar and The Beatles had introduced Indian classical music to a world opening up to new ideas. Subramaniam found that Indian classical and Carnatic music got a fair amount of attention in California, but not nearly enough respect.
“People thought Western music was the only classical music, everything else they put under the ‘world music’ category,” he says. “That really disturbed me, and in every interview I would do later, wherever I got an opportunity, I would make the point that India has what is probably the oldest classical music system in the world. Just because it is Indian musicians sitting on the floor, doesn’t make it a folk tradition.”
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Subramaniam would play his part in changing those perceptions, as he became the international face of the Carnatic violin, and pioneered a new kind of trans-cultural composition, which he calls “global fusion”.
His first real foray into this space was the album Garland (1978), a collaboration with the Danish jazz violinist Svend Asmussen. But it was American jazz producer Richard Bock who convinced him to fully commit to the idea of fusion music.
Bock was impressed by Subramaniam’s skills as a performer and his deep knowledge of Western music, and pestered him to do an East-West fusion album. Subramaniam was reluctant, but finally agreed after consulting with his father.
“In those days, there was this notion that if you did something different, something other than ‘your’ music, then it was a kind of pollution,” he says. “But my father always believed that innovation was key to music’s growth, and key to making a classical tradition interesting to future generations.”
With his father’s blessing, Subramaniam recorded Fantasy Without Limits (1979), blending jazz and Indian classical music. He then promptly forgot about the album.
He was in France when Bock called to tell him that it had hit the top ten on American jazz charts, sitting alongside releases by Miles Davis and Herbie Hancock.
Subramaniam would go on to release a number of critically acclaimed fusion records, collaborating with jazz greats such as Hancock, Stanley Clarke, George Duke, Stéphane Grappelli and Larry Coryell.
Simultaneously, he began composing major works for orchestra, pioneering the use of Carnatic ragas in orchestral compositions.
In 1983, he wrote a double concerto for the violin and flute, which he performed with flautist Hubert Laws at the LA Music Center.
A couple of years later, he wrote Fantasy on Vedic Chants (dedicated to his mother, who died in 1984), at the request of Zubin Mehta, who performed it with the New York Philharmonic.
In the decades since, he has written for and performed with some of the world’s greatest orchestras, including the Kirov Ballet, Oslo Philharmonic and Beijing Symphony Orchestra. He has performed for then-USSR President Mikhail Gorbachev in Moscow, and at the United Nations.
Along with his now-late wife Vijayashree, he set up the Lakshminarayana Global Music Festival in 1992, in honour of his father, who had died two years earlier. Now an annual event that has travelled to 75 cities in 25 countries, the festival brings together eminent artists and diverse musical traditions from around the world.
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Subramaniam’s irrepressible drive to experiment also led him into the film world. He was advisor to Peter Brook on the 1989 film The Mahabharata.
He scored the music for Mira Nair’s Salaam Bombay (1988) and Mississippi Masala (1991). He played the violin on the soundtracks of Bernardo Bertolucci’s Little Buddha (1993) and Merchant-Ivory’s Cotton Mary (1999).
Throughout, he has remained faithful to his Carnatic roots, releasing Carnatic music albums and regularly performing at Carnatic concerts too.
In 2007, Subramaniam and his second wife, the vocalist and playback singer Kavita Krishnamurthy, set up a music school in Bengaluru called the Subramaniam Academy of Performing Arts (SAPA). In 2018, the couple founded the Lakshminarayana Global Centre of Excellence, which offers a holistic curriculum of music education at the undergraduate, graduate and doctorate levels.
“I strongly believe that music is important for the intellectual, spiritual and emotional development for every human being,” he says. “We are trying to establish a space for experimentation. We want to offer a totally different approach to music. Because going to university and getting a textbook education cannot make one a great artist.”
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This commitment to musical education is also what inspired Subramaniam’s latest project, the book Raga Harmony: Harmonic Structures and Tonalities in Indian Classical Music (2024). Originally written as his PhD thesis in 2017, it explores the histories of the Western and Indian classical music traditions, before diving into his most-cherished innovation: a way to integrate the raga system into the harmonies of Western classical music.
“Using my methodology, anyone who is familiar with Carnatic music can write major orchestral pieces without having to go abroad to study Western music theory,” he says. “If you follow the Raga Harmony concept, you can create new sounds every time. It’s also the perfect system for anyone in the West who wants to go in another direction, instead of copying the baroque style or the Romantic style.”
Subramaniam has created more than 250 orchestral concerts so far, using the method, he adds. “And every piece I’ve written has been different. The only common factor is the Raga Harmony concept. It’s a whole new way to compose major symphonic works.”
What is it, exactly? Turn to the Q&A alongside for a bit more.
