Intercom

The Ithaca College Choir, conducted by Sean Linfors, will be joined onstage by Veena Chandra, sitar, and Devesh Chandra, tabla, in a performance of Reena Esmail's This Love Between Us: Prayers for Unity. The concert also features the Ithaca College Treble Chorale, conducted by Hana Cai, performing Esmail's  I Rise: Women in Song.

Veena Chandra is an internationally renowned sitarist, composer, teacher and choreographer. She is the founder and director of the Dance and Music School of India in Latham, NY (celebrating 31 years) where she teaches Indian classical music. She has been a faculty member at Skidmore College since 1990, teaching sitar in the Music Department. Since, 2014 she is also the Artist Associate in Sitar at Williams College (MA).

Her son, Devesh Chandra, has been learning the Tabla since the age of 3. He has learned Northern Indian Classical Music by accompanying his mother. Immersed in music at a young age, Devesh is fortunate to have grown up surrounded by iconic figures of Indian Music.

Indian-American composer Reena Esmail works between the worlds of Indian and Western classical music, and brings communities together through the creation of equitable musical spaces. 

Esmail is the Los Angeles Master Chorale’s 2020-2023 Swan Family Artist in Residence, and Seattle Symphony’s 2020-21 Composer-in-Residence.  Previously, she was named a 2019 United States Artist Fellow in Music, and the 2019 Grand Prize Winner of the S & R Foundation’s Washington Award.  Esmail was also a 2017-18 Kennedy Center Citizen Artist Fellow. She was the 2012 Walter Hinrichsen Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (and subsequent publication of a work by C.F. Peters)

About the pieces being performed on Monday at Ford Hall, she says:
“The genre of women’s choral music is very special to me. The first piece of music I ever wrote, at age 13, was for the choir at the all-girls middle school I attended in Los Angeles, long before I knew it was even possible to be a professional composer. Each of the movements of I Rise: Women in Song is inspired by the words of a female author who has shaped our world with her thoughts and actions. Some of the movements are sweet, subtle, and nostalgic. Others are fiery and bold. Some coalesce into their shape as they move along and others unravel towards their ends. Each movement is a reflection on a single facet of the multifaceted experience of being a woman in this world.

This Love Between Us is a piece about unity. Its seven movements juxtapose the words of seven major religious traditions of India (Buddhism, Sikhism, Christianity, Zoroastrianism, Hinduism, Jainism and Islam), and specifically how each of these traditions approaches the topic of unity, of brotherhood, of being kind to one another."

The concert is free and open to the public. We ask that masks are worn in our concert halls.