CalArts The CalArts World Music Performance Program was unique—in fact the first of its kind at a U.S. college—in that, unlike the proliferating ethnomusicology departments at colleges elsewhere, it focused on actually playing the music first and foremost. “[Kobla and I],” recalls Alfred Ladzekpo of their arrival in California, “were very happy to start something new, from the ground up, and that our classes were going to be about the performance—about the doing. The class at Columbia was a laboratory for ethnomusicology students, and we met once a week for three hours. Here, we were teaching five days a week, all day, individual lessons as well as ensemble classes, with students from different departments and schools participating. And the concentration was not just on research; the concentration was on doing the practical part of it, on performing the music and the dance.”
below: The Spring World Music and Dance Festival, an annual CalArts fixture over the decades, has often featured cross-cultural collaborations. bottom: Informal presentations of African music and dance represent another enduring CalArts tradition.
In addition to bringing in the Ladzekpo brothers from New York, Nick England managed to enlist the legendary Pandit Ravi Shankar, pop sensation of the late ’60s and early ’70s due to his work with the Beatles and violinist Yehudi Menuhin. Pandit Shankar was accompanied by two sitar disciples, Amiya Dasgupta—mentor to the Beatles’ George Harrison—and Harihar Rao. Also on hand were the brothers Ranganathan and Viswanathan, specializing in the South Indian Karnatic tradition, as was percussionist John Bergamo, a devotee of North Indian music. Shankar’s tenure, though, was a short one; he departed before the Institute moved from the interim campus in Burbank to Valencia in 1970 and passed the baton to Dasgupta. (The pandit did return as a frequent visitor and CalArts presented him with an honorary degree in 1985.) The Indonesian gamelan was begun in 1971 as an intensive course involving CalArts students as well as gamelan players from several other U.S. schools. Ethnomusicologist Robert E. Brown, brought in from Wesleyan—where he had first coined the term “world music”—engaged Javanese court gamelan master K.P.H. Notoprojo, affectionately known as “Pak Chokro,” and Pak Chokro’s son-in-law, Balinese musician, actor
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and dancer I Nyoman Wenten, and Brown supplied the program with his own instrument set. (Wenten, a current member of the faculty, recalls that an ad hoc gamelan room was put in what is now a laundry facility in the Chouinard Hall dormitory.) After Brown and the group traveled to Indonesia later that year for research, studying both the Javanese and Balinese traditions, the program was permanently adopted by the music school in 1972. Over the course of the next decade, the school added to the ranks of its faculty artists such as South Indian violinist L. Subramaniam, Ghanaian dancer and choreographer Beatrice Lawluvi, Javanese dancer and choreographer Nanik Wenten, and the noted tabla player Pandit Taranath Rao.
stephen callis
d. palm b. gormley
right: Alfred and Kobla Ladzekpo with the West African Music and Dance Ensemble at the Santa Monica Mall in 1983, there to perform as part of a series called “CalArts in Town.”
photos from the calarts archive and by steven a gunther
above: John Bergamo, a founding faculty member who retired in 2005. left: Taranath Rao (left) and Amiya Dasgupta with CalArts students.