CULT UR A L CONDUIT

Composer Reena Esmail’s Western and Indian classical music creates connections among cultures, performers and audiences.

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When composer Reena

Esmail received a commission from the Los Angeles Master Chorale as its Swan Family Artist-In-Residence, she considered potential subject matter. After ruling out Covid-19 and women’s issues, she hit upon a topic that people living in drought-affected Los Angeles could relate to: a requiem for water. The work—about 30 minutes in length, untitled at press time—has its world premiere at the ensemble’s March 26 concert at the Walt Disney Concert Hall downtown; it’s paired with Gabriel Fauré’s 19th-century Requiem in D minor.

“We’re here in Southern California, and all of us are deeply affected by the fact that water is becoming scarcer and scarcer,” says Esmail, who grew up in L.A. after moving from her native Chicago at age three. She earned a bachelor’s degree in composition from Juilliard and a master’s and doctorate from Yale.

“I thought, what better way to really talk about this issue than to bring love

BY LIBBY SLATE /

and care, and the mourning of the loss of that water, to a piece of music.”

Esmail’s inspiration came while attending a poetry reading by William O’Daly, known for his English translations of works by Chilean poet Pablo Neruda; O’Daly has written poems about water loss and is the lead writer for the California Department of Water Resources’ Water Plan. She reached out to O’Daly. “The requiem is a combination of Latin requiem [mass for the dead] texts, [O’Daly’s] English texts and a few Indian texts as well.”

The Indian texts will be sung by Esmail’s longtime collaborator, Saili Oak; the chorale orchestra is joined by Indian musician Abhiman Kaushal on the tabla, two drums played by hand. Unlike Western classical music, Indian music has little notation and is primarily improvised. The result, Esmail says, is more complex melody and rhythm than can be accomplished in a printed score.

Combining Western counterpoint and harmony with the improvised

Indian music, she says, is “a matter of understanding a tradition and the ways that it works to its practitioners, then finding ways that those [elements] align.”

Aligning those two cultures through music has been the goal of Esmail, the daughter of Indian immigrants, throughout her career.

“As I got further into classical music,” she recalls, “I realized it would pull me further and further away from my Indian culture if I didn’t do something to be that connector. I started this journey of trying to understand Indian classical music, and trying to find ways I could bridge those gaps—mostly because I loved being in both cultures, and I wanted both cultures to experience one another.”

Esmail received a 2011-’12 Fulbright-Nehru grant to study Hindustani music in India; experiencing the monsoon season there influenced her when writing her rain requiem for the chorale. She is a co-founder of Shastra, a nonprofit that promotes IndianWestern musical connections.

There’s a hint of destiny in Esmail’s connection to the Master Chorale: Her experience with choral music in L.A. began when she was a child attending St. Charles Borromeo Church in North

Hollywood, whose longtime music director Paul Salamunovitch led the Master Chorale from 1991 to 2001.

She recalls the wonder of hearing the church choir perform Morten Lauridsen’s O Magnum Mysterium, a 1994 Chorale commission, when she was 11. “It’s just amazing,” she marvels. “Morten wrote that piece when he was in the artist-inresidence position I’m in now!”

Esmail has held the position since 2020. She met chorale artistic director Grant Gershon at a choral conference where her work This Love Between Us was performed; they discovered they shared similar values and /CONTINUED ON PAGE 30