Raga & Raj [CD]

Celebrating Ravi Shankar's life and musical legacy of East-meets-West cultural exchange, Barry Phillips, Linda Burman-Hall and the Lux Musica Ensemble (with guest Debopriyo Sarkar) present a selection of daring, experimental compositions that reflect and re-imagine the musical encounters between North India and British traditions during the late 1780s. Though very different creative languages - Indian music communicates emotion through pitch nuance and elaborate metric foundations, whereas European music relies on simpler meters and melodies in order to convey emotion through harmonic progressions - these two traditions have diversified each other significantly ever since the British Raj, with results that are as complicated as they are beautiful.