Musical Bridges Project | 2023
2023 Composer
Juhi Bansal
“Radiant and transcendent,” the music of Juhi Bansal weaves together themes celebrating musical and cultural diversity, nature and the environment, and strong female role models.
The Commission
JUHI BANSAL Tum ho Meri Zameen
Premiered: Friday, July 14, 2023
The third work in our continuing series of commissions bridging music of different cultures with traditional Western classical chamber music features Hindustani vocalist Ranjana Ghatak, pianist Melvin Chen, and Norfolk Fellows in Juhi Bansal's Tum ho Meri Zameen which merges Western and North Indian classical styles.
Ranjana Ghatak voice
Melvin Chen piano
Eunseo Laura Lee violin
Miranda Werner violin
Lindan Burns viola
Michael Zyzak cello
Musical Bridges and this performance is made possible through the generous support of the Desai Family Foundation.
About the Composer
Juhi Bansal is an award-winning composer, conductor and teacher. Originally from India and Hong Kong, her music draws upon elements as disparate as Hindustani music, the spectralists, progressive metal, musical theatre and choral traditions to create deeply expressive, evocative sound-worlds. Spanning every genre of acoustic concert music to multimedia to film, her music is always driven by storytelling, with a particular focus on stories of strong women, wilderness, and celebrating cultural and ideological diversity. MORE
Tum ho Meri Zameen, grew out of an earlier collaboration with Hindustani vocalist Ranjana Ghatak in which they created music in response to stories from their communities about the women who inspire them. Waves of Change takes inspiration from the story of the Bangladesh Girls Surf Club, in the Cox Bazaar region of Bangladesh — a place where girls are forbidden from even entering the water.
