Scaling up

It's not easy to learn, but many Indians are turning to Western music and the piano as stress-buster, capacity-booster or pastime.

In mid-2008, the 16-year-old Italian piano prodigy Leonora Armellini visited Delhi and performed a Chopin concerto before a quiet and attentive hallful of Indians. “Initially, I did not know what to make of the audience,” she said later, “but after playing I realised they were wonderful and understood our music.”

This is not as surprising as it sounds. A small but swelling band of Indians is embracing Western musical studies. The guitar is still the most popular instrument, but the piano is not far behind.

“Yes, of course, it’s really increasing,” says Shivam, speaking of interest in learning the piano among potential students. Shivam, who goes by one name, is director at the School of Symphony, a private music school which he helped found in 2003 in the suburb of Dwarka, just outside Delhi. “For us it’s a 50 per cent increase with every passing year. Industry-wise, definitely above 30 per cent a year. There is a growing awareness of Western music and rock culture.”

“The number of schools that are coming up!” exclaims Ronald Laloo, who teaches the piano at the venerable, quasi-governmental Delhi School of Music, as well as in his own home. “It’s very obvious that there’s an increase in interest. Earlier, I never taught at home. I used to have 30 students in the school. Now I have 27 in the school and 15 at home.” Laloo calculates that the Western music boom in India is at least three years old. Asked about the age distribution of his students, Laloo surprises himself with the numbers: “Out of 42 let’s say kids are maybe... actually, I have more adults!” He has five pre-teens among his students, and “maybe six” teenagers; the rest are all adults.

“We are catering more to older people rather than children,” says Shivam. “It was initially by choice. We were not taking beginner-level lessons, it was only hardcore theoretical stuff” — by which he means scales, musical notation and so on, knowing which allows one to read musical scores — “and that children would not be able to grasp.” That soon changed, he adds quickly: “Now we have beginners’ lessons as well. There are many students who learn with their parents. So we now have students from 15 to 60 years of age.”

Laloo had just the opposite experience, to start with. “We certainly have more grown-ups now. When I first came to the Delhi School of Music, the rule was no adult can learn. They took it for granted that adults were too too old to learn. But I started taking [adult students].”

“With kids,” Laloo says, “a lot of them are forced to learn by their parents. Some parents think that music is an important part of education.” Older children, Shivam says, are “awed by the aura of playing an instrument”, while “For people with jobs it’s more like a stress-buster. They’ve wanted to learn music for a long time but somehow they didn’t have a chance.”

Given the Indian penchant for exams, many music students submit themselves to the judgement of Western examiners, following a theory and performance syllabus typically from either Trinity College London or the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music, both UK institutions. There are eight “grades” of instruction. “For a student to clear one grade on average it may take six months to a year,” says Shivam.

“Parents and students have started to realise,” explains Shivam, “that music instruction helps, even in studying [for school]. It builds memory power.” While playing the piano, “If you learn to read [music], you get to understand what you’re doing and why.”

“Classical piano is basically mathematics,” says Parthasarathy Ghosh. His son, 17-year-old Angad, has been learning the piano for a decade now, lately with Laloo. “I think it’s possibly helping him” in non-musical studies as well, the father says. “As a child it’s very hard to sit down and do things when you would rather go out and play football or watch TV. But we knew that somewhere down the line he would see the results for himself.” Although in his grade examinations he’s always stood first in Delhi, Ghosh says, his son suffered from bad teaching. “At a point of time his playing became mechanical. There’s only so much you can do unless you know the fundamentals” — that is, the language and logic of music. With Laloo, Angad “unlearnt everything and learnt it all over again. He’s become more proficient.”

As with any rapidly expanding industry, finding quality personnel can be a problem. In some schools, piano teachers are no further along in their musical education than the sixth musical grade. “If you don't have the real knowledge, you’ll automatically not be teaching it right,” says Laloo. “For me, that’s cheating people.” Until a few years ago, even secondhand pianos commanded fairly high prices, starting at Rs 50,000 for a two-decade old upright. Now the market has collapsed, partly because of the influx of high-quality digital pianos — they run on electricity, never need tuning (it can take a month to get hold of a trained tuner) and do not go “off” when the weather changes. You can get a new digital piano for approximately Rs 50,000. At that investment and three or four hours a week of practice, this is a less costly and more rewarding interest to pursue than many others.