Indian music has a bright future: 'Uri' composer

India has a very rich and advanced music industry, says music composer Shashwat Sachdev, who returned to the country's music industry a few years ago after working briefly in Hollywood.

Though Sachdev had learned Indian classical music for 20 years, he moved to Los Angeles in 2011 and started working with international artistes like Tony Maserati, Marc Shaiman and Katharine McPhee.

In an e-mail interview to IANS, the composer spoke about his love for Indian music and what made him shift from Hollywood to Bollywood.

He said: "I made the decision to come back and work in India for a reason. In fact, I think that India has a very rich and advanced music industry. There are things in Indian music and the music industry that I really like and love. The fact that the music and the films in India are intertwined is very interesting to me.

"With our writers writing such interesting scripts and with such accomplished and creative top-tier technical support, I think Indian music has a very bright future."

Sachdev debuted in the Bollywood music industry in 2017 as a composer in Anushka Sharma-starrer film "Phillauri". The audience appreciated his soulful, heart touching songs in the movie.

After "Phillauri", he worked in "Veere Di Wedding" and now he has composed tunes for "Uri: The Surgical Strike".

While sharing his experience composing songs for "Uri", Sachdev said it was challenging to "think out of the box" and "to break the rules, yet create something that people can easily accept."

"The challenging part for an artiste is to do something out of the box, something new, yet get popular appeal with the work. It's very easy to experiment and to think outside the box, but the challenge is to break the rules yet create something that people can easily accept. The sonic scape of the film is very different," he added.

He composed songs like "Beh chala" and "Jigra" in Vicky Kaushal and Yami Gautam-starrer film "Uri: The Surgical Strike", based on the 2016 real-life incident when the Indian Army conducted surgical strikes as retaliation for the Uri attack.

Asked if he was given complete freedom to explore his musical creativity in the film by director Aditya Dhar, he said they both have a "relationship of mutual respect and appreciation".

"After I read the script, I made a few themes and a few melodies on the piano and met my director. I played them to Aditya and Aditya loved them. We have a relationship of mutual respect and appreciation and I really love the script. It has its own tone, pace and sound built into it.

"So, the possibility to go wrong was very limited I think. We went to Germany and got ourselves a huge synthesizer, handpicked for the tone and sound of of our film. But the film also needed an emotional touch. So we recorded a live symphonic orchestra with 60 musicians at the Synchron Stage in Vienna."

--IANS

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