Shanker Krishnan grew up in a musically inclined family—his sister, vidushi Geetha Raja, is a noted Carnatic vocalist, his father wrote on music and culture, and his mother led devotional groups. Shanker was trained in Carnatic and Hindustani traditions under eminent gurus such as vidwan Bombay S Ramachandran and Ustad Khadim Hussain Khan respectively. 

Krishnan’s Western classical music training was more unconventional. After coming to the US for graduate study in applied mathematics, he discovered the world of Bach and Bartók, and spent as much time on music study at UC Berkeley as on math. While working in New York, Krishnan took private lessons from composer Nils Vigeland (later Chair of Composition at the Manhattan School of Music). During his 25 years at the World Bank Group in Washington DC, Krishnan studied music on the side before eventually leaving to pursue music composition full-time. Krishnan spent a decade in private study with Prof. Justin Boyer, composer and professor of composition and music theory at Montgomery College, MD. He wrote pieces ranging from inventions and fugues to Classical-era style works to serialist music. However, he has always been drawn to contrapuntal music in the Baroque style. In addition to his study at Berkeley, Krishnan’s non-musical education includes degrees from IIT Madras and Stanford.

After years of research, Shanker is releasing his debut album Confluence: Raga and Counterpoint on 26 September 2025. The album will be released by IndianRaga. The album blends Indian classical traditions with Western Baroque counterpoint, bringing together two very different musical forms in a unique way. The album’s artwork has been designed by Shanthi Chandrasekar, an Indian-American abstract artist.

In Conversation with Shanker Krishnan

You grew up in Bombay and Madras immersed in Carnatic music, later discovering Western classical traditions in the U.S. How did these diverse influences shape your identity as a composer and lead to the creation of Confluence: Raga and Counterpoint?

My music blends Carnatic music and its gamakas with Western classical music — especially Baroque counterpoint and harmony. This reflects my immersion and training in each of the two classical traditions, and in a sense my life's journey. Growing up in India with my parents devoted to Carnatic music, my sister, vocalist Geetha Raja, and I were trained by Sangita Kala Acharya Bombay S. Ramachandran. When my sister later became a student of Brindamma, I too came under the spell of the incredible intricacy of Brindamma's music.

I later discovered another world, that of Western classical music, as a graduate student at Berkeley. I was captivated by a different form of intricacy — the architecture of Bach's Baroque counterpoint, the art of combining multiple independent melodic lines. That's when I first had the idea of combining these two complex traditions. I eventually left a deeply meaningful career in poverty alleviation at the World Bank to pursue my 'encore career'. I undertook a decade of study of Western classical composition and found myself continually drawn back to Baroque counterpoint. While raga-based melodies have been combined with harmony, the integration with counterpoint has not been explored in the same way. All of these threads led to my debut album Confluence: Raga and Counterpoint.

In the Concerto-Kriti: Field of Dharma, you use the Bhagavad Gita as a storytelling device. What drew you to Arjuna’s dilemma, and how did you translate such timeless human conundrums into music?

The Bhagavad Gita's teachings (including nishkama karma, non-attachment to the fruits of your actions) have been a strong influence on me. As one of India’s great contributions to world thought, the Gita is also a work I wanted to feature for a broader audience outside India. In addition to the philosophy, we can all identify with Arjuna's anguish at the thought of fighting his kin, teachers, and friends. To me, music is a powerful expression of emotion. So in Field of Dharma’s first three movements, the music focuses on Arjuna’s emotional struggle. My compositional choices such as instrumentation and dynamics trace his turmoil and confusion, set against the backdrop of the Kurukshetra battlefield.

Arjuna’s dialogue with Lord Krishna is suggested through the interplay of the instruments, and Lord Krishna's unfolding discourses are expressed through the fourth movement's Swaram structure with its progressive elaborations.

The album brings together instruments as varied as the veena, venu, mridangam, trumpet, harp, oboe, and cello. What was it like to work with this unique ensemble, and what challenges or surprises arose in bringing Eastern and Western sonorities together?

You're right to note the unique nature of this ensemble of instruments, which created striking sonic opportunities — the resonant plucked notes of the harp echoing those of the veena, the interweaving of the oboe with the gamakas of the violin. It was certainly a process of exploration and experimentation, which also involved reimagining the roles of the instruments. For example: Given the focus on interplay of the instruments, the mridangam in this album serves more as rhythmic counterpoint and as emphasis at key points, rather than providing a constant beat as in a Carnatic concert. And the string sections often provide a bed of long, sustained chords that evoke the resonance of the tambura, but allow for shifts in the harmonic background.

But given the central role of gamakas in my music, the album naturally features Carnatic instruments more, and it was a privilege to work with artistes of the caliber of Shraddha Ravindran (violin), R. Thiagarajan (flute), K.R. Shrievats (veena) and Mannarkoil Dr. J. Balaji (mridangam).

Indian classical music, especially Carnatic, is often deeply identified with the voice. Yet Confluence is purely instrumental. Why did you decide not to include the human voice, and how did this decision influence the way you shaped the compositions?

My instinct was that for experimental music that combines the intricacy of gamakas with the layering of counterpoint, it would be easier initially to focus on the resulting textures and interactions by keeping the music purely instrumental, without the attention being drawn to text (sahitya) and the human voice.

But the other side of the coin is that an instrumental piece can be more challenging for a composer, since listeners connect more easily with the human voice and with text. This made it particularly important to shape emotional arcs and their development within each piece. For instance, in Fugue-Kriti where the counterpoint is especially evident due to the nature of a fugue, the music nevertheless traces a strong emotional arc moving from tranquillity and hope to chaos and foreboding, reflecting my own responses to this era.

You’ve used ragas like Hemavati, Vachaspati, Charukesi, which already have certain scalar similarities to Western modes. Was that intentional for smoother blending with counterpoint, or did you choose them for their emotional resonance?

I chose the ragas primarily for their emotional resonance. But I did choose only ragas that are sampurna ragas (i.e., ragas with all seven notes). Since the harmonic progressions in my compositions are created only from each raga’s notes, using a raga with fewer notes would have limited the available chords and harmonic progressions. However, there were still harmonic challenges: for instance, none of the ragas I used included a leading tone (the kakali nishadam or higher Ni), which is an important element of the Western tonal harmonic system. So I had to create an adapted functional harmony specific to each raga. In this approach, the chord progressions, built from each raga’s scale, follow their own internal harmonic logic that is different from the traditional Western tonal harmonic system.

Carnatic music thrives on gamakas—microtonal oscillations and glides—which are quite different from the precise linearity of Western counterpoint. How did you negotiate the tension between these two contrasting approaches?

This question gets to the crux of my compositional process. To me, gamakas are a key part of what makes Carnatic music so distinctive, and I have specific gamakas in mind when I write melodic lines. But gamakas incorporate neighboring pitches into the playing of a note — and in a fugue, where multiple melodies unfold simultaneously, the presence of gamakas in each melody can result in several notes being heard beyond those explicitly written.

Might this blur the harmonic progressions shaped by counterpoint? Could it disrupt the balance of dissonance and consonance that is a characteristic of Baroque counterpoint? Or would the combination of multiple gamakas add richness and intricacy to the contrapuntal texture, enhancing rather than obscuring it? For each phrase that I compose, I keep moving between the two systems to assess both its emotional impact and this tension. But the result is also music that is integrated between the two traditions at a very fundamental level.

This is your debut album, after years of private study and composition. What do you see as the next chapter in your musical journey after Confluence? Are there directions or themes you are already exploring for future projects?

To me, creating music is not only about expressing something important to me, but is also a deeper way to learn about music and its power. So I'm excited to move on to writing a new set of pieces. Even within Carnatic and Baroque music, there are many dimensions to explore — new timbres and instrument combinations, other musical forms and structures, and themes that connect to Indian culture or history.

I feel very fortunate to be on this musical journey, and to share music that brings together these two extraordinary traditions.

The Confluence will be available at https://indianraga.com/ on 26 September 2025