biography of pandit ravi shankar
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Ravi Shankar whose name is often preceded by the title Pandit, was an Indian sitar virtuoso and a composer. He was the best-known proponent of the sitar in the second half of the 20th century and influenced many other musicians throughout the world.
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Ravi Shankar, in full Ravindra Shankar Chowdhury, (born April 7, 1920, Benares [now Varanasi], India—died December 11, 2012, San Diego, California, U.S.), Indian musician, player of the sitar, composer, and founder of the National Orchestra of India, who was influential in stimulating Western appreciation of Indian music.
Born into a Bengali Brahman (highest social class in Hindu tradition) family, Shankar spent most of his youth studying music and dance and touring extensively in India and Europe with his brother Uday’s dance troupe. At age 18 Shankar gave up dancing, and for the next seven years he studied the sitar (a long-necked stringed instrument of the lute family) under the noted musician Ustad Allauddin Khan. After serving as music director of All-India Radio from 1948 until 1956, he began a series of European and American tours.
In the course of his long career, Shankar became the world’s best-known exponent of Hindustani (North Indian) classical music, performing with India’s most-distinguished percussionists and making dozens of successful recordings. Shankar composed the film scores for the Indian director Satyajit Ray’s famous Apu trilogy (1955–59). In 1962 he founded the Kinnara School of Music in Bombay (now Mumbai) and then established a second Kinnara School in Los Angeles in 1967; he closed both schools some years later, however, having become disenchanted with institutional teaching.
Beginning in the 1960s, his concert performances with the American violinist Yehudi Menuhin and his association with George Harrison, lead guitarist of the then wildly popular British musical group the Beatles, helped bring Indian music to the attention of the West. Among the diverse musicians influenced by Shankar’s compositional style were the jazz saxophonist John Coltrane and the composer Philip Glass, with whom Shankar collaborated on the album Passages (1990). Indeed, especially remarkable among Shankar’s accomplishments is his equally expert participation in traditional Indian music and in Indian-influenced Western music. Most characteristic of the latter activity are his concerti for sitar and orchestra, particularly Raga-Mala (“Garland of Ragas”), first performed in 1981.