Supriya Nagarajan on climate, Carnatic music and Meltwater

Meeting this quandary head on is MELTWATER, a musical performance piece, that comes to the Southbank Centre in August as part of our Planet Summer programme. Bringing together music, field recordings and evocative Indian vocals and a very visual depiction of a glacier melting before your eyes, MELTWATER curates the effect of climate change into a day-in-the-life of a glacier condensed into a 60-minute spectacle.

This important work is the product of Carnatic singer-composer Supriya Nagarajan and is born out of ‘Terrarium’, a cross-border community story-telling project led by Nagarajan’s arts-music charity Manasamitra. Ahead of MELTWATER’s arrival in our Purcell Room, we caught up with Nagarajan to find out more about how this piece came to be, as well as her own background, and a quick introduction to what exactly Carnatic music is.

Your artistic journey began as a singer of Carnatic vocal music. For those unfamiliar with Carnatic music could you give a quick introduction to it and its origins?

In India there are two types, or genres, of classical music North Indian classical music, which is Hindustani music, and South Indian classical music, which is Carnatic music. Hindustani music has a Persian influence because when the Persians invaded from Iran and Central Asia many years ago, they left behind musical influences on the northern parts of India where they resided. The southern parts of India however were mostly untouched by the Islamic invasions, and so Carnatic music structures remain pretty much as they were from the time it was first developed.

Carnatic music is very lyrical, and is largely based on the concept of Bhakti, which is a devotion to Gods. So a lot of lyrical content in Carnatic music is devoted to singing about the different Gods of the Hindu tradition. At the heart of Carnatic music are three saints, the three main composers of the music in the 18th century, and a lot of the music comes from their compositions.

Did you always want to have a career in the arts?

I didn’t always have a career in the arts. I grew up in Mumbai, and because I grew up in a family of accountants, I became an accountant myself after studying at Mumbai University. And then I worked in banking, firstly in India until 1998 and then after I moved to the UK.

But my primary passion in life was music. My mother was a singer and I was surrounded by music in my childhood, but I’d never gotten the opportunity to pursue music as my primary occupation. So in 2005 I decided I had to leave banking then, or I would forever be stuck doing that, and so I quit then and set up Manasamitra.

In those first few years I meandered around what the idea of a music organisation was and could be. And then from 2011, I started composing and performing myself. And it’s been a journey from there. It took another five or six years to sort of carve a niche for myself in the music world. 

‘My projects don’t simply end where their performance or tour is done, because I feel these ideas have a life; they grow and they flourish and they shape shift and change and morph into something different.’

Is there a concert or performance of yours that sticks in the mind?

One of my absolute favourite performances was performing in Portsoy in Scotland for the Sound Festival, with snow and wind raging outside and an audience of five people who had braved all that to come to this tiny little boathouse on the edge of the sea. Myself and Duncan Chapman performed Lullaby and really relaxed the audience at that point in time. It has remained a lasting memory because it didn’t matter what was happening outside that space, we managed to create an intimate musical space for everybody there.

What led you to set up Manasamitra?

As I mentioned, when I gave up my career in finance all I knew was that I wanted to make music, but I had no clue or no vision of what the music sector in the UK looked like. I came from the South Indian classical vocal tradition and I knew that I had to take my music beyond this, I knew I couldn’t stay in a box. I knew that I had to cross the barriers in order to encourage people who didn’t know anything about Carnatic music to come in and listen. But how the journey was going to unfold, I had no clue. 

So to start off, I set up Manasamitra, which is an arts charity, a music charity based in Dewsbury, and I wanted to explore my options from there. In its 15 years Manasamitra has evolved and shape-shifted, and been flexible to changing circumstances, but it really has two strands. One is community engagement in which I devise projects and partner with various collaborators and other artists to deliver work in the community; the other strand is where I compose for commissions; delivering brand new projects like MELTWATER.

The scope of work you’ve done, and been commissioned to do, with Manasamitra is quite broad, but is there a favourite project you’ve worked on?

That’s a difficult question; every project is as important to me as the next one or the previous one is. And they don’t simply end where their performance or tour is done, because I feel these ideas have a life; they grow and they flourish and they shapeshift and change and morph into something different. Lullaby, for example, was a very different show when I was devising it in 2015 to what it is now.

That said, Lullaby is one of my favourite projects as it is very heartwarming. And now I think I have a special fondness for MELTWATER too because it’s a topic really close to my heart and I feel that I have only really touched the tip of the iceberg with it – no pun intended. I think there is still so much to uncover and unravel and explore and develop within MELTWATER.

‘As humans we inhabit our own little terrariums; we don’t think about life outside them that much. We are so caught up in our day to day that we don’t have the energy or often the time, to put our head over the terrarium and look at the wider world around us’.

The basis for MELTWATER came in Manasamitra’s Terrarium project; how did this project come about, and where did it take you?

MELTWATER came from a place of personal tragedy. The town of Kedarnath in India, which is in the Himalayan foothills, was submerged in 2013 by floods. It was the first time the town had flooded in the history of that region. We lost a family member in those floods and at the time I thought that this was something that could have been avoided. 

That thought stuck in my head, and came back to me when a friend in Dewsbury purchased a house next to a canal. Six months later she hadn’t moved in and when I asked why, she said it was because rats kept coming into the property. That was an eye opener because you think of a canalside property as being idyllic and beautiful, you don’t think about the hidden dangers lurking underneath the water.

This is how Terrarium was born, through these two prompts. I wanted to explore the role of water as a disruptor in our lives, and think about what climate change has done to water, and people’s stories in relation to that. The name comes from how we as humans inhabit our own little terrariums; we don’t think about life outside that much. We are so caught up in our day to day that we don’t have the energy or often the time, to put our head over the terrarium and look at the wider world around us.

So with Terrarium we collected stories from people in three parts of the world, in Indonesia, India and Yorkshire. We collected stories, as well as poems and songs, that told how water has been a disruptor in the life of people, whether it was as a force for good, or as a force of destruction. As we all know, climate change is disrupting life across the globe and we wanted to collect stories and highlight what is happening everywhere, so people can have a glimpse of something beyond their terrarium, something they hadn’t thought of happening somewhere further afield which could actually come to affect them at a later date. 

And how did this project lead to the MELTWATER performance piece?

The next step was taking time to work out how to represent this idea of water and climate change through a musical performance. I chose to create a 60-minute piece that celebrated the life of a glacier. I wanted to anthropomorphise the glacier, turn into a person, something alive, and I wanted to capture all the microtonal changes that happen in a glacier in just one day. So MELTWATER is a day in the life of a glacier, and I’ve used the Indian raga system to embody that. I’ve started with Bhairav, which is the celebration of the sun, and followed the journey right up to Bihag at midnight, which is putting the glacier to sleep. So that was my response to how the glacier felt through the day in many ways, and that is the performance. 

What you can expect is a mixture of manipulated field recordings, Indian Carnartic vocal syllables and specially written lyrics, as well as sounds of the harp and percussive meditative sounds from the marimba as well as wonderful bass and other flutes. The idea was to create a soundscape in which there aren’t any dramastic moments, you won’t feel like getting up and dancing, but you will feel like sinking into your seat and reflecting and pondering on what the glacier is thinking at that point in time. It’s a slow, gradual, meditative and haunting soundscape.

How central is the climate crisis to your creative work? 

This is my first piece in which I directly respond to the climate crisis. Water and the changes to water was the thing I felt I could relate to most personally, and so it has offered my first step in this direction; highlighting the changing of sea levels and melting of the glaciers through my work. But I will definitely be doing more in this field, ideas are brewing, and I think this will become a constant in my creative and musical journey.

Often we look at the world in a closed way; we hear but we don’t listen, we look but we don’t see. So I want to properly see what’s happening and listen to the world around me. I like to work with my senses – I have synesthesia – and so I want to use this to explore how I can play more of a role in this changing landscape and help address the climate crisis.

‘If everybody thinks they are too tiny to make an impact, or won’t make an impact, then nothing will change. But if we all see the world around us and contribute in our little ways, who knows? We might make that small difference to our future generations.’

How important do you feel music and the arts can be in the fight against the climate crisis?

Very important. There are so many people in the world, but if everybody thinks they are too tiny to make an impact, or won’t make an impact, then nothing will change. But if we all see the world around us and contribute in our little ways, who knows? We might make that small difference to our future generations. So I want to be able to do whatever is possible, and I think music and arts can make a huge contributory factor.

I’m currently collaborating with Professor Natasha Barlow of Water at Leeds, and she reminded me how important it is that we do things like MELTWATER that cross over into different areas, otherwise we would only be talking in our own little bubbles. So climate change scientists would just be talking to climate change scientists who already know what is happening, but if we form bridges between different disciplines, then the whole problem might just become easier to tackle, or at least easier to highlight to the wider world.

What do you hope audiences will take from MELTWATER? 

I think audiences will go away reflecting on the glacier that slowly crumbled before their eyes. We took a three minute video of the glacier and stretched it to an hour. It plays behind the performance, and because the glacier’s crumbling and calving now happens so slowly you don’t notice it changing at first; which is perfect, as these things really do happen so gradually that people don’t realise they’re changing.

So I’m hoping the combination of the film, the music, the soundscape, and the evocative nature of MELTWATER will leave a lasting memory in the minds of the audience and the food for thought. If we have planted the right seeds, then audiences will go away and think about water in a different light.