Garage Gigs

Jyoti Pande Lavakare: Business in harmony with music

A Chennai-based venture, MusicUniv, is imparting classical music education to children in a structured manner

Jyoti Pande Lavakare / Dec 31, 2011, 00:08 IST

When I was growing up and my father’s government job was moving us around different parts of India, one of the first things I remember my mother looking out for as soon as we were a little settled into the new school and home was a music teacher. Home was always a musical place, with raagas and rhythms meandering through our spaces of work and play, swaras jostling with chords as we grew older, almost as integral as food and shelter and definitely more important than homework, at least from my mother’s point of view.

My mother’s masters in Indian classical music ensured that she had a fair idea of the quality of teaching of the various music teachers we had. She wouldn’t settle for anything less than the best, whether it was in Mumbai or Meerut. Despite such a strict quality controller, we ended up with a wide range of teachers, from the silken-voiced young woman who wanted us to spend the first 30 minutes of class focusing only on the three key notes of sa-pa-sa and hold them infinitely, to the eccentric, paan-chewing, tabla-throwing bald-headed man whose quicksilver taanas left us open-mouthed in admiration, but whose teaching style consisted of clipping the ear of the child sitting closest to him if even one of us didn’t “get” it the first time.

Some of my mother’s chosen music teachers came home to teach. Others homes we had to go to. Nothing remained consistent, except the spectrum of 12 sharp and flat notes. Each teacher had his own syllabus, her own style and individual teaching focus — some emphasised more on music theory; others focused on making sure we repetitively sang taught compositions faithfully, each note perfectly in place. The only real constant that ensured we didn’t abandon our musical education each time we moved cities was my mother’s grim persistence.

This was almost four decades ago, but things haven’t changed much, as I discovered when I began looking for Indian music teachers for my own children in India and abroad. I’ve met diasporic and desi Indians across countries who would give a lot to teach their children the music of their ancestors in a systematic and structured manner. But because originally, complex oral traditions such as this were more dependent on received wisdom – gurukul style than structured teaching – for both style and substance, codification is far from perfect. The danger in this is of original compositions getting lost through generations, but more immediately, this leads to an imperfectly structured teaching methodology that makes the next generation’s access to this knowledge at a basic level, very challenging.


Indian classical music, in both Hindustani and Carnatic traditions, are also seen as esoteric and inaccessible, especially for the economically-challenged. And this is exactly where Chennai-based MusicUniv comes in.


The idea of MusicUniv was born when investor-entrepreneur Sudhir Rao met Dr Karaikudi Subramanian, a ninth generation veena player and founder of Brhaddhvani, a centre for research in music education supported by the Ford Foundation, and started studying Carnatic vocal music in 2008 to better understand the pedagogy for teaching it. Along with the musically-accomplished Anil Srinivasan, Rao and his wife Sadhana decided to collaborate with Brhaddhvani to take the pedagogy into schools, thus, co-founding MusicUniv.


Between the three co-founders, they have a passion for classical Indian and Western music, the ability to parse the language of music and the desire to impart that musical intelligence to the next generation in a systematic and structured manner — all wrapped up in some very sharp business acumen. They have established MusicUniv as a platform to teach classical music – with a focus on Carnatic and later Hindustani classical music – through a structured and graded syllabus for children in pre-primary, primary and secondary schools.


If the prodigiously talented classical pianist Srinivasan is the heart behind MusicUniv, Rao is definitely the brains powering this initiative.


“Our research showed that eight out of 10 parents want their children to have this kind of classical music education — we wanted to be the agents of access to this,” says Rao, who also invests in start-ups in fields like education, health care, wealth care, food, retailing, renewable energy and transportation.


“I wanted to figure out a way to sensitise children in art and aesthetics on a sustainable basis, and do this for profit,” says Rao. For this, he figured he would have to work towards establishing and embedding structured music and art education as an integral part of academic discipline.


However, it was the entry of the musical and market-savvy Srinivasan – who was leading a double life as a research, analytics and consulting expert from Columbia Business School – that MusicUniv took its current form. Srinivasan is the custodian of the mission and in charge of operations and business development. But being a musician himself – he has played at New York’s Lincoln Centre, and also collaborated with Sikkil Gurucharan, U Srinivas and Lalgudi Krishnan – Srinivasan believes in the power of music in shaping our lives. For him, it goes beyond appreciating a medley of sounds “Music affects a child’s neural pathways towards a lifelong interest in learning. It helps our thoughts develop, completes our personality and allows us to live with conviction.”


His magical fingers are impressive, but what I loved best was his ability to deconstruct the intricacies and intangibles of classical music to make it more accessible for laypeople. As an entrepreneurial concept it is good one — driven by passion, easy to scale. Within the first year of its three-year pilot, 52 Chennai schools have signed up with 5,085 students. They plan to reach a million students in 10 years, taught by 5,000 trained music educators. But its success will lie in the authenticity of its methodology and implementation during scaling.


“I think of MusicUniv like a bamboo,” Srinivasan likes to say. “It’s very small in its infancy, grows very little in height, strengthening its roots. In its fifth or sixth year, it shoots up dramatically, growing as high as 60 feet. It is a tree that symbolises centred growth and continuity.”


MusicUniv’s official symbol is the bamboo.