Jet lagged and exhausted, but that did not show when Prof. Stephen Slawek took to the stage with his sitar for his first ever show in Hyderabad. “It also happens to be Guru Poornima,” said the
American professor of musicology, surprising many in the audience, before he began with a raag he learned from none other than his guru Pandit Ravi Shankar.
Prof. Stephen began studying sitar in 1969 under the late Dr Lalmani Misra and was later accepted as a disciple by Pandit Ravi Shankar in 1977.
“It was an absolute privilege. And knowing that, I would try to absorb as much as I could. He was a creative genius. And he was so technical in his approach to instrument that to learn from you had to have a knowledge of the basics. He gave me a 100 per cent but I could absorb only 60 per cent, I would say. And I probably need another lifetime to just make up for the remaining 40 per cent,” he says.
In 1985, Ravi Shankar even flew Stephen Slawek to Kansas City, where Shankar was performing his Concerto for Sitar and orchestra. It was a 40-minute work commissioned and premiered in 1970 by André Previn and the London Symphony Orchestra. This gave Professor Stephen a sleepless night.
“He would borrow my sitar on and off because my sitar was tuned for a concerto. So when he had to play both a concert and a concerto, he did not want to tune his instrument twice. And when he flew me to Kansas, I also had to play the Bongo for the show because the percussionist just wasn’t able to play with him. And I stayed up all night practising for that,” he says.
A professor of musicology in Austin, Texas, Prof. Stephen is also an expert on Ehtnomusicology, with focus on Asian music.
