George Mathew was going down to the hotel lobby when he ran into an Indo-American couple. Where in the US are you, he asked the Indian wife, a Malayali. After exchanging a few lines, they realised she was once his student at the university. Has he changed so much, he asks, sitting at the lobby of the Hilton Garden Inn, Thiruvananthapuram. When you come back to a place you had long left behind, it’s like coming back to that age, he says. He was 18, he remembers, getting his Indian citizenship a month before he left the country to study abroad. He is 52 now, renowned orchestra conductor, founder of Music For Life International and Ubuntu-Shruti Orchestra, using classical music for humanitarian issues and crises.
Even now, George is in Kerala after a concert for people suffering from cataract blindness. But he says he is an immigrant to India. He had come as a boy of 11 to the land of his parents, after spending his early years in Singapore. “There is a way in which Thiruvananthapuram is home, New York is home, Boston and Singapore and Rishi Valley (where I went to school), are home,” says George. But then Thiruvananthapuram is where he realised his fondness for music conducting. He was in a school choir and leading it at the age of 14. He had mentors here — Samuel Valsalam of the Trivandrum Choral Society and Wilson Singh whose music pieces he still keeps.
It was a very natural progression for George to go to the US and study. But something strange happened. “Halfway through my studies I was invited to join the faculty. I did.” Two years later, he went back to study, with the students he taught before. This meant he was a little older than others. By 30 he became conductor at Tufts University, and later, organist-choirmaster at various churches in Boston. “But I felt the need to study at a proper conservatoire. So I went to do PG at the Manhattan School of Music.” And as luck would have it, George arrived in New York one week before 9/11. He was walking to class on a pleasant Tuesday morning when someone told him there was a fire downtown. “I turned around and looked, seven miles away was the World Trade Centre, and I could see this pillar of smoke. “Soon people were turning on television sets, and we saw the second explosion. We thought planes were crashing everywhere and the world was ending!”
From the recent Mahler for Vision concert at Carnegie Hall. (Photo: Chris Lee)
He had another brush with death. Not his own, former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s. He was in Delhi in September 1984, visiting her next door neighbour, and saw her at the exact spot she was assassinated a month later. Looks like young George was drawn towards historical moments without really planning it. Same way he did that first concert for a humanitarian cause at the New York Carnegie Hall in 2006 and then ended up doing more every year. “That first concert was for the victims of an earthquake in Kashmir, along the Line of Control. The bulk of the damage and causalities were on the Pakistan side. Story got out that an Indian chap was doing this for Pakistan. The media got interested. And we raised some money — almost $100,000 for Doctors Without Borders. It must have been beginner’s luck — there were musicians from 17 orchestras. The UN got behind it. And the whole thing happened in five weeks. It was ordinary people doing an extraordinary thing.”
Seeing the success, George’s friend from Sudan mailed him, asking him to do something for the people there. And one year to the day, he put together Requiem for Darfur with musicians from 35 orchestras. “It so happened that the then UN Under-Secretary-General for public information and media was Shashi Tharoor and he was very helpful. He insisted on talking to me only in Malayalam!” The image that was put up at the concert — of a Sudanese girl looking up — was picked up by the New York Times and millions of people saw it. “Someone said it was a little crazy that you are doing these concerts and a week before, frantically running around trying to raise money. There should be an organisation to take care of the logistics. Why don’t you form a non-profit organisation?” It is not an original thought — music for a cause — concedes a modest George. Mozart had done it, Leonard Bernstein had led a now legendary concert at Carnegie Hall for AIDS in 1987 with the same name, Music for Life. So George went to the children of the late Leonard Bernstein and asked if he could use the name. Daddy would be thrilled, they said. George’s wife suggested adding the word ‘international’ and the name got incorporated in 2008, which makes this the tenth year.
The causes covered by now have been many — to end violence against women, for the children of war-torn Syria and so on, partnering with UN agencies, Refugees International, etc. Humanitarian causes are only one part of our work, George says. There is for instance, Ubuntu-Shruti, a new professional training orchestra. In George’s words, “when you perform ensemble music, you are also listening to each other, to voices you don’t normally agree with. It becomes important in these times when one is less tolerant of those who disagree, calling them anti-national, anti-this and anti-that. Music is a place where you not only can, but must bring different voices. The richness of what happens is because of the differences, not the homogeneity.”
