When Paul Livingstone was 12 he first heard the music of Indian maestro Ravi Shankar.
The sounds of Shankar’s sitar washed over him, Livingstone said in a recent telephone interview. "I
felt like I was under this waterfall of music that was cleaning me out head to toe," he recalled.
"It was such a joyful experience I knew that’s what I wanted to do."
Livingstone went on to study sitar, including with Shankar himself, and has become a leading American
master on the instrument, collaborating with a global cast of musicians performing as well as composing.
Livingstone will present a free concert with tabla player Pramod Upadhyaya Friday at 7 p.m. at Grounds
for Thought, 174 S. Main St., Bowling Green. The Bowling Green State University tabla class, taught by
Rob Wallace, will perform a brief opening set. At 2 p.m. that day Livingstone and Upadhyaya will present
a master class at the arts village on campus.
Livingstone, who was born in Beirut in 1970, had to wait three years after hearing Shankar before he
traveled to India and first got his hands on a sitar so he could begin his studies.
He had already been playing rock and jazz, but "this was a more difficult path."
"A seed was planted very deep in my heart."
His studies continued in California, where he studied with an number of Indian masters as well as
teachers in other forms of music.
He had studied under Amiya Dasgupta, himself a student of Shankar. After Dasgupta’s death Livingstone met
with Shankar backstage and they talked about the late musician. Shankar told him he was part of
"the family" and invited him to his house.
Shankar, recognized as a genius as a performer of Indian classical music and a composer who melded Indian
and Western music, was also an devoted teacher. "He had a wonderful balance of strictness and
humor," Livingstone said. "He loved to teach. It wasn’t like a burden. It was part of passing
on the art."
Shankar’s music was "profoundly deep and insightful and always sublimely creative," Livingstone
said, and the same was true of his teaching. Now "I try to pass on the gifts I’ve been given."
Ragas have their own strict discipline and rules.
Simply put a raga is a series of notes akin to a scale, but the notes are different whether the line is
rising or descending. There are "king" and "queen" tones that define the character
of the raga, and each has certain characteristic phrases and embellishments associated with it.
Indian music has independent rhythmic elements, which can be mixed and matched with the ragas.
Yet, Livingstone said, "the expression has to be very personal. You can hear the same raga 100 times
and each time it will be different."
A raga is like a person, Livingstone said, and the musician develops a relationship to the raga as with a
person. That requires the musician to leave the ego behind, he said, and lose oneself in the music and
allow oneself to be filled with the breath of creative energy.
That concept of creative breath, like the breath Yahweh breathed into Adam, exists in many spiritual
traditions, Christian, Hindi, Hebrew. "When you breathe life into the music," he said,
"there’s a life beyond the skeletal rules, the science, otherwise a computer could play it,"
he said. "You have to bring to it what you have in the moment. For me it’s also a very profound
spiritual practice in itself. It’s not just something you reproduce and copy. It’s something you have to
dig deep within yourself and generate each time."
