Raga-Kulam Music school

Raga-Kulam Music school
NIRALA ESTATE, 14 -1004, opposite PATEL NEOTOWN, Amrapali Dream Valley, Greater Noida, Uttar Pradesh 201305, India
https://www.ragakulam.com/
Raga-Kulam Music School sits at the southern edge of the old Bharathi quarter, its terracotta façade half-hidden by the limbs of an ancient banyan whose roots nudge the threshold like curious students. Teak doors swing open onto a central courtyard floored with smooth river-stone where every dusk, mridangam beats echo against a small lily tank known as Kulam. Around the water, arcaded verandas serve eight practice rooms simply named after the seven principal swaras and silence, “Sa”, “Ri”, “Ga”, “Ma”, “Pa”, “Dha”, “Ni”, and “Shh”. Monsoon evenings, swaras mingle with frogs croaking at the Kulam—improvised konnakol.

Curriculum follows the gurukula method, updated for urban lives. Students aged six to sixty receive 60-minute riyaaz slots, tiers from Pravesh (ear training with tanpura apps) to Vistara (five-year diploma in chosen raga families). Class never exceeds six learners, ensuring bow-holding for violin, jawari polishing for sitar, and “why” behind each ornament. Friday mornings belong to elective courses: Sanskrit prosody, Hindustani-Carnatic fusion labs, or fieldwork in nearby temples with Dr. Revathi, a scholar who helped classify lost melakarta ragas. Certification requires one margam recital plus a thesis-recording, presented under the banyan with faculty and family seated on floor mats—no stage, ashiver of strings at eye-level.

Two resident gurus anchor Raga-Kulam. Vidwan Raghav Iyer, bearer of the Tanjore veena lineage, teaches “voice through fingers”, demonstrating how the veena’s mirrorlike kudam mimics glottal shading. Guru Kasturi Bai, a seventies-era thumri prodigy turned oral historian, runs the Dawn Listening Sessions: 4:30 am, khus curtains are lifted, six jasmine ropes dropped in water to scent the air, and the Kulam musicians begin with Abhogi Alaap as sky bleeds orange. Current faculty count is twelve, including a visiting bansuri exponent from Amsterdam who switches rooms monthly so every learner breathes differently.

Beyond traditional forms, the school curates Raga Roots Outreach, mini-concerts at bus stands and old-age homes; last December, children played a Bahudari tillana for wheelchair-bound veterans who later took a tabla workshop in the courtyard. Fees are sliding-scale, thirty percent seat reserved for wards of temple gardeners. A library above the west veranda stocks fragile palm-leaf manuscripts, CD transfers, and a wall of field cassettes—wax-stamped labels of village festivals that Dr. Revathi rescued from termites. Digital machines here run on solar stored in recycled rickshaw batteries; conservation meets continuity.

Dusk concludes with collective duggi taps at Kulam, drums watered gently to cool skin. Students depart through gates brushed by banyan aerial roots, stroking foliage like strings. Even the frogs anticipate tomorrow’s first sruthi box drone—set to 4.5 Hz on the veena peg, purposefully aligned with the courtyard’s resonant length of 6.5 metres, so the entire campus becomes one sympathetic chamber, a cell of living music called Raga-Kulam.

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