Pa Dha Ni Sa Music Academy
Logix Blossom Greens, Sector 143, Noida, Uttar Pradesh 201306, India
Pa Dha Ni Sa Music Academy sits on the quieter, tree-lined stretch of Thiruvanmiyur High Road, where the traffic of Chennai ebbs just enough to let a tanpura note linger in the air. The building is a two-level, chocolate-brick house renovated into a modest campus; bougainvillea tumbles across the entrance trellis, mirroring the descending swaras of its name. Inside, the foyer is an acoustic collage—photographs of M. S. Subbulakshmi, Thyagaraja, and John Coltrane share a pale-yellow wall, announcing the eclecticism that defines the curriculum.
On the ground floor, three air-conditioned studios are surfaced with tuned spruce-wood panels. Morning light filters through jute blinds onto rows of tanpuras, tablas, and gleaming brass saxophones. Five faculty cabins ring the studios, each crammed with decades of RISM notations and digitized archives on iMacs; the academy still insists on a hand-written panchama notebook for every beginner, claiming the circular motion of ink sharpens spacing between swaras. Upstairs, a 45-seat ranga-shala—the “Ga Ma Hall”—is fitted with tiered teak benches facing a miniature proscenium where Sunday baithaks and student juries are held. Overhead, a skylight diffuses sound evenly so a mridangam stroke or a bowed fifth never overwhelms.
The Academy was founded in 2008 by vocalist-composer R. Vedavalli and Berklee alum guitarist Khan Sab in reaction to what they called “the karaoke-isation of Carnatic scales.” The syllabus therefore braids classical rigor with global fluency: a 7-year graded course combines Patantara memorization with jazz ear-training; a teenager learning Kalyani alapana is simultaneously taught how to voice-lead a ii-V-I. Mid-year, students fold into inter-genre ensembles—“Talk Tala,” “Sa-Rock Quartet,” “Bol Bachan Dhrupad”—that perform at Alliance Française and the Egmore Museum Theatre. Scholarships, funded by the Sundaram Finance endowment, send two high-schoolers annually to Rotterdam Conservatory and Swarnabhoomi’s KM Music Conservatory.
Beyond lesson time, Pa Dha Ni Sa functions as an acoustic community library. On Wednesday evenings an open archive room hosts vinyl-spinning circles; Fridays, visiting gurus give lec-dems on lesser-known kritis sourced from Ettayapuram palm-leafs. A small canteen at the back converts into an amphitheatre after sunset; strings of Edison bulbs illuminate peer-led thillanas segueing into bossa-nova riffs while filter coffee floats above teflon tabla heads. Students often linger until the watchman whistles the academy’s ambiguous closing motif—Ni Sa Ga Ma—reminding them that, like music itself, the building never truly shuts down, it merely modulates to a rest.
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- Published: July 30, 2025
