RaagRas Music School
Nirala Greenshire, Greater Noida W Rd, Sector 2, Patwari, Greater Noida, Uttar Pradesh 201306, India
RaagRas Music School sits on the third floor of a quiet sandstone building on the southern edge of the old city’s textile quarter. A narrow staircase, its stone treads scooped out by decades of footfalls, opens into an airy veranda lined with terracotta pots of hardy tulsi plants. Sitar bridges rest on a low wooden bench beside a brass hookah converted into a water dispenser; students are expected to rinse their hands before touching instruments, an act learned as both hygiene and ritual. Inside, the main hall is exactly 11 by 6 meters—dimensions chosen deliberately because they approximate the courtyard of a 19th-century haveli, creating acoustics warm enough for khayal yet crisp for contemporary ensembles. Chalk murals of taanpura strings curve around the ceiling like musical constellations, each star painted at the exact nodal point where the concrete ceiling won’t buzz. Underfoot, hand-knotted Durri rugs muffle anklet bells during late-night practice, allowing neighbors in the adjoining dye-works to sleep.
The principal room houses two tablas carved from 90-year-old neem, their goatskin faces still turned every full-moon night in accordance with the guru’s conviction that the lunar cycle regulates the dal and dayan’s skin tension. A mirrored cabinet stores tanpura, mandolin, khanjira, and a rare Sur Singar rescued from a collapsing palace in Rajasthan. In one glass drawer lie unbound spiral notebooks; every student, even five-year-olds, is required to transcribe bandishes in the obsolete Modi script so that melody, language, and the tactile feel of the syllables become inseparable in memory. A vertical garden climbs the south wall, watered by an improvised copper jal-tarang system: whenever a leaf tips its cup, a descending F-sharp minor chord splashes softly as a silent metronome.
Classes run from 6:30 a.m. to 9 p.m. six days a week. Morning alap sessions are lit by mustard-oil lamps; the flicker forces singers to steady their larynx against the fluctuating light temperature, an old gharana trick for breath control. Evenings shift to fusion labs where coders layer A-C scale ragas over granular synth beds, the wall-mounted microphones feeding data into a custom python client named “RiffRas” that searches Hindustani archives for matching improvisations. Tuition is strictly need-blind; half the current cohort weaves silk hand-looms by day, their nimble fingers already fluent in polyrhythms before they ever touch a tabla.
Three nights a month, the entire veranda becomes a baithak. Woolen carpets are unrolled across the linoleum, electric fans are silenced, and a single coconut-oil diya floats in a brass tray beside the door: its trembling flame is the only accompaniment allowed for the first hour. Starting at 8:17 p.m.—a time calculated so that Venus descends directly above the veranda’s western jaali—students present new compositions, often in raag Rasik-Priya, the school’s micro-raga improvised by the founders in memory of a monsoon court grievance. Visitors sit two feet behind the musician, near enough to feel the sympathetic string vibrations in their sternum. Tea follows: first sip before clapping or words, a rule transplanted from the Jaipur-Atrauli gharana to preserve the resonance in the body.
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- Published: July 28, 2025
