SUR LAYA MUSIC ACADEMY
Plumeria Garden Estate, Omicron III, Greater Noida, Uttar Pradesh 201310, India
Sur Laya Music Academy stands at the intersection of craftsmanship and community, a modest two-storey house in South Delhi converted into a living conservatory where every surface seems to hum. Founded in 2011 by tabla exponent Aditya Roy and vocalist Shireen Pande-Roy, the academy was imagined first as a refuge for serious musicians who also wanted to stay human. Today it hosts roughly two hundred students ranging from ten-year-old mridangam hopefuls to sixty-year-old retirees discovering the joy of khayal.
Classes begin in the morning riyaaz session: no shoes, no phones, only tanpur apps left on low volume. Three rooms on the ground floor are treated with light cedar sound baffles so that the tanpura of the beginner’s kharaj saptak in Room 1 never collides with the fierce double-handed tukdas of the advanced tabla group in Room 3. Upstairs, larger studios fitted with carpeted dias and slate blackboards host bandish workshops where students annotate not only swar but also the emotional archetype they believe belongs to each raga phrase. A fourth room, barely eight-by-ten, is wrapped floor to ceiling in books—Bhatkhande volumes, South Indian notation manuscripts, Japanese scores—and is jokingly called “the headphone”; it is where professors retreat between classes to breathe silence back into themselves.
Curriculum is a relationship more than a list. Diploma courses run over one year and are split into Hindustani vocal, percussion, four non-orchestral strings, and a small but tenacious electronic-music segment. In the tabla major, for example, students master six primary taals before they are allowed to explore their own recursive compositions. A vocal “repertoire night” happens at the end of every quarter; students perform for an invited neighborhood audience of parents and auto-rickshaw drivers, with one required wrong note left in as a reminder of humility.
Technology is used sparingly but decisively. A wall-mounted camera above the main dais streams concerts to the academy’s YouTube channel—417 videos and counting—while MIDI foot pedals allow percussion students to trigger drone loops without bowing to pick up a tanpura. Analog instruments are still king: a 1935 Rudra veena that once belonged to Shireen’s grandmother is taken down each spring for senior recital; its brass frets are polished by the same student who will play it, a satisfying continuity that looks almost ritualistic.
But the emotional spine of Sur Laya lies in equal consultation: no final exam occurs without the learner presenting a five-minute talk on what the raga or taal taught them about their own life. Thus a financial analyst discovers that Malkauns helps him frame risk, while a sixteen-year-old drummer who lost his mother plays Keherva and hears her laugh in the khali. Tuition runs on an honesty-based sliding scale; no one refused entry because of money. Concerts, teaching, late-night tea, all of it under one rooftop shaped like a simple home instead of a factory of degrees.
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- Published: July 29, 2025
