STL, This music is for you

The only qualification is curiosity.

Last year, after Ramana Balachandran's veena concert, someone stopped me and said they had never heard the veena or the mridangam before. They had been, in their own words, completely transported — and found it all unexpectedly eye- and ear-opening. It is a phrase that has stayed with me, because it captures something I believe deeply: that this art does not require preparation to move you. It only requires presence.

I think about that evening often when I consider what it means to present South Asian performing arts in St. Louis. There is a version of this work that exists behind glass — reverent, inaccessible, implicitly addressed to those who already know. Even as someone within the field, I've found myself on the outside looking in more often than I should admit. That is not what Janya is building, and it is not what a concert like Ganesh & Kumaresh at The Sheldon on May 17 is asking of you.

I am aware of the hesitation. I have heard it many times — the worry about walking into a room where everyone else seems to know something you don't, about not knowing how to respond or what to say to the person next to you afterwards. That worry is understandable, but it is not necessary. The tradition of Carnatic music -- or any South Asian performance art for that matter -- has always been built around the connection between the artist and the "rasika" — the engaged, curious audience member. Not the credentialed one. Not the initiated one. The one who shows up and pays attention. That is the only qualification this music (or other art) has ever asked for, and it is one you already possess.

What a Carnatic violin concert does to a room is difficult to describe, for fear of over explanation or simplification. Succinctly, there is both composition & improvisation happening in real time — here, the musicians will exist in conversation with each other, with the music, with the audience. The architecture of the music reveals itself gradually, and the experience of that revelation — of beginning to hear something you couldn't quite hear twenty minutes earlier — is one of the more quietly extraordinary things live performance can offer. This troupe have spent decades refining their ability to bring audiences into that experience. They understand their listeners as acutely as they understand the form. That dual attentiveness is rare, and it will be palpable in the room.

Through Janya, I work to hold the room in a particular way. For example, last year's veena concert included a Q&A that one audience member described as thoughtful, clear, and humble — not because the artists were performing accessibility, but because genuine curiosity was welcomed and space was made for it. Questions came in before the concert, during, and afterwards — and were answered personally every time. That is not incidental to what Janya does. It is the point. The event is one part of the evening. The conversation around it is the other.

St. Louis has something that larger cities often lose — the capacity to slow down, to genuinely engage, to form real connections around shared experience. This city has been overlooked by many who see it as a "flyover" instead of for what it truly is -- an incredibly passionate hub for the arts. A concert like this is an opportunity to show up for that identity — not as a gesture, but as a genuine act of participation in something that matters.

You do not need to know what a raga is before you walk in. You do not need to have heard Carnatic music before. You do not need to arrive with anything other than an open ear and a willingness to be surprised. If last year's audience is any indication, surprised is exactly what you will be -- regardless of if this is your first or 100th concert.

Come. We can't wait to see you there.