Reena Esmail, globalized.
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Who I Am & Where I Live
- Name: Reena Esmail
- City: Los Angeles, California
- Country: United States
- Hometown: Chicago, Illinois
My Life & Work
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Bio:
Esmail is the Los Angeles Master Chorale’s 2020-2023 Swan Family Artist in Residence, and Seattle Symphony’s 2020-21 Composer-in-Residence. Previously, she was named a 2019 United States Artist Fellow in Music, and the 2019 Grand Prize Winner of the S & R Foundation’s Washington Award. Esmail was also a 2017-18 Kennedy Center Citizen Artist Fellow. She was the 2012 Walter Hinrichsen Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (and subsequent publication of a work by C.F. Peters)
Esmail holds degrees in composition from The Juilliard School (BM’05) and the Yale School of Music (MM’11, MMA’14, DMA’18). Her primary teachers have included Susan Botti, Aaron Jay Kernis, Christopher Theofanidis and Martin Bresnick, Christopher Rouse and Samuel Adler. She received a Fulbright-Nehru grant to study Hindustani music in India. Her Hindustani music teachers include Srimati Lakshmi Shankar and Gaurav Mazundar, and she currently studies and collaborates with Saili Oak. Her doctoral thesis, entitled Finding Common Ground: Uniting Practices in Hindustani and Western Art Musicians explores the methods and challenges of the collaborative process between Hindustani musicians and Western composers.
Esmail was Composer-in-Residence for Street Symphony (2016-18) and is currently an Artistic Director of Shastra, a non-profit organization that promotes cross-cultural music connecting music traditions of India and the West.
She currently resides in Los Angeles, California.
My Media
- ▶ Instagram: reenaesmailcomposer
- ▶ Website: http://www.reenaesmail.com
- ▶ Charts/Scores: http://www.reenaesmail.com/shop/
- ▶ Articles: http://www.reenaesmail.com/media/
Click to Listen on Spotify
- ▶ (Album/Podcast 1): http://open.spotify.com/album/1202nELCWQHH5ybeos9VD6
Contact Information
- Contact by Webpage: http://www.reenaesmail.com/contact/
More
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Quotes, Notes & Etc.
“She is so at home in the different styles. I’m more excited about Reena and her compositional voice than just about anybody that I’ve worked with in recent years. She’s obviously fiercely brilliant and a gifted musician, but what makes her music special is the fact that she’s able to channel this incredible empathy and complex understanding of the human experience into music that’s crystal clear, beautiful, thought-provoking and unlike anything I’ve ever heard before.”
-Grant Gershon, as told to Catherine Womack, Los Angeles Times
“Reena Esmail’s This love between us ‘Prayers for unity’ is the most substantial work. Reflecting her Indian-American heritage, the seven movements each set a text from one of the religions practised in India, with corresponding variety of musical intent, from mesmerising ululations, via hints of Baroque choruses to driving exuberant exclamations. The only accompanied work, colours are added not only by Juilliard 415, but also the twang of sitar and shimmying tabla rhythms, the naturalness and integrity of Esmail’s music ensuring this is no mere touristic fusion.”
-Christopher Dingle, BBC Music Magazine
“Especially compelling was “The Light Is the Same” by the Indian-American composer Reena Esmail. She took as her inspiration lines of the 13th-century Sufi poet Rumi: “Religions are many/ But God is one/ The lamps may be different/ But the light is the same.” With highly ornamented lines reminiscent of Hindustani singing, Esmail wove textures that seemed like the musical equivalent of translucent silk, rustling in a gentle breeze.”
-Patrick Rucker, The Washington Post
“Reena Esmail conceived a beautiful amalgamation in “My Sister’s Voice” with the Hindustani singer Saili Oak and the always impressive soprano Fitz Gibbon. The work’s marvelous lyricism, its superb string writing and equally perfect balances allowed…lush tones to blend and soar. The audience jumped to its feet, cheering and applauding loudly.”
-Geraldine Freedman, The Daily Gazette
“There weren’t just bits of the “Messiah” but also an engaging new piece by the young Street Symphony composer-in-residence, Reena Esmail, “Take What You Need,” that sounded like Sondheim at his most lyric and without the cynicism.”
-Mark Swed, Los Angeles Times
“Esmail has scored the work for Western instruments, and parts of the work evoke a 1950s-ish orchestral sound, complete with lugubrious cello melodies and brisk, vital ensemble writing. But she also draws on melodic and rhythmic elements of Hindustani music, which she approximates with glissandi, pizzicato, and other techniques. Much of the work’s charm lies in the ease with which she moves between these styles, particularly in the work’s final bars, which are thoroughly Western but for a brief, final raga allusion.”
-Allan Kozinn, San Francisco Classical Voice
“Esmail’s music is often angular, a little like Shostakovich. The soloist plays lyrical melodies over swirling sounds from the orchestra, or interjects its comments between big, jagged, dramatic blocks of sound. Partway into the second and last movement, a staccato theme builds up in the orchestra as the violin darts around it. It then breaks up into fragments that form the basis for most of the rest of the movement. This theme is so catchy that I heard someone whistling it during intermission. When’s the last time that happened at a modern music concert?”
-David Bratman, San Mateo Daily Journal
“Reena Esmail’s Hindustani-inspired Clarinet Concerto with the estimable clarinetist Shankar Tucker, was a floral summer night with exotic perfumes coupled with a free-flowing fast movement of scales passed around from soloist to orchestra.”
-Geraldine Freedman, The Daily Gazette
“Grounding the new commissions, Reena Esmail’s arrangement of N. Rajam’s Dadra in Raga Bhairavi, offered a semiclassical Hindustani work with an underwater quality that had Harrington’s violin sounding like the humming of a woman far in the distance.”
-Lou Fancher, San Francisco Classical Voice
“At that point the character changed to become a vivacious dance with complicated rhythms — a South Asian take on John Adams, perhaps — before the work concluded with a return of the opening drone-based rootedness. I would happily hear the piece again.”
-James M. Keller, Santa Fe New Mexican
“More compelling, Reena Esmail’s spookily evocative arrangement of the celebrated Hindustani violinist N. Rajam’s Dadra in Raga Bhairavi created an extraordinary seven minutes. To a background track of an oud playing a sustained drone, Harrington’s solo violin’s dark tone relished the twists and turns of the colorful slow-ish raga theme. Yang accompanied with a reasonable facsimile of the sound of a tabla, playing on the body and strings of her cello. (I’m definitely adding this piece to my iTunes rotation.)”
-Harvey Steiman, Seen and Heard International
“Thankfully, classical music in the 21st century has progressed beyond stolid, middle-aged white guys in tuxes walking out on a stage, performing, then walking off again to restrained applause. “Perhaps,” composer Reena Esmail’s collaboration with filmmaker Heather McCalden, employed the most familiar approach, the bucolic lyricism of Esmail’s music serving as an atmospheric soundtrack to McCalden’s moody seaside meditation.”
-Eric Skelly, Houston Chronicle
“There are moments of agitated, fast gestures that suddenly turn on a dime, transforming into soft and elegant lines. Hard hitting brass chords are followed by moments of guilt cried forth by oboe and clarinet solos. One of the more poignant moments is when all of the women in the orchestra stop playing and, one by one, reenter singing in order of the year they entered the orchestra.”
-Jarrett Goodchild, I Care If You Listen
“Teen Murti heads after another direction, drawing on composer Reena Esmail’s Indian heritage and interest in Hindustani music. Alternating three principal ideas, it’s a score that mixes moments shimmering beauty and potent athleticism with grace and intelligence.”
-Jonathan Blumhofer, The Arts Fuse
“Esmail’s dulcet lines hung song-like over McCalden’s melancholy scenes of cascading waves and grey beaches, infused with life by Segev’s rapt playing.”
-Christian Kriegeskotte, I Care If You Listen
“The use of the western string quartet was a brilliant stroke – traditional Indian instruments can make this music sound so exotic that it can be hard for the uninitiated to absorb. Coming through the familiar lens of violins, viola and cello however, it is clearer to westerners how subtle and sophisticated this music can be.”
-Paul Muller, Sequenza 21
“The haunting mystery of its opening passages evolved into pulsing rhythms from opposing sections of the strings. The exciting composition moved on to take many unexpected twists and turns, somber one moment, and full of surprising tempo changes the next.”
-David Dow Bentley III, The People’s Critic
“Reena Esmail’s “Gul-e-dodi” (Dark Flower; video of another performance of the composition below) from her Anjuman Songs paid stunning tribute to Nadia Anjuman’s illustrious career, cut short when the poet was murdered by her husband in 2005.”
-Lucy Gellman, New Haven Independent
“Sometimes she introduced propulsive, polymetric vamps to accompany the tabla and sitar. In other sections, the Baroque strings provided a transparent wash of ethereal sustained chords as a background for the singers, or for solo moments by the winds.”
-Robert Mealy, Strings Magazine
