Kamala Sankaram

Kamala Sankaram

Indian American Composer, Vocalist, Playwright, Actress & Psychologist

Author: Eric Hung

We tend to hire those that we can think of quickly, and we tend to be able to think of people who are most similar to us more quickly than people who are not. As both a woman and a person of South Asian descent, my worldview and my network are different than many people in the field. Therefore, as a gatekeeper, I see my role as inviting people to the table who may not have had an invitation before.
— Kamala Sankaram on her role as co-Artistic Director of Experiments in Opera

Mother’s aria from Kamala Sankaram on Vimeo.

Composer Kamala Sankaram and librettist Susan Yankowitz’s Thumbprint (2014) is an opera based on the real-life story of Mukhtar Mai, the first Pakistani female gang rape victim to gain some level of justice against her male attackers. At the midpoint of the work, Mukhtar and her mother sing a pivotal duet. Set two days after the savage attack, it takes place right after Mukhtar decided to follow custom and to commit suicide to restore her family’s honor. This led her to open her door to ask her mother to buy acid. Upon entering the room, her mother solemnly intones over a drone that she cannot let her daughter die. She adds, “I heard your first cry / How can you ask me to hear your last?” To word-paint her pain, she uses a downward chain of descending two-note motives that have denoted tears and sighs in European music since the 17th century (starting at 0:23). Notably, Mukhtar had used this motive extensively in an earlier aria, when she described the effect that the rape had on her.

As the duet proceeds, the mother tries to convince her daughter to change her mind. Reminding Mukhtar of the meaning of her name—powerful and self-respecting—she transforms the descending two-note motive. Instead of placing the motive in a continually downward chain, the Mother introduces a melodic line in which the chain ascends. This melodic turn, along with the sudden appearance of an ostinato of two optimistic-sounding chords on the piano (starting at 2:21)—injects a sense of optimism that has been missing since the first appearance of the Mastoi, the perpetrators of the rape. After some consideration, Mukhtar begins to recognize that she has done no harm, and that the rapists were responsible for the crime. As she makes the decision to continue living, the music turns into a bouncy, quasi-post-minimalist romp (starting at 4:52). The tempo increases, the raga-influenced melodies have wider ranges, and the textures are fuller. Most importantly, Mukhtar’s vocal lines are utterly transformed. In the first half of the opera, she sings almost exclusively in the middle range. In many sections, it is impossible to separate the vocal lines of the different women characters. They seem to be embroidering each other’s lines, demonstrating the expectation that they work to better the group, and not as individuals. As Mukhtar makes this pivotal decision, she breaks out of this middle range, and discovers her high notes. In an interview with Suzanne Cusick, Sankaram says, “The trajectory of the piece is that Mukhtar at the beginning is very contained, in the middle voice, and it’s as she decides not to kill herself and take her attackers to court that…the coloratura appears. …I was trying to think of it as a metaphor for finding one’s voice” (Cusick 2018, 245-246).

I begin with this example because it exemplifies three key aspects of Sankaram’s music. The first is her hybrid compositional style that juxtaposes and fuses elements of Indian classical music, Bollywood, minimalism, rock, the soundtracks of film noire, EDM, and many other styles. The second is her strong interest in writing music that focuses on women who are discovering themselves in the midst of difficult situations. She has complained that rape in opera and film is “often the culminating point of the story, rather than the impetus for the rest of the story” (Cusick 2018, 245). In Thumbprint and several other works, she is primarily interested in the decisions that women make after these traumatic events. Third, Sankaram asserts that composers should engage with contemporary social issues. She believes that music—particularly music theatrical works—“has the potential to open up perspective, empathy,” and to bring out important parallels (Cusick 2018, 248).  With regards to Thumbprint, she said:

That was something that was really important to me, that if people from that part of the world came to the show that they would not feel that I was wagging a finger at them or that Susan and I were saying, “Oh, this is a problem only among illiterate Muslims.” If you look at America, we’re not that different. Colleges don’t tend to go after football stars who have been accused of rape until after they have graduated and are no longer useful. So you have all of these girls who are doing everything they’re supposed to do: they do the rape kit, they go to the police. And still, nothing happens. So it’s not that we’re so different from India and Pakistan; we have our own culture that needs to have the silence broken around it. (Oteri 2014, paragraph 5)

Born in Orange County, California in 1978, Sankaram is the daughter of an Indian father (from Andhra Pradesh) and a white American mother. After her parents divorced when she was 7, Sankaram and her mother moved to Ramona, a small city about 40 miles northeast of San Diego. She learned a wide variety of musical styles as a youth. She took piano lessons from the age of six to the age of 12, and her mother loves instrumental Western classical music. Meanwhile, her father “pretty much only listens to Indian classical music and Bollywood.” As she became a teenager, she became increasingly interested in singing, theater, and especially musical theater. In an interview for Anthony Braxton’s Tri-Centric Orchestra, she said, “I stopped playing piano when I was 12 because I saw the high school show choir!  Mind you, this was in the early ‘90s and I lived in a very small town, so the show choir seemed very glamorous.  They got to wear spangly, sequined outfits and tons of makeup.  I joined, started singing and that was it” (TCO Profile 2012, paragraph 2). In addition to the show choir, Sankaram co-founded a drama club, and was in play production classes and several community theater productions during high school. She particularly recalls a show she was in called Choice, and said, “I would do these big dance and song numbers and that’s what got me even more interested in it. I wanted to be on Broadway!” (Chadha 2014, paragraph 3) In crediting these early experiences for helping her launch her career, Sankaram stated, “All of these experiences directly led to the career that I have now. They provided a welcoming environment for me to explore my singing and a forum for my fledgling efforts at composition” (King 2012, 17).

Despite spending so much time on music and theater as a youth, Sankaram did not really consider a musical career. She says that, although many people on her mother’s side of the family played instruments, the only music profession they really knew about was teaching. She added, “When I was a kid, I actually thought I was going to be a scientist…I did the Science Olympics and, when I was in Middle School, my team won first place! I wrote an essay that won me a contest to spend the night in the Science Center in Balboa Park!” (Meet the Composer 2019) Although she was a straight-A student in high school, she says that she did not really learn critical thinking or the ability to think across disciplines until she attended Sarah Lawrence College, where she majored in music and psychology and began her training in classical voice.

After she finished her bachelor’s degree, Sankaram’s father—who had wanted her to follow his footsteps and become a physician, or at least a lawyer or engineer—said that he would foot the bill for graduate school as long as she did not study music. As a result, she enrolled in the Ph.D. program in cognitive psychology at the New School of Social Research. Her 2013 dissertation, “Information Processing on Political Blogs by Readers, Lurkers, and Posters,” examines a topic that many people consider extremely important today. In it, she concludes, “Reading on the Internet may also have the potential to create a more positive effect on reading in the form of deeper information processing. In particular, reading may be enhanced by the presence of some form of interactive, two-way communication, such as a comments section” (Sankaram 2013, 56). The project might also have been just a bit ahead of its time, but it indirectly helped Sankaram to launch her musical career.  She said, “I couldn’t get any grant money to research on Twitter, but people started asking me to write more music” (Midgette 2019, paragraph 10). Ultimately, this psychological research has heavily influenced several of her musical projects—most notably Looking at You, an opera about privacy in the digital age that we will examine below.

Bibliography