KANNIKS KANNIKESWARAN

Community Choir

New: Upcoming concert -- The Sound of Seasons

 The Greater Cincinnati Indian Community Choir is a unique venture exploring polyphonic avenues in rAga based music. It has also been a very successful attempt in building community around music.

The first choral experiments were with Basant, a musical theater production that was performed in 1994. The next major choral performance of rAga based music was 'Chants for Peace' in the year 2000.

What started off as a committed group of people meeting to enhance their choral repertoire, grew into a group of about 85 singers of Indian origin, who shared choral singing with two other community choruses in what was the highly acclaimed multi-media musical Shanti - A journey of peace.

Shanti is ready to be performed yet again at the Aronoff Center for Performing Arts, Cincinnati in March 2006.

In the meanwhile, Kanniks is working with yet another group of singers in Allentown Pennsylvania where another Indian community choir is in the making and is getting ready to perform Shanti in the year 2006.

The choral sessions allow participants to get exposed to various rAgas that form the basis of Indian classical music. The simplicity of the parts make it a pleasurable learning experience and over a period of time, the choir acquires the ability to handle complex musical scales and themes.