Amjad Ali Khan

(Hindi: अमजद अली ख़ान; IAST: Amjad Alī Khān) (born 9 October 1945) is an Indian classical musician who plays the sarod. Khan was born into a musical family and has performed internationally since the 1960s. He was awarded India's second highest civilian honor, the Padma Vibhushan, in 2001.

Early life and career

Khan was born in Gwalior on 9 October 1945 as Masoom Ali Khan, the youngest of six children, to Gwalior court musician Hafiz Ali Khan and Rahat Jahan.His family is part of the Bangash lineage and Khan is in the sixth generation of musicians; his family claims to have invented the sarod.

His personal name was changed by a sadhu to Amjad. Khan received homeschooling and studied music under his father.His family moved frequently and Khan performed on the sarod from a young age.

Khan first performed in the United States in 1963 and continued into the 2000s, with his sons.He has experimented with modifications to his instrument throughout his career.Khan played with the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra and worked as a visiting professor at the University of New Mexico.

 

Recognition

Khan was awarded the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award in 1989, and received the Padma Shri in 1975, the Padma Bhushan in 1991, and the Padma Vibhushan in 2001.He was awarded the Fukuoka Asian Culture Prize in 2004. The U.S. state of Massachusetts proclaimed April 20 as Amjad Ali Khan Day in 1984.Khan was made an honorary citizen of Houston, Texas, and Nashville, Tennessee, in 1997, and of Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 2007. He received the Banga-Vibhushan in 2011.

Family and personal life

Khan cared for his diabetic father until he died in 1972. His family arranged a marriage, which failed, and Khan was married a second time, to Bharatanatyam dancer Subhalakshmi, on September 25, 1976.Subhalakshmi Barua Khan is a native of Assam and has stopped performing. They have two sons, Amaan, and Ayaan, who were taught music by their father.Khan is a Muslim and his wife is a Hindu. Their family home in Gwalior was made into a musical center and they live in New Delhi.

Sarod player Ustad Amjad Ali Khan's latest album 'Moksha' has been nominated for a Grammy in the 'traditional world' category.

While other purists of Indian classical music refrain from experimenting with the age-old forms of raga, Ustad Amjad Ali Khan does not mind innovation in Indian classical music as long as the sanctity of the raga is maintained.



His latest album, Moksha, is replete with such innovations. The album has eight solo pieces that have been put together keeping in mind the sensibilities of music listeners in the west. Ustad's two sons Amaan Ali Bangash and Ayaan Ali Bangash - both sarod players - have also contributed in the album.

'Moksha' was released in Europe in May and in the US in June by Real World Records. It has been received very well in the west so far. And whether it gets a Grammy will be known in February next year when the winners will be declared.

Ustad is presently on a musical tour of the US. He, along with his sons, will perform in Chicago on Oct 16. The concert is already believed to have been sold out.


Other News:

Creativity needs a world of peace, says Ustad Amjad Ali Khan

Creativity can be harnessed only in a peaceful world, sarod maestro Ustad Amjad Ali Khan says, voicing concern over the mounting threats to peace since the 9/11 attacks in the US 10 years ago and the recent retaliatory killing of Osama bin Laden.

Amjad Ali Khan, Jogen Chowdhury honoured

Sarod maestro Ustad Amjad Ali Khan and renowned painter Jogen Chowdhury were Friday conferred with lifetime achievement awards by luxury accessories maker Mont Blanc and Dakshinee, a premier music academy in Kolkata.

Amjad centre on varsity cards

Siliguri, April 8: The UGC today asked North Bengal University to set up a department as well as a centre of fine arts and music in honour of sarod maestro Ustad Amjad Ali Khan.

Varsity honour for sarod maestro

Siliguri, April 5: The North Bengal University will confer the DLitt degree to sarod player Ustad Amjad Ali Khan during the varsity's annual convocation on April 9. Sources in the varsity said the Honoris Causa Committee had proposed the names of the sarod maestro for DLitt and S. Chandrasekharan, the president of the Chemical Research Society

 

Articles Of Note Music Articles And Life Enrichment

Articles Of Note

Whether you admit it or not, music imbeds our daily life, weaving its beauty and emotion through our thoughts, activities and memories.  So if you're interested in music theory, music appreciation, Beethoven, Mozart, or other composers, artists and performers, we hope you'll spend some time with here and learn from these music articles of note for all ages and tastes.

When I first started studying the history of music, I did not realize what I was getting into. I had thought that music history was somewhat of a trivial pursuit. In fact, I only took my history of classical music class because I needed  the credits. I did not realize how completely fascinating music history is. You see, in our culture many of us do not really learn to understand music. For much of the world, music is a language, but for us it is something that we consumed passively.  When I began to learn about the history of Western music, however, it changed all that for me. I have had some experience playing musical instruments, but I have never mastered one enough to really understand what music is all about. This class showed me.

When most of us think about the history of music, we think of the history of rock music. We assume that the history is simple because the music is simple. In fact, neither is the case. The history of music, whether you're talking about classical music, rock music, jazz music, or any other kind, is always complicated. New chord structures are introduced bringing with them new ways of understanding the world. New rhythmic patterns are introduced, bringing with them new ways of understanding time. And music reflects all of it.

Even when the class was over, I could not stop learning about the history of music. It had whetted my appetite, and I wanted more. I got all the music history books that I could find. I even began to research forms of music that had not interested me before in the hopes of enhancing my musical knowledge further. Although I was in school studying toward something very different – a degree in engineering – I had thought about giving it up and going back to get a degree in musicology. That is how much I am fascinated by the subject.

If you have never taken a course in the history of music, you don't know what you are missing out on. The radio will never sound the same to you again. Everything will seem much more rich, much more luminous, and much more important. A new song can reflect a new way of being, and a new way of imagining life in the world. This is what learning about the history of music means to many of us.

 Source: http://www.articlesofnote.com/

Music Quotes

After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.
Aldous Huxley

All good music resembles something. Good music stirs by its mysterious resemblance to the objects and feelings which motivated it.
Jean Cocteau

All music is beautiful.
Billy Strayhorn

Any good music must be an innovation.
Les Baxter

But when you get music and words together, that can be a very powerful thing.
Bryan Ferry

Classical music is the kind we keep thinking will turn into a tune.
Kin Hubbard

Composers shouldn't think too much - it interferes with their plagiarism.
Howard Dietz

Everywhere in the world, music enhances a hall, with one exception: Carnegie Hall enhances the music.
Isaac Stern

For me, singing sad songs often has a way of healing a situation. It gets the hurt out in the open into the light, out of the darkness.
Reba McEntire

He has Van Gogh's ear for music.
Billy Wilder

Hell is full of musical amateurs.
George Bernard Shaw

I asked my daughter when she was 16, What's the buzz on the street with the kids? She's going, to be honest, Dad, most of my friends aren't into Kiss. But they've all been told that it's the greatest show on Earth.
Ace Frehley

I don't care much about music. What I like is sounds.
Dizzy Gillespie

I don't know anything about music. In my line you don't have to.
Elvis Presley

I think music in itself is healing. It's an explosive expression of humanity. It's something we are all touched by. No matter what culture we're from, everyone loves music.
Billy Joel

I wake up in the morning, I do a little stretching exercises, pick up the horn and play.
Herb Alpert

I was born with music inside me. Music was one of my parts. Like my ribs, my kidneys, my liver, my heart. Like my blood. It was a force already within me when I arrived on the scene. It was a necessity for me-like food or water.
Ray Charles

I was growing up listening to Queen. Freddie Mercury threw those incredible melodies into his songs.
Gary Cherone

I've said that playing the blues is like having to be black twice. Stevie Ray Vaughan missed on both counts, but I never noticed.
B. B. King

If a composer could say what he had to say in words he would not bother trying to say it in music.
Gustav Mahler

Quotations about Music 3

If I were to begin life again, I would devote it to music.  It is the only cheap and unpunished rapture upon earth.  Sydney Smith


There is nothing in the world so much like prayer as music is.  ~William P. Merrill


If in the after life there is not music, we will have to import it.  ~Doménico Cieri Estrada


Men profess to be lovers of music, but for the most part they give no evidence in their opinions and lives that they have heard it.  ~Henry David Thoreau


Music is the mediator between the spiritual and the sensual life.  ~Ludwig van Beethoven

Quotations about Music 2

Were it not for music, we might in these days say, the Beautiful is dead.  ~Benjamin Disraeli


Music is what feelings sound like.  ~Author Unknown


There's music in the sighing of a reed;
There's music in the gushing of a rill;
There's music in all things, if men had ears:
Their earth is but an echo of the spheres.
~Lord Byron


Musical compositions, it should be remembered, do not inhabit certain countries, certain museums, like paintings and statues.  The Mozart Quintet is not shut up in Salzburg:  I have it in my pocket.  ~Henri Rabaud


Music is the poetry of the air.  ~Richter

Quotations about Music 1

If a composer could say what he had to say in words he would not bother trying to say it in music.  ~Gustav Mahler


Why waste money on psychotherapy when you can listen to the B Minor Mass?  ~Michael Torke


And the night shall be filled with music,
And the cares that infest the day
Shall fold their tents like the Arabs
And as silently steal away.
~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Day Is Done


He who sings scares away his woes.  ~Cervantes


Music was my refuge.  I could crawl into the space between the notes and curl my back to loneliness.  ~Maya Angelou, Gather Together in My Name

Quotations about Music

A painter paints pictures on canvas.  But musicians paint their pictures on silence.  ~Leopold Stokowski


Music washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.  ~Berthold Auerbach


All deep things are song.  It seems somehow the very central essence of us, song; as if all the rest were but wrappages and hulls!  ~Thomas Carlyle


If the King loves music, it is well with the land.  ~Mencius


Without music life would be a mistake.  ~Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche


Take a music bath once or twice a week for a few seasons.  You will find it is to the soul what a water bath is to the body.  ~Oliver Wendell Holmes

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