Traditions: Ohio Heritage Fellows; 202; Kanniks Kannikeswaran interview, part 6 of 7

KANNIKS: The tunes that came to the United States in the 1700’s and the 1800’s, uh, you still hear them in the form of old time music and I have many friends that play that. Then you have Appalachian music which essentially is transformation of some of the tunes that came from Europe but it’s a tradition now, it’s honored as tradition now, similarly the spirituals were born in the United States and 400 years ago you didn’t have spirituals. So, tradition is something that is born and over a period of time it’s a respected as being something traditional. Umm, the Indian musical traditions by themselves are very old, umm, umm, of course, they have undergone modification over time but what we are doing here in terms of Indian choral music is, uh, something that’s new here, it’s bound to interact with, uh, uh, other choral traditions here and evolve into a genre by itself and just to give you an example, one of the works that I wrote in the domain of Indian Raga based choral music was actually performed by a Canadian choir recently.