Ragas Live Festival

We are excited to announce the 12th annual Ragas Live Festival, 24 continuous hours of transcendent, spiritual music at Pioneer Works - an experience like no other.  

Premieres include: Amir ElSaffar “In E half-flat,” a Terry Riley sanctioned composition for 18 raga and maqam musicians, a new trio from Vicky Chow, David Cossin & Mark Stewart of Bang on a Can (playing works by Brian Eno and others) and a sarangi and santoor jugulbandi (duo) from maestros Kunal Gunjal & Suhail Yusuf Khan. 

Major Carnatic ensembles traveling from India include the Akkarai Sisters and Ramakrishna Murthy, and the legendary disciple of Ravi Shankar, Gaurav Mazumdar will fly in as well. Our BRM home team will add to the celebration with Jay Gandhi, Abhik Mukherjee & Samarth Nagakar; Quadrature, Celebrating John McLaughlin and Trina Basu and Arun Ramamurthy.Check out the full schedule and reserve your tickets today!

Since 2011 the Ragas Live Festival has expanded the audience and presentation of raga, South Asia’s epic, classical music form. Inspired by the time specific nature of raga, where certain modes are only invoked to match the mood of specific times of day, Ragas Live first broke new ground in 2011 when a community of 50 musicians collaborated for a 24 hour radio broadcast on WKCR 89.9 FM-NY, the first of its kind, even in India.

Four years later, the festival graduated from the radio studio and was broadcast remotely in front of an enthusiastic audience at Pioneer Works. In 2020 the festival again broke new ground during the height of the pandemic lockdowns, when it broadcast a 24 video livestream from 15 cities and 9 countries. This iteration of the festival featured 90 musicians, including many legends of music such as Toumani Daibate (from Côte D’Ivoire), Zakir Hussain (from SF Jazz), Betsayda Machado (from Venezuela), and the legendary composer Terry Riley from Japan.

This year’s Ragas Live Festival will once again expand the boundaries of raga presentation with an immersive, experiential performance of Brooklyn Raga Massive’s large ensemble work, In D, in collaboration with the subject of their homage, Terry Riley, who will perform virtually with ensemble.

Under the Artistic Direction of Adrien Tillman—whose vision was key to Ragas Live Festival 2020’s triumph—and featuring animations by Jesse Johanning, the audience will be surrounded by projection mapping and quadraphonic sound while the piece, a combination of Riley’s compositional approach and classical raga, is performed live by a large ensemble.  

The evening will begin with a traditional classical set by the young maestros, Jay Gandhi and Abhik Mukherjee, and will close with the spiritual ecstatic trance music of Innov Gnawa.

This live event will be the finale of a 24 hour, 24 set broadcast featuring performances by an international community of musicians. The radio broadcast on WKCR-FM will begin at the stroke of midnight on November 19th and will conclude with live performances at Pioneer Works.

The celebration of the festival’s 10th anniversary will continue the next day! Beginning at 7pm on November 20th, the 24-hour livestream of last year’s Ragas Live Festival 2020, which featured 90 musicians from 15 cities, will be re-broadcast in full online.

Presented by Pioneer Works, Brooklyn Raga Massive, and NYC Radio Live.

Ragas Live Festival is supported by the Brooklyn Arts Council. Brooklyn Arts Fund (DCLA) is sponsored, in part, by the Greater New York Arts Development Fund of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, administered by Brooklyn Arts Council (BAC). The Ragas Live broadcast is produced with the support of Society for Arts and Culture of South Asia.

Ragas Live Festival is also made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.

Ragas Live Festival is an epic 24-hour, 24-set celebration of what The New York Times calls “the Raga Renaissance, flowering in Brooklyn.” Now in its ninth year, the immersive experience has expanded to include 70 artists from 13 cities, including the major torchbearers and creators of new genres such as Terry Riley, Toumani Diabate, Zakir Hussain, and Betsayda Machado.

The event is rooted in Indian Classical Music and its unique time cycle in which specific musical modes are performed at specific times of day. Listeners and viewers will journey from Japan to Nepal to Madagascar as the musical offerings flow between traditional presentations and cross-cultural, genre-blurring collaborations.

Born in 2012 when 50 musicians volunteered to create an FM-Broadcast with the theme of “Community, Unity, and Harmony,” the festival graduated to become a popular live event at Pioneer Works. For the first time, Ragas Live Festival will be live-streamed and broadcast from and around the world, a musical collaboration at an unprecedented scale, and a testament to the transcendent power of music.

During the penultimate set of the festival Brooklyn Raga Massive will perform a raga based homage to Terry Riley called In “D.” An original composition, performed by 24 musicians, this, like last year’s Ragmala, will be released as an album concurrently with the Ragas Live Festival.

Presented by Pioneer Works, Brooklyn Raga Massive, NYC Radio Live and the Rubin Museum of Art.

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