Sitars and Symphonies: LA Composer Reena Esmail Fuses Indian Ragas with Western Rhythms

This story is part of The California Report Magazine’s series about California composers. You can hear Esmail’s compositions and learn more about her work by listening to the audio story above, or by subscribing to The California Report Magazine podcast.

Reena Esmail’s childhood in Los Angeles had two soundtracks: the Western classical music her parents loved, and the old, scratchy Bollywood tapes her paternal grandparents would play over and over.

Western classical music was Esmail’s first love, inherited from her mom’s side. That branch of the family — Catholics from Goa, a part of India once colonized by Portugal — eventually relocated to Kenya.

“It would be some really hot night in Mombasa. And my grandfather would turn off all the lights and put on a record of a Beethoven symphony,” Esmail recalled. “He would just sit in the dark and listen as if it was a religious experience.”

Meanwhile, her dad’s parents, who lived with her in L.A., loved Bollywood soundtracks.

Those multicultural influences shaped what would become the driving question of her work: how do you invite people from different cultures onto the same stage to build a relationship and create music together?

“It starts the dialogue because you’ve both already created beauty together,” she said.

As an elementary school student, Esmail would beg her parents to tag along to classical music concerts. It was too heavy, they told her. She wouldn’t appreciate it.

Esmail’s response? “I will appreciate it. I will figure out how to appreciate it.

“I remember thinking, ‘I need to figure out how this music works,” she added.

Esmail’s talent soon became clear. She began playing piano at age 11.

“I had a practice curfew. My dad would kick me off the piano at 11:00 p.m. every night, [saying] ‘You have to be done. We need to go to sleep.’”

But performing on stage was a different story.

“My arms would shake. My legs would be shaking. Sometimes when you panic, your fingers get sweaty and then your hands are sliding off the keys,” Esmail recalled. “Just an avalanche of disaster.”

“You are terrified every time you have to play in front of people,” she recalls her parents telling her. “Are you sure you want to do this for the rest of your life?”

Her teachers at the L.A. County High School for the Arts encouraged her to consider a different way of making music without having to perform on stage: composing. Her early compositions got her into Juilliard, earned her a Fulbright in India and launched a career that’s earned her countless accolades, including her current stint as artist-in-residence with the L.A. Master Chorale.

Composing is how Esmail has made her mark — by putting Western classical musicians in conversation with Indian artists, building bridges between violinists and sitar players, tabla drummers and Western singers. Her music has been performed by major orchestras and choirs all over the world.

“I just feel like I’m living my dream because as a young child, there were so many times where I couldn’t rectify the cultures that I was living in,” Esmail said. Now, her music is helping others bridge those worlds.

“[Indian American] teenagers… now actually say to me, ‘We had that same feeling. We felt like we couldn’t rectify these cultures. And then we heard your music and it was everything that we are in one piece.’”

One of her most-performed compositions is a piece called Ta Re Ki Ta, originally created with singers from the Urban Voices Project who have currently or recently experienced being unhoused on L.A.’s Skid Row.

“How [do] these people who have so many major life concerns find the time to sing?” Esmail remembers wondering. “Then when you meet them,” Esmail said, “you realize this is how they’re getting through all those things.”

Esmail taught the singers onomatopoeic sounds that imitate the sound of a tabla, kind of like scatting in jazz. Today, choirs around the world can follow Esmail’s instructions to pronounce the syllables using different parts of the mouth and tongue.

One of Esmail’s most ambitious works for the L.A. Master Chorale, called Malhaar, focuses on drought and water in California.

The project is inspired by music Esmail heard while attending Catholic church, listening to requiems, or songs of mourning.

To capture the sense of loss she felt when thinking about drought and climate change, she chose lyrics by William O’Daly — a poet and translator — who also worked for the state’s Department of Water Resources as lead author of the recent California Water Plan.

The piece brings together choral singers with a tabla player and a Hindustani singer performing ragas, a traditional melodic framework for improvisation in Indian music.

“Malhaar is a family of ragas that are supposed to beckon rain,” Esmail said. “The lore goes that if it is the driest desert and someone sings the most perfect Malhaar, suddenly water droplets are going to form in the air.”

In fact, on the day of Malhaar’s premiere at the Walt Disney Concert Hall in 2023, L.A. was drenched in a record rainstorm, as the choir sang: “Without you, how will we weep when we need to? How will the earth smell after the last drops of rain?”

“It’s this slow march towards grief that will just flatten you and change you,” Esmail said. “Without water, how can we actually cry tears?”

Esmail lives in Altadena, a community full of grief right now. Luckily, the house she shares with her husband, violinist Vijay Gupta, is still standing after the Eaton Fire.

Esmail kept returning to that line: how will the earth smell after the last drops of rain? Now, she said, she knows. It’s the smell of ash in the air after a fire has torn through a drought-stricken landscape.

These days, Esmail is working on a harp concerto about wildfire. The piece ends with the harpist holding a light in her hand. While fire can easily destroy everything in its path, Esmail said, it can also help find a way forward as it lights the path to whatever comes next.