Draft:Anantha R. Krishnan

Anantha R. Krishnan
Anantha R. Krishnan performing on the mridangam Anantha R. Krishnan
Background information
Born	(1983-04-27) 27 April 1983 Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India
Genres	Carnatic, world music
Years active	1991–present

Anantha R. Krishnan is a Carnatic mridangam artist, composer and educator.

Early life and training

Anantha started his musical journey on the mridangam, the principle drum of the Carnatic tradition. The grandson and disciple of the great mridangam maestro, Shri. Palghat R. Raghu, he first learned the fundamentals of the mridangam under his uncle, Shri. R. Ramkumar and then began an official tutelage under his grandfather at the age of five. He performed his first concert at the age of seven and before the age of twenty performed alongside a rare generation of Indian classical musicians like, Dr. M. Balamuralikrishna, Pandit Hariprasad Chaurasia, Prof. T.N. Krishnan, Dr. K. J. Yesudas, Mandolin Srinivas, among many others. During this period, he received numerous awards from traditional organizations of classical music in India. He was awarded the State of the Arts Award from the New Jersey government twice in 1997 and ­1998 as part of the National Endowment of the Arts' effort to promote cultural awareness in the U.S.A. He is also a special interest student of tabla under Ustad Zakir Hussain (musician).

Performance career

In 1999, he was invited to perform for the Millennium celebrations in Berlin, Germany at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt and at the EXPO 2000 in Hanover. In fall of 2006, at the invitation of Fred Frith, the British experimental guitarist he performed with Clearing Customs for the seminal New Jazz Meeting for SWR 2, a national radio station in Baden Baden. In October of 2007, he was invited by Rudresh Mahanthappa to perform with the group, Samdhi, at the Festival of the Firsts in Pittsburgh, PA . In July of 2011, he performed in a Carte Blanche Artist Series at the North Sea Jazz Festival in Rotterdam with the same group and was the first mridangam artist to appear in Carnegie Hall’s ​Shape of Jazz​ series in NYC, all with the group Samdhi.

In November 2014, he was invited to perform at the opening ceremony music for International Film Festival (IFFI)l in Goa and the closing ceremony of the National Games 2015 in Trivandrum with the actor danseuse Padma bhushan Shobana.

From 2016, he was invited by Ustad Zakir Hussain (musician) to perform with Masters of Percussion (MOP) through the United States and Europe . In 2018, MOP ensemble performed in Kathmandu to commemorate seventy year India- Nepal diplomatic relations. In May of 2018, Anantha performed with Kammerensemble Neue Musik Berlin for the prestigious Berliner Festspiele, MaerzMusik edition for the premiere of Memory Space by Alvin Lucier.

In Janurary of 2020, Anantha, along with music producer Viveick Ragagopalan started Mridangamela, a festival property centered around the theme of mridangam which premiered at the Royal Opera House (mumbai)

Anantha has also performed as part of Two Summ, a band with Viveick Rajagopalan at the Mahindra Percussion Festival in 2024.

                                                                                                                                                                                                              ==Education==

Anantha holds a B.A. in Western Music and Philosophy from Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, and a Masters of Fine Arts in Electronic Music and Percussion from Mills College, California. He appears on Intakt Records, Echo Music and ACT Records. He currently​ serves as faculty of percussion at A.R. Rahman's KM Music Conservatory in Chennai, India.

Discography

• https://open.spotify.com/album/4Qk0C9dagWitDCmJvBEMPe
• https://open.spotify.com/album/72izvMvtL1cE4aaf7r1ccy
• https://open.spotify.com/album/0SoqH61JfAhm42jnGVrrXF

Awards

• Ustad Bismillah khan yuva puraskar 2021 from the Sangeet Natak Akademi, Delhi.

External links

• https://www.misterdangam.com/
• https://www.instagram.com/misterdangam