TUNED IN

Zane Dalal is determined to engender a love for music and turn out India’s next generation of world-class instrumentalists

Anjana Vaswani

Excited as he is about his repertoire and the proficiency of the orchestra, Dalal is just as charged about the active outreach programme he is engaged in with NCPA through which he hopes “to take this music out of its confines and put it where no one has seen it before.” That could mean a performance in schools or in the fields of Rajasthan. 
Talking about the Suzuki method (conceived by Japanese violinist Shin’ichi Suzuki, it focuses on creating the right environment in which to learn music), Dalal says the programme initiated in 2011 by Kazakh virtuoso violinist Marat Bisengaliev, “has morphed into a system that’s unique to India.” Elaborating, he says, the physiognomy of an Indian child is different from a Japanese kid’s. “An Indian kid’s fingers and hands are thinner, generally. The pressure they can bring to bear on the string pushing down (he plucks at the strings of an invisible violin), requires them to start around six years and not at two-and-a-half.”

The objective of this endeavour is to put a musical instrument in the hands of a child at an early age so as to instil appreciation for music, while promoting the functions that come from playing a musical instrument, i.e., “hand-eye coordination, development of the left brain, the process by which you come to your emotion, gain confidence and learn how to interact with others, the ability to lose yourself in another place…these things are value-added points which stay with you for the rest of your life, whether or not you continue as a musician. So the gift to the children is crucial.”

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