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NewsvineRaagapella successfully defended its title at the South Asian A Cappella Championships Nov. 18, picking up hardware for the second year in a row and highlighting the growing interest in the blend of Eastern and Western musical traditions.
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The group, which took home the top prize last year as well, competed at Berkeley against five other South Asian a cappella groups from the West Coast. Stanford singers performed three Bollywood hits and one original piece written by Raagapella members.
Senior Vivek Agrawal, music director for the group, attributed the win to the group’s passion for South Asian music.
“Everyone was determined and energized by the idea of competing and being able to show what good South Asian music sounds like,” he said. “The group really loves the music and just enjoys performing it.”
Raagapella was founded by four students in 2002 for a one-night performance. Since then, the group has grown to 13 members — including three non-South Asians — toured the country, sold 1,000 copies of their debut album and performed in Los Angeles with popular Hindi film composer A. R. Rahman.
Raagapella uses a cappella to fuse Western forms and traditional South Asian music.
“You have Hindustani classical, which isn’t really used to harmonies,” Agrawal explained. “And that’s starting to change in recent years, with people starting to experiment with harmonies and chords. But before, that wasn’t really a part of that tradition, so I think that what Raagapella is doing is really new for the genre.”
Junior Sunthar Premakumar, marketing director and business manager for the group, had not even heard of a cappella until he came to the Farm from Sri Lanka.
“The only forms of music that are really associated with South Asia are traditional carnatic music or ragas and Bollywood songs,” he said.
While the group covers many Bollywood songs, it also tries to reinterpret Indian film hits to give them a more Western feel. The members have been working on integrating classical Indian music into Western songs. In addition, while many of the songs are currently sung in Hindi, the official language of India, the group also sings in Tamil, Punjabi and English.
In the future, Agrawal hopes that Raagapella will expand its musical borders even further.
“We don’t come with one model and settle on it,” he said. “We try to push, creating new songs, doing new types of songs. If we want to do an R&B song, then we find a way to put an interesting twist on it. If we want to do a choral song, we can do that. Raagapella is a melting pot of genres.”