Explore the Festival
Salastina
Voted "Best Chamber Ensemble" in San Francisco Classical Voice's 2022 Audience Choice Awards, Salastina is a 6-member chamber ensemble and nonprofit presenting organization. By day, Salastina musicians record the soundtracks to your favorite films. By night, they're on a mission to redefine what classical music was, is, and can be.
*Programming and artists subject to change, please refer to the participating organization’s calendar listing for the most up-to-date program.
Events
Salastina x Leela Dance Collective: Encounters with Beauty
Salastina’s contribution to the statewide California Festival of contemporary classical music is in partnership with Leela Dance Collective, a Hindustani Kathak dance company. Encounters With Beauty is a world-premiere piece of choreography set to music by LA-based composer Derrick Skye and Dr. Ashwini Bhide Deshpande, a renowned Hindustani classical vocalist. Together, Leela Dance and Salastina weave musical traditions from around the world into multi-layered, distinctive, synergistic, cross-cultural expression unlike anything you've seen before. Wine reception, replete with Indian munchies, to follow.
Piece(s)/Composer(s)
AMERICAN MIRROR
Derrick SKYE
MULTIPLE ORIGINAL HINDUSTANI VOCAL WORKS BY DR. ASHWINI BHIDE DESHPANDE ARRANGED BY REENA ESMAIL, AKSHAYA TUCKER, AND MORE, 2019
Program Notes
How can classical music tell the beautiful, complex story of today’s America?
Composer Derrick Skye wrote American Mirror for String Quartet as a response to the 2016 presidential election. Through music, Derrick proposes that diverse musical cultures can become ever more mutually amplifying through collaboration. American Mirror is a musical metaphor for how disparate segments of American society, through its global roots, can be truly harmonious. In Derrick’s words: “Today, America continues to be at crossroads with racial discrimination, as it was in 2016 and before. American Mirror is still a sonic representation of what a community could be, the way a community could interact with itself, celebrating and valuing the uniqueness of its differences while cultivating its shared ideals.”
Composed and championed in that spirit, American Mirror is all the more relevant and uplifting today, as America struggles with questions of identity.
Dr. Ashwini Bhide Deshpande's original compositions include:
Ajapa jaap
Lagan bina
Mhari surata
Pata rakho
Magan rehna
Daaro waari
Kaha rahyo
All works were arranged for strings by Shane Scott Cook, Kara Ford, Anton Ariki Sten, and Akshaya Tucker. These individuals are all alumni of Saili Oak’s non-profit, Shastra, which is dedicated to creating meaningful, cross-cultural music that connects the great musical traditions of India with those of the West.
Leela Dance, a Kathak dance troupe, created a world-premiere piece of choreography around these musical works.
The beauty of this process for Salastina? Though the musicians have performed each musical work many times before, the addition of Leela's choreography makes the music feel as though it was always meant to be performed alongside the dance they've created.