McKnight Fellowship for Composers (2021-22)

The McKnight Artist Fellowships Program, created to increase the exploratory opportunity, economic stability, and productive capacity of artists, provides $25,000 in unrestricted support for mid-career artists and discipline-specific artistic and professional development opportunities.

“For the McKnight artist showcase, one of the songs I presented is a poem written by a Delhi-based poet and my friend Nadim Asrar. The meter and rhyme scheme of this poem follows the structure of a Nazm (couplets in Urdu poetry written in rhymed verse, often dealing with loss and romantic love, and where each couplet is structurally / thematically linked to the other, unlike in a Ghazal). In composing it in an R&B articulation, I have retained the longingness, loss and melancholy central to the presentation of a Nazm.”

Voice | Composition: Ritika Ganguly
Poem: Nadim Asrar
Guitar: Shinjan Sengupta