For more than a month now, 220 students from the Mehli Mehta Music Foundation’s (MMMF) The Singing Tree choirs, the Udayachal High School and schools run by the Aseema Charitable Trust and St Stephen’s School in the city have been working on this outcome — building bridges, so to speak, across their diverse backgrounds. Fittingly, Building Bridges is the theme for the foundation’s annual concert this Sunday, where the students will be singing in seven different languages with music as the conduit across cultures and communities. They are being trained by choral director Mariona Fernandez Blanco from Palau de la Música Catalana in Barcelona.

Students of the Mehli Mehta Music Foundation in performance

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"Our association with Barcelona goes back to the year 2010 when maestro Zubin Mehta was honoured by the queen of Spain," says Farahanaaz Dastur, director of the education programme, MMMF, about its founder. "The queen asked him how the musical bond between Spain and India can be strengthened and Mr Mehta replied that there couldn’t be a better way of doing that than having a sustained cultural exchange," she adds, pointing to the fact that the Barcelonian school specialises in teaching choir singing to children.

Of the 220 students performing in the concert that will last for a little over an hour, more than half of them are between the ages of six and 11. "The repertoire is a blend of traditional, classical and modern styles of singing, where you will also see calypso [a Caribbean song about a subject of current interest] and a shade of rap. The songs revolve around mutual respect and understanding," informs Dastur.

Blanco, who has been in Mumbai since mid-July, says she was pleasantly surprised to see that the budding musicians of Mumbai have a knack for Spanish and Catalan accents. "Teaching them compositions in both the languages was fairly easy. We also have songs in English, Hindi, Latin and two African languages," she shares, adding that the students not only know the lyrics well, but
also understand their meaning.

On her fourth visit to the city, Blanco seems impressed by how the music scene of Mumbai is shaping up. She says, "There is a lot of good work happening, which keeps growing every year. I don’t just come here to teach, it’s a beautiful learning experience for me, too."

ON August 26, 7 pm
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