Based on conversations with Steve & Mrityunjay, this booklet reveals how Sunil created his music—its voices, instruments, methods, struggles, & unique sound.
Sunil Bhattacharya (1920–1998) was "The Mother's musician" at Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry — a composer who spent five decades translating the Mother’s musical inspiration into an entirely new sound. Beginning with Indian classical sitar and moving through reed organs, electric organs, and ultimately synthesisers, he created the New Year music from 1967-1998, and the background music for The Mother's reading of Sri Aurobindo’s epic poem Savitri, amongst other compositions.
This booklet gathers, from two extended conversations, the intimate behind-the-scenes account of how that music was actually made: the instruments, the singers, the recording methods, the creative blocks, and the singular technique through which Sunil — a man trained as a sitar player who could no longer play the sitar — invented a sound the world had not yet heard.
The two interlocutors are Steve, a close technical collaborator who worked alongside Sunil from 1972 until the composer’s death, and Mrityunjay Sathyanarayanan, a composer and researcher who grew up in the Ashram school and later studied at the Boston Conservatory. Their voices complement each other: Steve speaks from the workshop; Mrityunjay from the listener’s inner ear.
Quotations are drawn verbatim from Steve's interview & Mrityunjay's interview. Background context is supplied from Clifford Gibson’s biography Sunil: The Mother’s Musician.
“The insane relish of work is gone, the allegretto agitato of strings have died down — but deep within me there is a still pool which sends back the image of a light that is burning somewhere.”
— Sunil Bhattacharya, in a letter to a friend
Every morning, at around eight-thirty or nine, Sunil would climb the stairs to his composing room and lock the door. He spent roughly two hours there before coming down. No one witnessed these sessions; the privacy was absolute and inviolable.
“We never actually saw him composing, because the doors were always locked. Every day, around eight-thirty or nine in the morning, he would go upstairs and spend roughly two hours composing.”
— Steve
One door, however, was kept unlocked — a precaution that arose from a near-crisis during the 1966 New Year compositions, when the force passing through Sunil was so overwhelming he nearly fainted. The Mother’s response, in correspondence, was characteristic:
“Perhaps I put too much into it.”
— The Mother, in a letter to Sunil
After that, Sunil’s sister-in-law Chobi insisted the connecting door to the adjacent room was never to be bolted again.
Sunil kept composing notebooks, written in a personal notation system that mixed Bengali script with mathematical symbols. These were not standard music notation; they were a private language he developed to hold his musical ideas between the morning sessions and the recording room.
“It turns out the balance between improvised and composed is something Sunil Da threaded so deftly that it is genuinely hard to say which it was. He spent a great deal of time playing and trying out parts. Inspiration was clearly the guiding force — he received, and then he transmitted. But when you look at his notebooks — and in Sunil Da’s Studio at the Ashram there are boxes upon boxes of notation — you find a very deliberate system he developed himself, using Bengali script, with carefully written melodies, chords, and structural sketches.”
— Mrityunjay Sathyanarayanan
The notebooks travelled with Sunil into the mixing phase. If they were not at hand, he became unsettled. They were not a memory aid to be discarded once the music was committed to tape; they were a continuous working document.
“Steve told me that Sunil Da would sit with those notebooks during the mixing phase — and if he did not have them to hand, he was unsettled. So the notation was taken seriously; it was not merely a memory aid to be discarded. And yet he was also known to change things on the fly, as any Indian classical musician might.”
Whether Sunil’s music was improvised or pre-composed is not a question with a tidy answer. Both things were true at once. Steve’s account of working alongside Kanakda — the slide guitarist who collaborated with Sunil from the early years until the very end — captures this duality precisely:
“His collaborator Kanakda — who played slide guitar and other forms of guitar, and remained with him until the very end — gives a vivid picture of how they worked together. From what I am told, Kanakda would come into the room, Sunil Da would be at the organ, and without a word exchanged, they would simply begin playing. For music connected to something as weighty as the New Year invocations or Savitri, you might expect some kind of spiritual discussion beforehand — but no. They just played, as musicians do. It was both: inspired and received, but also carefully considered.”
The decisive turn in Sunil’s creative life came not from a planned programme but from a chance encounter with the Mother in 1954. He had been composing dance music for Ashram programmes — a task that felt, to him, artistically restricting. Then:
“One day in 1954 he ran into the Mother in the playground, and she asked how the music was going. He said fine, and she replied, ‘Come at four o’clock and show me.’ He assembled his musicians, went to her room, and they played. When it was over, the Mother said nothing immediately. Then one of the girls who used to play the reed organ asked her, ‘Why don’t you play something for Sunil?’ And she did. That is when he had the experience he described — the flood of chords, the opening.”
The Savitri settings — which occupied the last decades of Sunil’s life — were composed to text rather than to sound. Chobi would type out lines from the Mother’s recorded recitation of Savitri and paste them directly into Sunil’s composing notebooks. He wrote his music in the space below the words.
“The words were always physically in front of him while he composed. He did not compose to the sound of the Mother’s recorded voice, but to the words themselves.”
For the Sanskrit shlokas, Sunil worked from Nolini Kanta Gupta’s Bengali translations, which were laid alongside the original Sanskrit. “Some of the material he used,” Steve notes, “was also traditional Bengali — pieces like Jadav that he would have known from childhood.”
“He was working with reed organs and electric organs — instruments that are, by nature, the least expressive things imaginable. A flat, buzzy tone, no envelope, just the one note. And yet he found ways to make them sing.”
Sunil was trained as a sitar player, not a keyboard player. His move to the organ was not a creative choice but a physical necessity: a wrist broken playing football was never set correctly and caused him pain for the rest of his life. Because of this injury, the sitar became inaccessible.
“He never played the piano as such — his training was as a sitar player. He came to the keyboard because he broke his wrist playing football. It was not set properly at the time and pained him for the rest of his life; you would always see him flexing it after the recordings. Because of that injury he could no longer play the sitar, and so he turned to the organ.”
Steve, who documented the studio’s evolution closely, traced three distinct instrumental periods.
The first period centred on the reed organ, which carried through until around 1970. In 1971, a Yamaha electric organ was lent to the Ashram; when the owner wanted it back, André Vioat built a kit organ that served from 1973 to 1977. After that, Clusterman sent a Farfisa organ — the model called the Maharani — from Europe.
“In around 1986 I took the Farfisa completely apart to wire in MIDI, a project that took nearly a month. During that period Sunil had nothing to play, so Patrick set him up on a Yamaha DX7 synthesiser. It was on that instrument that Sunil developed the distinctive sound he used at the close of the next New Year music. After that, the Farfisa became primarily a MIDI controller.”
With each transition, a period of adjustment followed — roughly a year during which traces of the previous instrument could still be heard. Then the new sounds would open up, and the music would change again.
“With each transition between instruments, there was always an adjustment period — roughly a year — during which you could still hear traces of the old instrument in his playing. Then he would begin to explore the new sounds, and the music would open up again.”
Perhaps the single most consequential piece of equipment in Sunil’s history arrived with a man known as Clusterman, around 1971. It was not a sophisticated instrument — merely an amplifier with a built-in mixer and, crucially, a tape-loop echo and reverb unit.
“Something I only fully understood while working on restoring the music is the profound change that occurred between the 1971 and 1972 New Year recordings. Both were made on the same Yamaha electric organ, yet they sound completely different. What I am now fairly sure happened is that this is when Clusterman gave Sunil a crucial piece of equipment.”
The unit gave Sunil something unprecedented: a device he could actually use while composing at home, not just in recording sessions. Around it, he developed an entirely new playing style.
“From that point on — particularly in the single-handed melodies — he would keep one hand on the volume control and use it to shape the envelope of each note. Without that control, with the level of echo he was using, the sound would have blurred into a muddy cascade. By shaping each note manually, he achieved those extraordinarily long, sustained melodic lines that are so characteristic of the 1972 music and everything that followed.”
The effect was transformative: people who heard his music in the late 1970s frequently assumed he was already using a synthesiser. He was not. He was playing a Farfisa organ through a reverb unit, with one hand shaping each note’s envelope by hand.
Synthesisers entered Sunil’s world in the mid-1980s, brought by Patrick, who joined the core studio group around 1984 and remained until the end.
“Patrick joined from around 1984 until the very end, and he brought the first synthesisers. Before that, in roughly 1987, I rewired Sunil’s organ to output MIDI and connected a synthesiser to it, so he could play the synthesiser from his own organ keyboard.”
The shift to synthesisers was gradual. Patrick would audition sounds while Sunil practised in the mornings; Sunil would indicate which he liked.
“In the first year he played just one synthesiser but still mixed in the organ sounds; a couple of years later he stopped using the organ sounds altogether, even though I had rigged things so he could bring them in himself whenever he chose. He never did.”
As equipment improved, Patrick also moved his guitar parts from live performance to a sequencer. Sunil was not immediately comfortable with this. He was an Indian musician and valued the live interaction fundamental to that tradition.
“He told me at the time, ‘I was happier when he was actually playing with me.’ But he grew used to it.”
Long before the synthesisers, Sunil’s experimental instinct expressed itself in more unorthodox ways. Mrityunjay describes learning, as a student, that Sunil was always an experimental composer:
“Even in his early period, the creative mind was already at work. He would open a piano and pluck the strings like a harp. He would record the piano at half speed and play it back at full speed, creating a higher octave and a completely different texture — and the reverse for lower octaves.”
The old upright piano was another site of invention. As Steve recalls:
“It was not a grand piano — it was an old, rather decrepit upright that would no longer hold a tune. They would manage to tune just the keys they needed, but they also experimented with restringing it as a harp. Another experiment was recording at half speed and playing back at normal speed, so everything came out an octave higher.”
Most famously, the kitchen was never off-limits to Sunil’s ear:
“It was well known in the Ashram that he would walk into the kitchen, pick up a pan, and walk out. They would ask what he was doing. He needed it for a piece. He would stand far from the microphone, strike the pan, and let the natural resonance and the reverb he added become part of the composition.”
There was one instrument Sunil never acquired but spoke about with real enthusiasm: the Ondes Martenot, the early French electronic instrument developed in the 1920s, famously used by Messiaen.
“Gambelon gave him a recording of it. It has a keyboard but glides between the notes in a way somewhat like a theremin. Sunil said something to the effect that this was ‘psychic music’ — that it touched something Western music generally did not reach.”
“He liked to compose, he liked to play, but he did not like to record.”
— Steve, on Sunil
For much of Sunil’s career, recording meant a two-track Revox semi-professional machine — essentially a live performance captured in real time. There was no multitrack, no ability to isolate mistakes. If something went wrong, the whole piece had to be started again — on the same tape.
“Before multi-track recording became available in the 1980s, everything was done on a two-track recorder. They would do a take, stop, Sunil Da would practise a passage further, and if something needed to be added, they would superimpose it onto the same recording. This is why the early material has a quality that noticeably deteriorates over the length of the tape — you can actually hear it.”
The tape shortage of the early years added its own pressure. Victor, who served as Sunil’s recording assistant from the mid-1960s, once wrote to the Mother to say he would have to stop recording entirely if tapes could not be found. Her reply: “Don’t worry.” Shortly afterward, Gambelon arrived carrying a stack of tapes.
A recording session began not with a take but with prolonged familiarisation. The process was deliberate, patient, almost ritual.
“He would come in and spend at least the first hour simply playing through the piece, over and over, so that Kanat could learn his part and Clusterman or Patrick could familiarise themselves with the music. Only after everyone felt comfortable would we actually record.”
Sunil disliked multiple takes. He felt that repetition eroded the feeling of a piece. Unless a mistake was obvious, the first take was kept.
“He disliked multiple takes — he felt that if you did too many, you lost the feeling. So unless there was an obvious mistake, the first take was the one he kept.”
And yet there were sessions that transcended technique altogether:
“There were sessions where the room itself seemed to change as he played. There are certain passages I remember simply because of what it was like to be in that room when he was working through them.”
The arrival of multitrack recording changed the emotional atmosphere of the sessions substantially.
“Once we eventually acquired a multitrack recorder, Sunil became far more relaxed. He knew he could go back and add or correct things. He still did not enjoy the act of recording itself — he would often say he liked to compose, he liked to play, but he did not like to record. I think that was a residue of the stress from those early live sessions. In the later years, particularly during mixing, he was genuinely at ease.”
Some of what listeners heard as deliberate artistic choices were, in fact, the behaviour of the medium. Mrityunjay’s account of discovering this is one of the most illuminating passages in the interviews:
“For the longest time I believed the opening of the Savitri Book One, Canto One music — ‘The Hour of God’ — was one of the most futuristic sounds imaginable. That rich, lush bell tone, like the startup sound of an early Macintosh. I thought it was a stroke of genius. Years later, Steve told me it sounds that way because the reverb was overdone and there was natural tape flutter. What I heard as a deliberate composition was actually the behaviour of the medium.”
This did not diminish the music; it illuminated its method. Constraint was simply medium. The creative mind found use in whatever was there.
The pressure of producing a New Year composition every year without fail was not always met smoothly. There were years of silence.
“Yes. There were some years where nothing came and we simply did not record. If you look at the release dates, most years follow in sequence, but there are a few gaps. I remember one year — in the early period — where we did not begin recording until nearly Christmas and had to complete everything between Christmas and New Year.”
“A keyboard player had become a string player.”
The most defining technical achievement in Sunil’s music was one he developed out of necessity rather than design. Working with an organ — an instrument with a flat, undifferentiated tone, no built-in envelope control — and feeding it through a reverb unit with strong feedback, he faced a problem: without intervention, each note would blur into the next, creating muddy cascades rather than sustained, singing lines.
His solution was to place one hand permanently on the volume control and use it to shape each note’s attack, sustain, and decay manually. Mrityunjay describes what this meant technically:
“Sunil Da began manually controlling the volume envelopes by hand. Those expressive swells we hear in his music — almost vocal in quality, like a cello or violin — were not built into the instrument. He was physically extracting them. Around the early 1970s, he acquired an FX unit — a Dynacord, I believe — which had a built-in tape reverb. He would control the feedback knob on that reverb to create sustained sounds from the organ. Steve pointed out that if you listen to the 1971 music and then the 1972 music, the difference is dramatic. Sunil Da had effectively invented a new voice — a sustained, string-like instrument — out of a simple organ tone, using nothing but a feedback knob as a physical controller. Swell it up, close it, swell again. A keyboard player had become a string player.”
This technique continued, unchanged in principle, even after the synthesisers arrived in the mid-1980s. The instrument changed; the physical act of shaping each note by hand did not.
A direct consequence of this technique was a characteristic single-handed melodic style. With one hand reserved for the volume control, the melody was played entirely with the other — a constraint that became, over decades, a defining feature of Sunil’s sound.
“People who heard his music in the late 1970s often assumed he was already playing a synthesiser, precisely because of that technique. But it was always an organ until the mid-1980s. And that manual envelope control continued right up to the end, even with the synthesisers.”
Sunil’s relationship to rhythm evolved over his career from presence to deliberate withdrawal. The early dance compositions for Anuben were rhythmically defined. But at a certain point, he began to feel that rhythmic music was not what he was called to make.
“He has said to those around him, including Patrick, that he was not drawn to rhythm in his music. And from the late 1980s and 1990s onwards, there are these vast expanses of organic sound — no rhythmic pulse, just ebbs and flows of energy. It reflects both his deliberate aesthetic choices and his growth as a musician.”
And yet even within this apparent rhythmlessness, Mrityunjay hears a subtler pulse:
“Even there his mastery of modulating those parameters over time ensures the musical line always feels like a musical line, not a mechanical process. There is an inherent rhythm even within the rhythmlessness — a pulse within each synthetic sound itself, in the oscillation, the envelope.”
It is worth noting that the Farfisa organ did contain a built-in sequencer with preset rhythms — Bossa Nova patterns and similar. Sunil used them occasionally in the Savitri settings. He used what was there. He simply did not allow what was there to dictate his direction.
Trained musicians approaching Sunil’s work are often surprised by the apparent simplicity of his harmonic language. No extended harmonies, no chromaticism, no adventurism in the conventional musical sense. Mrityunjay spent years puzzling over this before arriving at a different understanding:
“As a student I could not understand this, because in my mind music of the future meant ever greater complexity, ever greater pushing of the language of sound.”
“He could have pushed further — microtonality, alternate tuning systems, the influence of contemporaries. A friend of his was apparently going to play one of his tracks to Olivier Messiaen, and they were debating which track to choose. So he was in touch with that world. He simply chose not to go there. Which means his adherence to diatonicism, to scale-degree melodies that are essentially 1-4-5-1, was a conscious expression of his inner direction.”
What looks like simplicity is, in Mrityunjay’s formulation, something more radical: the complete stripping away of cultural containers, leaving only the human experience that underlies both Eastern and Western musical traditions.
“That is the voice I was always hoping for.”
— Rajuta, on Minnie’s singing
Sunil had no staff notation to place before his singers. He taught entirely by demonstration: playing the melody on the organ, singing it softly beside them, repeating until they had absorbed it. It was the natural method of the Indian musical tradition.
“The Indian singers — Manoj, Minnie, Ravi, and later Toret — did not practise separately. They would come in together in the morning, gather around the organ, and Sunil would play and softly sing the melody to them. You could not hear it from across the room; he was singing very quietly, right beside them. They would go over it repeatedly, then walk to the microphone and record.”
The core of Sunil’s vocal ensemble over the decades was small and intimate. Manoj and Ravi were among the earliest. Ravi’s eventual departure for Canada was a genuine loss:
“Sunil was quite upset when she eventually left to move to Canada with her husband. He said, ‘I am losing my singer.’ She had a high, very sweet tone that he valued greatly. Rajuta spoke warmly of her voice too — after hearing the New Year music that Minnie had sung, she said, ‘That is the voice I was always hoping for.’”
Minnie brought an unusual vocal versatility: a European singer had at some point taught members of the Ashram community to sing from the diaphragm rather than from the throat. Minnie learned both techniques.
“Minnie learned that technique, so she could actually sing both ways. That breadth became part of what Sunil valued in her.”
Toret, who joined around 1974 or 1975, offered a different quality:
“Toret, who joined around 1974 or 1975, brought a different quality from Manoj — a deeper, smoother voice; he was semi-professional, I think.”
Beatrice, an Italian opera singer, represented a completely different approach to Sunil’s process of teaching vocalists. Where the Indian singers learned at the organ by ear, Beatrice required advance preparation.
“She was a professional and would not sing without first practising on her own. The first time she came, Victor made a cassette for her so she could prepare at home. By her second visit, Patrick was here and he wrote out proper notation for her. She would practise in advance, arrive, and sing. She appears in three Savitri pieces, and Sunil was genuinely glad to have her.”
With singers, as with instrumentalists, Sunil’s preference for first takes applied. The feeling was paramount.
“Without a word exchanged, they would simply begin playing.”
— Mrityunjay Sathyanarayanan, on Sunil and Kanak-da
Kanak-da — the guitarist who played slide guitar and various other forms — was Sunil’s most constant musical companion, present from the earliest years of the new music until the very end. Their working method required no preliminary conversation:
“Kanak-da would come into the room, Sunil Da would be at the organ, and without a word exchanged, they would simply begin playing. For music connected to something as weighty as the New Year invocations or Savitri, you might expect some kind of spiritual discussion beforehand — but no. They just played, as musicians do.”
Steve recalls that Kanak-da’s transition to entirely live guitar playing is audible in the early recordings:
“If you listen to those earliest pieces in his new style — Aspiration and Devotion, from December 1954 — you can actually hear the moment of transition. The whole group is playing, and then suddenly they drop out, leaving only the reed organ and Kanat’s guitar. That is precisely where the new music begins.”
Victor Jauhar became Sunil’s recording assistant through a story that captures both the Mother’s guidance and a moment of comic honesty. Victor had gone to the Mother wanting to leave school in order to focus on the piano. She told him to sit at the piano, place his hands, and the music would come.
“He did exactly that — and nothing came. He went to Sunil and told him, and Sunil burst out laughing. ‘Only the Mother could say that,’ he said, and directed Victor to a Greek pianist who taught in a house on Rue François Martin.”
Simultaneously, the Mother appointed Victor as Sunil’s recording assistant. He served in that role from the mid-1960s onwards, handling the two-track sessions that preceded multitrack recording.
Patrick’s arrival in 1984 ushered in the synthesiser era. His role was multiple: he brought the equipment, auditioned sounds during morning practice sessions, eventually wrote formal notation for Beatrice, and over time moved his own guitar contributions from live performance to sequencer.
During morning sessions:
“Sunil would come in the morning, begin playing, and Patrick would audition different sounds while he practised; Sunil would choose which ones he liked.”
Gambelon, a devotee who lived partly in France and partly in Pondicherry, occupied a quieter role: a devoted friend who provided, at critical moments, what the music needed. He sent the Farfisa organ from Europe. He brought tapes when the studio ran out. He gave Sunil the recording of the Ondes Martenot. He described the 1974 New Year music — the first composed after the Mother’s passing in November 1973 — as “the requiem of the Mother.”
Sunil was hurt by the departure of the Indian musicians who had been part of his early ensemble. Steve’s understanding is that the separation was essentially one of musical language:
“I think the issue was essentially one of playing style — and perhaps tuning. Sunil was moving towards Western equal temperament, and the Indian musicians were trained in a different tuning system entirely. It may not have been stubbornness on their part; retuning one’s ear and one’s instrument is a genuine undertaking.”
“The creative genius was a tool. It was not the experience itself.”
The most important frame for understanding Sunil’s work is not aesthetic but spiritual. Mrityunjay returns to this repeatedly:
“An important point to hold when speaking about Sunil Da’s music: it was not art for art’s sake. It was art for the sake of sadhana. That is an important point to hold when speaking about Sunil Da’s music.”
The composition letters Sunil wrote to the Mother were not reports from a student to a teacher but exchanges between two composers — and something more:
“There are letters where he writes things like, ‘I have extended this measure to this length’ or ‘I have used a bass saxophone here’ — the kind of detail you might share with a fellow composer. And the Mother would respond with equal precision: this works, that is good. It was a strange and beautiful relationship — musical, compositional, integral.”
Sunil’s creative genius, in Mrityunjay’s framing, was something he wielded rather than something he inhabited. The distinction carries weight:
“For Sunil Da, the creative genius was a tool. It was not the experience itself. That is what separates him as a sadhak rather than merely a composer. He clearly had natural talent and creative brilliance, but for him those faculties were instruments to be used consciously — not ends in themselves. That reveals something about his development as a human being that goes well beyond musicianship.”
The Mother stated, quite plainly, that the purpose of music is to raise consciousness. Sunil’s music was built entirely within that understanding. Mrityunjay reflects on what this means for a composer now:
“As a sadhak I have to speak about music as a vehicle — and that shifts the entire responsibility of the conversation. What Sunil Da’s music has awakened in me is this: even to appreciate it fully, I need to know first what sounds mean to me. It can be as simple as sitting at a piano, playing a single C, and finding it a profound event.”
Two of the Mother’s communications about Sunil’s music stand as bookends to his career. The first came early, after the opening of the new style: her encouragement was direct and unconditional. The second came regarding the Savitri settings, when uncertainty arose about whether they should continue:
“The Mother’s message — that the Savitri music was between him and her — was her way of making absolutely clear that he was to continue.”
And after Sunil’s death in 1998, the Mother’s formulation — reported by those who worked with Sunil — remains the most complete account of where the music came from:
“The Mother said that his music comes from the world of harmony. That is evident in the sounds themselves.”
YouTube video
Steve was among the small circle of dedicated collaborators who worked alongside Sunil Bhattacharya — the musician of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry — over several decades. In this conversation, he shares intimate recollections of Sunil's composing process, his instruments, his collaborators, and his unique spiritual relationship with the Mother.
Narad : Namaste, and welcome to our continuing series of interviews with disciples and devotees. Today we are honoured to have Steve with us. Steve, namaste. I always begin my interviews by asking: how did you first hear of the Mother and Sri Aurobindo?
Steve : I was in California in 1971, and at the time we were all exploring different spiritual paths. A friend of mine found out about the California Institute of Asian Studies, run by Haridas Chaudhuri, and that was where I first read Sri Aurobindo.
I came to Pondicherry at the end of December 1972 and have been here ever since. Before I arrived, I had actually heard Sunil's music at a conference for Sri Aurobindo's centenary that Haridas had organised. I believe June Maher ran a slideshow on Auroville, and Sunil's music was playing in the background — it simply blew my mind.
So when I came here, I had a friend who had been corresponding with Sunil. We met at the Park Guest House and he took me to meet Sunil. My friend eventually left, but I stayed on, became friends with Sunil, and gradually began participating in the music.
Narad : Sunil's music has been, for many of us, the new music — without question.
Steve : Yes. And yet the world knows very little about him, actually.
Narad : One of the questions that has come up in our research — Narendra calls it "the initial spark" — is whether Sunil heard the music internally before he played it. He also spent considerable time composing formally. Even in the early years, when the New Year music was done in a hurry, he still kept notebooks written in his own notation — using Bengali characters and some mathematical symbols.
Steve : People have looked at those notebooks. Patrick could read them to some degree, and more recently Matunjoy has been studying them. They are not an exact transcription of what Sunil ultimately played, but he certainly used them as a guide.
We never actually saw him composing, because the doors were always locked. Every day, around eight-thirty or nine in the morning, he would go upstairs and spend roughly two hours composing. One door was always kept unlocked, however — I believe this went back to an incident, probably around the time of the 1966 New Year music, when the force coming through him was so overwhelming that he nearly fainted. There is correspondence with the Mother about it; she wrote something to the effect of, "Perhaps I put too much into it." After that, Chobi insisted that the connecting door to Sham's room was never to be bolted. So while he composed in complete privacy all those years, there was always that one exit.
Narad : We had heard — and of course this may be rumour — that in the early days he experimented with the strings of a grand piano.
Steve : It is not a rumour, though it was not a grand piano — it was an old, rather decrepit upright that would no longer hold a tune. They would manage to tune just the keys they needed, but they also experimented with restringing it as a harp. Another experiment was recording at half speed and playing back at normal speed, so everything came out an octave higher. I believe it was Victor who played the piano for that — it involved only isolated notes rather than a full melody, and the effect was quite unlike a piano when raised in that way. Most of this experimenting happened before I arrived, but I witnessed some of it.
Narad : Patrick was responsible for introducing synthesisers to Sunil, wasn't he?
Steve : Yes. Patrick joined from around 1984 until the very end, and he brought the first synthesisers. Before that, in roughly 1987, I rewired Sunil's organ to output MIDI and connected a synthesiser to it, so he could play the synthesiser from his own organ keyboard. Over the following years the balance shifted: in the first year he played just one synthesiser but still mixed in the organ sounds; a couple of years later he stopped using the organ sounds altogether, even though I had rigged things so he could bring them in himself whenever he chose. He never did.
Patrick would select the synthesiser patches during the recording sessions. Sunil would come in the morning, begin playing, and Patrick would audition different sounds while he practised; Sunil would choose which ones he liked. Patrick also eventually made his own guitar parts virtual — using a sequencer rather than playing live — as the equipment improved. At first Sunil was not entirely happy with this. He was an Indian musician and wanted the live, interactive quality that is so fundamental to the Indian musical tradition. He told me at the time, "I was happier when he was actually playing with me." But he grew used to it.
Narad : Before all of this — before the music became his primary occupation — was Sunil a teacher at the Ashram school?
Steve : Yes. Music in the Ashram in those early days was not a full-time calling. He was primarily a teacher. I believe he held a college degree — possibly in chemistry, or perhaps botany — and at the school he taught mathematics and botany. His students included people like Manoj and Arun. That would have been in the 1940s.
Narad : Can you walk us through the different instruments Sunil used over the years?
Steve : There were essentially three main periods. First, the reed organ — that carried through until around 1970. Then in 1971 he had a Yamaha electric organ that someone had lent him. When that person wanted it back, there was a brief gap of a couple of months. André Vioat then stepped in and built a kit organ; that instrument served from 1973 through to 1977. After that, Clusterman sent a Farfisa organ — the model was the Maharani — from Europe, and that continued until the mid-1980s.
In around 1986 I took the Farfisa completely apart to wire in MIDI, a project that took nearly a month. During that period Sunil had nothing to play, so Patrick set him up on a Yamaha DX7 synthesiser. It was on that instrument that Sunil developed the distinctive sound he used at the close of the next New Year music. After that, the Farfisa became primarily a MIDI controller.
With each transition between instruments, there was always an adjustment period — roughly a year — during which you could still hear traces of the old instrument in his playing. Then he would begin to explore the new sounds, and the music would open up again. It was much the same with the synthesisers: in the first year it was perhaps eighty per cent organ and twenty per cent synthesiser; the year after, closer to fifty-fifty; and by the third year, exclusively synthesiser.
Narad : Was Sunil an accomplished pianist?
Steve : He would not have said so himself, and I am not really in a position to judge. He never played the piano as such — his training was as a sitar player. He came to the keyboard because he broke his wrist playing football. It was not set properly at the time and pained him for the rest of his life; you would always see him flexing it after the recordings. Because of that injury he could no longer play the sitar, and so he turned to the organ.
Steve : Something I only fully understood while working on restoring the music is the profound change that occurred between the 1971 and 1972 New Year recordings. Both were made on the same Yamaha electric organ, yet they sound completely different. What I am now fairly sure happened is that this is when Clusterman gave Sunil a crucial piece of equipment.
Clusterman had arrived with what was essentially a small performance setup: an amplifier with a built-in mixer and, most importantly, a tape-loop echo and reverb unit. This was the first time Sunil had something he could actually use while composing — not just during recording sessions. He developed an entirely new playing style around it.
From that point on — particularly in the single-handed melodies — he would keep one hand on the volume control and use it to shape the envelope of each note. Without that control, with the level of echo he was using, the sound would have blurred into a muddy cascade. By shaping each note manually, he achieved those extraordinarily long, sustained melodic lines that are so characteristic of the 1972 music and everything that followed. People who heard his music in the late 1970s often assumed he was already playing a synthesiser, precisely because of that technique. But it was always an organ until the mid-1980s. And that manual envelope control continued right up to the end, even with the synthesisers.
Narad : Narendra mentioned that Sunil was deeply hurt when the Indian musicians left him.
Steve : Yes, he mentioned it more than once, and it came up from other sources as well. I think the issue was essentially one of playing style — and perhaps tuning. Sunil was moving towards Western equal temperament, and the Indian musicians were trained in a different tuning system entirely. It may not have been stubbornness on their part; retuning one's ear and one's instrument is a genuine undertaking.
If you listen to those earliest pieces in his new style — Aspiration and Devotion, from December 1954 — you can actually hear the moment of transition. The whole group is playing, and then suddenly they drop out, leaving only the reed organ and Kanat's guitar. That is precisely where the new music begins.
Sunil told me how that first piece came about. He had been composing dance music for the Ashram programmes, which he found very restricting — he had to compose to specific choreographed movements. One day in 1954 he ran into the Mother in the playground, and she asked how the music was going. He said fine, and she replied, "Come at four o'clock and show me." He assembled his musicians, went to her room, and they played. When it was over, the Mother said nothing immediately. Then one of the girls who used to play the reed organ asked her, "Why don't you play something for Sunil?" And she did. That is when he had the experience he described — the flood of chords, the opening. He incorporated what came to him into his music, the Mother encouraged him greatly, and from the following year he progressively turned entirely to this new style.
Narad : Can you describe how he worked with the Savitri texts?
Steve : Chobi — his sister — would type out the lines from the Mother's recitation and paste them into his composing notebook. He would then write his music directly below the text on the same page. So the words were always physically in front of him while he composed. He did not compose to the sound of the Mother's recorded voice, but to the words themselves.
Almost all of the shlokas he incorporated — particularly those from the Rig Veda — came from Nolini's Bengali translation. That was because he needed to understand what was being expressed. The Sanskrit was there, and Nolini's Bengali rendering was beside it. I believe Nolini based his translations on Sri Aurobindo's English version rather than translating directly from the Sanskrit — though for some other texts, such as those from the Puranas, he may have worked directly from Sanskrit. Some of the material Sunil used was also traditional Bengali — pieces like Jadav that he would have known from childhood.
Narad : Was the Mother's voice the anchor for him when composing Savitri?
Steve : The words of her recitation were always there, but it was the text — those typed lines — that was his anchor, not the recordings. The meditations she recorded were originally intended to accompany Huta's paintings of Savitri. I believe the Mother first simply selected the passages; the recordings came later, when Huta wanted to make a slideshow. By then the Mother's eyesight was not strong, so Huta would write everything out on large cards and hold them up. We had a mimeographed sheet listing the recitations in order, and that is what Chobi typed from and pasted into the notebooks.
Narad : Did Huta's protectiveness over the recordings ever create difficulties for Sunil?
Steve : Almost, but we always managed. She was possessive — and fearful that the tapes would be used in ways she could not control. At one point she refused to send any tapes at all, and Sunil genuinely thought he might have to stop work on Savitri. Eventually she relented. Through the 1970s and 1980s she would send only what was needed for the next composition, and always a copy — never her originals. Towards the end of Sunil's life, I think she did send a larger batch. But it was always an anxious negotiation.
Narad : How did Sunil work with his singers?
Steve : The Indian singers — Manoj, Minnie, Ravi, and later Toret — did not practise separately. They would come in together in the morning, gather around the organ, and Sunil would play and softly sing the melody to them. You could not hear it from across the room; he was singing very quietly, right beside them. They would go over it repeatedly, then walk to the microphone and record. He disliked multiple takes — he felt that if you did too many, you lost the feeling. So unless there was an obvious mistake, the first take was the one he kept.
He had no conventional notation to give them. He simply taught by playing and singing, and they learned by ear — entirely natural for Indian musicians.
Beatrice, the Italian opera singer, was a completely different case. She was a professional and would not sing without first practising on her own. The first time she came, Victor made a cassette for her so she could prepare at home. By her second visit, Patrick was here and he wrote out proper notation for her. She would practise in advance, arrive, and sing. She appears in three Savitri pieces, and Sunil was genuinely glad to have her.
Toret, who joined around 1974 or 1975, brought a different quality from Manoj — a deeper, smoother voice; he was semi-professional, I think. As for Ravi, Sunil was quite upset when she eventually left to move to Canada with her husband. He said, "I am losing my singer." She had a high, very sweet tone that he valued greatly. Rajuta spoke warmly of her voice too — after hearing the New Year music that Minnie had sung, she said, "That is the voice I was always hoping for."
There is also an interesting detail about Minnie. At some point — before my time here — a European singer came to the Ashram and taught many of the Indian singers how to sing from the diaphragm rather than from the throat. Minnie learned that technique, so she could actually sing both ways. That breadth became part of what Sunil valued in her.
Narad : Gambelon was also an important figure in Sunil's life.
Steve : Very much so. Victor had a wonderful story about the tape shortage in the early years. Tapes were extremely scarce; you would record, and then reuse the tape. There were no spares. At one point Sunil had separated from the projector room and was recording independently, but they had no tapes at all. Victor wrote to the Mother saying he would have to stop if tapes were not found. She replied, "Don't worry." A few days later, Victor said, Gambelon walked in carrying a stack of tapes. She must have asked him to bring them. After that, Gambelon remained a close and devoted friend to Sunil over many years — he lived partly in France and partly here, having built a house just behind the Ashram.
Narad : And Victor — how did he come to be Sunil's recording assistant?
Steve : The earliest recordings were made by the projector room, but there was some kind of falling out — those engineers had their own way of doing things and were not always responsive to an artist's needs. For a period, a man named Naranjan, who ran the library, stepped in with his own tape recorder and did the 1965 and 1966 recordings — Hour of God and Mahashakti. But eventually Naranjan told Sunil he could no longer continue.
At that point Sunil wrote to the Mother saying he needed a recording assistant. Now, Victor had separately gone to the Mother because he was unhappy at school and wanted to leave in order to focus on the piano. She told him: sit at the piano, place your hands, and the music will come. He did exactly that — and nothing came. He went to Sunil and told him, and Sunil burst out laughing. "Only the Mother could say that," he said, and directed Victor to a Greek pianist who taught in a house on Rue François Martin — the building that is now part of the Ashram archives. So Victor studied piano there, and simultaneously the Mother appointed him as Sunil's recording assistant. That is how the collaboration began.
Narad : Did Sunil ever experience creative blocks?
Steve : Yes. There were some years where nothing came and we simply did not record. If you look at the release dates, most years follow in sequence, but there are a few gaps. That happened a couple of times with the New Year music as well. I remember one year — in the early period — where we did not begin recording until nearly Christmas and had to complete everything between Christmas and New Year.
In those early years we had only a two-track tape recorder — a Revox semi-professional machine. There was no multitrack, no real mixing. It was essentially live. If a mistake was made, the piece had to be done again, which meant reusing tape. Once we eventually acquired a multitrack recorder, Sunil became far more relaxed. He knew he could go back and add or correct things. He still did not enjoy the act of recording itself — he would often say he liked to compose, he liked to play, but he did not like to record. I think that was a residue of the stress from those early live sessions. In the later years, particularly during mixing, he was genuinely at ease.
Narad : What was the atmosphere like within a recording session?
Steve : He would come in and spend at least the first hour simply playing through the piece, over and over, so that Kanat could learn his part and Clusterman or Patrick could familiarise themselves with the music. Only after everyone felt comfortable would we actually record. There were sessions where the room itself seemed to change as he played. There are certain passages I remember simply because of what it was like to be in that room when he was working through them.
Narad : I have heard that Stockhausen knew about Sunil's music — and of course Stockhausen himself said that Sri Aurobindo was his sole spiritual inspiration.
Steve : Yes, Stockhausen knew of Sunil's music, through contacts in France. There was some exchange between them, though I am not certain of the details.
There was one particular instrument that Sunil spoke about with real enthusiasm — the Ondes Martenot, the early French electronic instrument from the 1920s. Gambelon gave him a recording of it. It has a keyboard but glides between the notes in a way somewhat like a theremin. Messiaen composed for it famously. Sunil said something to the effect that this was "psychic music" — that it touched something Western music generally did not reach. I notice now that people on YouTube have actually rebuilt Ondes Martenots and are recording on them. That old, scratchy recording Gambelon gave him was apparently quite revelatory.
Sunil did listen carefully to Western classical music. He was friends with Nolini, who had a gramophone and a collection of recordings, and Sunil used to visit his house to listen. He was familiar with the major composers and their works. But he did not discuss the fusion of East and West with us in explicit theoretical terms. He talked about it with musicians, but since I am not a musician myself I did not take it all in, and I would not want to misrepresent him.
Narad : There is a note that the Mother told Sunil that the Savitri music was "just between you and me."
Steve : That came about because the music was originally conceived as an accompaniment to Huta's paintings. But the music outgrew that framework — each passage Sunil set to music was longer than you would want to contemplate a single painting — and Huta was rushing to complete her work without ever finishing the whole of Savitri anyway. So the two projects parted ways. Huta made her slideshow with selections of the Mother's own organ music, and Sunil was left uncertain about what to do with the compositions he had made. The Mother's message — that the Savitri music was between him and her — was her way of making absolutely clear that he was to continue.
Narad : What about the tension with Satprem after the Mother's passing?
Steve : I believe the difficulty arose after the Mother's passing in November 1973. Satprem apparently felt that Sunil should not continue the New Year music — that he was in some sense assuming the Mother's role by doing so. There may have been a certain tension even before that: those joint birthday meetings with the Mother, where Sunil and Satprem both came to her on each other's birthdays, had stopped by around 1968 or 1969 after only three years.
Narad : And Gambelon described the 1974 music as "the requiem of the Mother."
Steve : That was the first New Year music composed after her passing in November 1973. Naturally it carried that quality.
Narad : Sunil passed away while composing the second part of Book Ten, Canto Four of Savitri — is that right?
Steve : Yes. During the 1998 New Year recording sessions, he fell ill with a high fever. I think we had recorded part of the first movement when he became seriously unwell. He had been having some difficulties before that — falling a couple of times — but I had not fully understood how serious it was; Victor was more aware of it. It turned out to be a heart condition — what we would call heart failure in America, though the doctors here were not very forthcoming with details. Chobi had him admitted to the nursing home, and he remained there for most of the New Year period. We just managed to finish the New Year music when he was discharged.
After that, for several months he mostly rested. But then he began going to the studio again and started composing. I was away in Bangalore when I heard he had been readmitted to the nursing home. When I came back, I saw him in his room — he was breathing heavily. They took him back to the nursing home, and he passed away three or four days later. He was about seventy-seven years old.
Narad : Steve, this has been truly extraordinary. Thank you so much.
Steve : It has been a pleasure. There is so much more to be said, and I hope Narendra will be able to fill in much of what I have not covered. He knows a great deal that I do not.
Mrityunjay Sathyanarayanan grew up in the Sri Aurobindo Ashram school in Pondicherry and later studied composition at the Boston Conservatory. He has spent years researching the life and work of Sunil Bhattacharya — composer, ashramite, and one of India’s earliest electronic musicians. In this conversation, he traces the arc of Sunil Da’s creative evolution: from sitar-based Indian classical music to the meditative electronic soundscapes of his New Year and Savitri compositions, and reflects on what it means to make music as a form of spiritual practice.
Interviewer Namaste and welcome, Mrityunjay. We’re delighted to have you here. We’re going to be talking about Sunil Bhattacharya and his music. My first question is simply: how did you come to encounter his work?
Mrityunjay I was a student at the Sri Aurobindo Ashram school — I did all of my education there, right through what we call ‘Knowledge.’ We grew up with Sunil Da’s music playing every morning for meditations, for New Year programmes, for darshans. It was woven into the culture of the school. But strangely, because we heard it so constantly, we tended to take it for granted.
The shift came in my final year of Knowledge, when I became genuinely fascinated with the music. That was also the period when I was getting seriously into composition myself — electronic music in particular. It shocked me to discover that the Ashram already had an electronic musician of this stature, and that almost no one was speaking about him.
That discovery started a long thread of inquiry I am still pursuing today — one for which I don’t yet have clear answers, but which is vivid and real. It covers everything from the historical and biographical story of Sunil Bhattacharya coming to the Ashram, to his aesthetics and how he evolved his musical language, to the practicalities of his everyday production. He was an electronic musician with a team working alongside him — how did that function, being an ashramite, a sadhak, going to a studio and then returning to the rhythms of Ashram life? These questions have kept me going.
Interviewer What is the broader origin story of Sunil’s music? He has a remarkable personal story — his journey to Pondicherry, to the Ashram, to meeting the Mother. But what was the birth story of the music itself? What was the idea behind it?
Mrityunjay The origin is fascinating, and the evolution over time equally so. All of it is beautifully documented in Sunil: The Mother’s Musician by Clifford Gibson — essential reading for anyone interested in this work.
In short: Sunil Da was already an accomplished sitar player when he came to the Ashram, around 1945. Music was already part of his family culture. Once here, he began composing for the Ashram’s annual 1st December programmes and for dance events — because the Mother had requested him to compose. It grew from there. He started with Indian classical instrumental work on sitar, but gradually moved towards the electronic realm. He began as an Indian classical composer, but his creative genius kept pushing him into new territory.
Interviewer Can you walk us through the phases of his music? There was the early raga-based, sitar-based phase — and then what were the main milestones of evolution, as you hear them as a listener?
Mrityunjay There are probably people better equipped to answer that in detail — those who grew up around him and worked with him directly. But from my perspective as a researcher, I see three main junctions.
The first is what I would loosely call the Indian classical period, though that’s already a misnomer. Even then, the creative genius was unmistakable — others who knew him well say the same. From there, his style began evolving as he composed for dance: there was a dancer in the Ashram called Anuben, and he was writing pieces for those performances. He started using non-traditional instrumentation, and his language began to shift.
The most pivotal junction came in 1959. The Mother had specifically asked him to orchestrate the New Year music, and in his own words, the orchestration of the 1958 New Year music was one of the most significant events of his creative life. He realised there was an entire world he could inhabit — and crucially, that this work was part of his sadhana. That is an important point to hold when speaking about Sunil Da’s music: it was not art for art’s sake. It was art for the sake of sadhana.
From 1965 onwards, he developed his signature approach — using the Mother’s organ recordings as a foundation and orchestrating them with electronics. The Savitri settings emerged in conjunction with this, continuing until 1998. For me as a listener, the Indian classical work, the New Year music, and the Savitri compositions form a single, continuous arc.
Interviewer What was the musical interplay between Sunil and the Mother? She had a profound relationship with music and played herself. How did that feedback loop function?
Mrityunjay Sunil Da was a very private, introverted person when it came to his relationship with the Mother. There is a story that comes to mind: during one of the New Year music sessions, the Mother said she was unable to play that day and asked whether he could play the organ. He simply stood there and said, ‘No. I will not play the organ that Mother has played.’ That humility, I think, says everything about the nature of their relationship.
Everything he did — whether in music, mathematics, or botany (he taught all three at the Ashram school) — came from a place of complete self-giving to the Mother. The relationship speaks for itself in the life he lived and the work he produced.
What I found particularly striking, as a student, was how specific he was in his compositional letters to her. There are letters where he writes things like, ‘I have extended this measure to this length’ or ‘I have used a bass saxophone here’ — the kind of detail you might share with a fellow composer. And the Mother would respond with equal precision: this works, that is good. It was a strange and beautiful relationship — musical, compositional, integral.
Interviewer You studied composition at the Boston Conservatory — one of the great Western institutions for musical training. How did that technical framework change your perception of Sunil Da’s music?
Mrityunjay ‘Help’ is a subjective word here — it cuts both ways. Before I came to Sunil Da’s music seriously, I was already interested in the broader evolution of music from a musicological perspective: trying to situate him within the larger sweep of musical development across human cultures, not simply Western or Eastern. That remains the central question for me: where does this person fit, musically?
With my education at the Boston Conservatory, I thought I might be better equipped to piece things together. But after six or seven years of study and professional work, I found that those frameworks don’t really help you navigate Sunil Da’s music. They situate it — they make it even more remarkable, in fact — because when all your theoretical tools prove insufficient to account for someone’s music, it really does beg the question: what are we actually dealing with here?
That is not to say there are no technical observations to make. As composers, we can speak about structure, production, harmonic language — many interesting things. But those observations will always fall short of the central motive behind the music, which is ultimately what we connect to.
Interviewer Was Sunil Da’s music purely improvised, or was there a premeditated compositional element? And how did the harmonic and melodic approach develop? His music freed itself from the rigidity of the raga framework — but was it spontaneous and meditative, or was there significant pre-composition?
Mrityunjay This is something I was deeply curious about and used to ask Steve — the technical person behind Sunil Da’s recordings, who is still at the Ashram and offers invaluable insights — about constantly.
It turns out the balance between improvised and composed is something Sunil Da threaded so deftly that it is genuinely hard to say which it was. He spent a great deal of time playing and trying out parts. Inspiration was clearly the guiding force — he received, and then he transmitted. But when you look at his notebooks — and in Sunil Da’s Studio at the Ashram there are boxes upon boxes of notation — you find a very deliberate system he developed himself, using Bengali script, with carefully written melodies, chords, and structural sketches.
Steve told me that Sunil Da would sit with those notebooks during the mixing phase — and if he did not have them to hand, he was unsettled. So the notation was taken seriously; it was not merely a memory aid to be discarded. And yet he was also known to change things on the fly, as any Indian classical musician might.
His collaborator Kanakda — who played slide guitar and other forms of guitar, and remained with him until the very end — gives a vivid picture of how they worked together. From what I am told, Kanakda would come into the room, Sunil Da would be at the organ, and without a word exchanged, they would simply begin playing. For music connected to something as weighty as the New Year invocations or Savitri, you might expect some kind of spiritual discussion beforehand — but no. They just played, as musicians do. It was both: inspired and received, but also carefully considered.
Interviewer How were the recordings actually made — single takes, or a process of repeated retaking and polishing?
Mrityunjay Steve would answer this more accurately than I can, but from my understanding: before multi-track recording became available in the 1980s, everything was done on a two-track recorder. They would do a take, stop, Sunil Da would practise a passage further, and if something needed to be added, they would superimpose it onto the same recording. This is why the early material has a quality that noticeably deteriorates over the length of the tape — you can actually hear it.
Once multi-track arrived, he had far more freedom to re-record individual elements — a melody, a bass line, whatever was needed. But what strikes me is the attitude towards technical limitation. What we would call a constraint today was simply the medium. Here is what I have; let me work with it. That is something we can still learn from, now that we have access to virtually unlimited tools and still struggle to decide what to use and how.
Interviewer What is the status of Sunil Da’s music today? Is it still accessible, still growing? Here in Auroville it is still being played and studied — both technically and as a meditative practice. How do you see its current life?
Mrityunjay In the active culture of the Ashram, his music is always present — playing every morning for concentrations, for any darshan or meditation. In that sense it is very much alive. But I also feel that much of that presence is the momentum of continuity: it has been used for a long time, and so it continues. As for active, questioning engagement with the music — understanding it, building on it — I do not think a great deal of that is happening at the moment.
Interviewer Do you see potential for yourself and other musicians to carry this idea of a ‘music of the future’ forward — to take the essence of where Sunil Da’s work was going and continue it, perhaps in the context of Auroville or the Ashram?
Mrityunjay That would require a whole separate conversation, because there is a great deal of ground to lay before we can have it properly. I am in that process myself. What I keep finding is that the phrase ‘music of the future’ is not precise enough to capture what happened with Sunil Da’s work — or what the Mother was asking him to make. Before we can speak about carrying it forward, we really need to understand what, exactly, we are carrying.
Interviewer If we survey all the music humanity has produced — and we now have immediate digital access to any of it, from Gamelan to Mbira from Zimbabwe — where does Sunil Da’s work sit? As a listener and as a musician, his music feels extraordinarily singular to me. It takes one into an altered state, on a journey. And it was clearly also an artistic music, used with Savitri and other major works. As a composer, how has it influenced you — and where are your own compositions going, having grown up in the Ashram with these ideas?
Mrityunjay From a composer’s perspective, the most honest answer is that I have spent a great deal of time trying to emulate Sunil Da’s music. Friends and teachers at the Ashram have noticed that much of what I compose echoes his style, and it is because I have been — consciously or not — trying to absorb what lies behind the music. But emulation, I have come to see, is not a way of carrying it forward. It is a way for me, individually, to assimilate what is there.
To carry it forward requires a much wider conversation about what music means to an individual. The Mother said, quite plainly, that the purpose of music is to raise consciousness. Anything that disturbs or lowers it is not what we are looking for here. This is clearly music in the service of something beyond itself. As a composer I can speak about music for its own sake, but as a sadhak I have to speak about music as a vehicle — and that shifts the entire responsibility of the conversation.
What Sunil Da’s music has awakened in me is this: even to appreciate it fully, I need to know first what sounds mean to me. It can be as simple as sitting at a piano, playing a single C, and finding it a profound event. As composers we tend to take that singular unit for granted because we are always working with many notes, many timbres, many layers. That singular unit of musicality — what is it? For me, that is what is present throughout all of Sunil Da’s music: the music of the sound itself. That cannot be trained or systematised. It has to be an expression of a life lived. The music of the future will depend on the life of the future, and we are piecing that together as we go.
Interviewer Can you speak about the technology Sunil Da used — the synthesizers, the early equipment, the evolution of his sonic palette? I recently worked on a project to recreate those sounds as plugins and found it fascinating to trace what he was using and when.
Mrityunjay What strikes me most is that the technology never seemed to dictate or limit what he was doing. He was working with reed organs and electric organs — instruments that are, by nature, the least expressive things imaginable. A flat, buzzy tone, no envelope, just the one note. And yet he found ways to make them sing.
One example Steve described to me: Sunil Da began manually controlling the volume envelopes by hand. Those expressive swells we hear in his music — almost vocal in quality, like a cello or violin — were not built into the instrument. He was physically extracting them.
Around the early 1970s, he acquired an FX unit — a Dynacord, I believe — which had a built-in tape reverb. He would control the feedback knob on that reverb to create sustained sounds from the organ. Steve pointed out that if you listen to the 1971 music and then the 1972 music, the difference is dramatic. Sunil Da had effectively invented a new voice — a sustained, string-like instrument — out of a simple organ tone, using nothing but a feedback knob as a physical controller. Swell it up, close it, swell again. A keyboard player had become a string player.
When digital equipment arrived, it coloured his entire sound world in turn. The Yamaha DX7 — brought to the Ashram by Patrick or Steve — you can hear its FM synthesis shimmering across the tracks from that period: the flutes, the bells. Later, the Oberheim basses and brass synths appear throughout the later work. There was never a sense of technology and music evolving separately. For him they were one and the same. That is a profound attitude towards the tools of one’s craft.
Interviewer And in some of the early work he was using tea cups, a modified Stylophone, found objects. Can you speak briefly about that?
Mrityunjay That was one of the moments, when I learned about it as a student, when I realised he was genuinely an experimental composer from the very beginning. Even in his early period, the creative mind was already at work. He would open a piano and pluck the strings like a harp. He would record the piano at half speed and play it back at full speed, creating a higher octave and a completely different texture — and the reverse for lower octaves.
And then the tea cups — it was well known in the Ashram that he would walk into the kitchen, pick up a pan, and walk out. They would ask what he was doing. He needed it for a piece. He would stand far from the microphone, strike the pan, and let the natural resonance and the reverb he added become part of the composition. No matter what was available, the creative mind found a use for it.
Interviewer What was his approach to rhythm — entirely free form, or did he ever work within a defined metre?
Mrityunjay Rhythm is fascinating in the context of Sunil Da’s music precisely because there is so little of it, especially in the later work. And this reflects the evolution of his own sensibilities. In the early dance compositions, rhythm was very present. But Steve has mentioned — and I believe it is also in the book — that at a certain point Sunil Da began to feel that rhythmic music was not what he was meant to be making. When Anuben would come to commission another dance piece, he was reportedly not pleased — he knew what would be required of him.
Interestingly, some of the Savitri music does contain sequencers. The Farfisa organ had a built-in sequencer with presets — Bossa Nova rhythms and the like — and you can hear them in certain tracks. He used what was there. But he has said to those around him, including Patrick, that he was not drawn to rhythm in his music. And from the late 1980s and 1990s onwards, there are these vast expanses of organic sound — no rhythmic pulse, just ebbs and flows of energy. It reflects both his deliberate aesthetic choices and his growth as a musician.
Interviewer Though we could say there is still a kind of internal rhythm — a pulse within each synthetic sound itself, in the oscillation, the envelope. An inherent rhythm even within the rhythmlessness.
Mrityunjay Yes, and even there his mastery of modulating those parameters over time ensures the musical line always feels like a musical line, not a mechanical process.
There is something related I have long wanted to discuss: many of the things we hear in Sunil Da’s music are artefacts of the recording medium itself, not intentional compositional choices. For the longest time I believed the opening of the Savitri Book One, Canto One music — ‘The Hour of God’ — was one of the most futuristic sounds imaginable. That rich, lush bell tone, like the startup sound of an early Macintosh. I thought it was a stroke of genius. Years later, Steve told me it sounds that way because the reverb was overdone and there was natural tape flutter. What I heard as a deliberate composition was actually the behaviour of the medium.
This is an important thing to keep in mind when thinking about carrying Sunil Da’s music forward: we need to be able to distinguish between the recorded object as it exists and the musical intentions behind it. Steve has done remarkable work restoring the recordings and keeping the studio going, but the limitations of the medium are real.
Interviewer It sounds as though everything was improvised — he was using even the defects, the accidents, as instruments. It is an extraordinarily creative process. Have you encountered other musicians who have worked in a similar way?
Mrityunjay In terms of creative genius and experimentation, certainly — there is much I could name. My time at the Boston Conservatory gave me wonderful teachers and peers whose work I deeply admire. But the context in which music functions there is very different. The compositional ideas can be beautiful, but the kind of integration and support that surrounded Sunil Da’s music is rare.
And I think that is actually the crucial distinction: for Sunil Da, the creative genius was a tool. It was not the experience itself. That is what separates him as a sadhak rather than merely a composer. He clearly had natural talent and creative brilliance, but for him those faculties were instruments to be used consciously — not ends in themselves. That reveals something about his development as a human being that goes well beyond musicianship.
Interviewer Could his music be taught? You have suggested the difficulty of a conventional institutional approach, but how would you think about a pedagogy built around his work — or around the kind of free, meditative, improvised music it represents?
Mrityunjay I would want to ask: when you say teach, which aspects of his music do you have in mind?
Interviewer Fair point. Perhaps: teaching people to improvise, to create free and rhythm-less sound, for meditation, for some higher expressive purpose — in the way that Western classical music was also, in its time, deeply spiritually motivated.
Mrityunjay To frame Sunil Da’s music as a style that can be taught would itself be part of the problem. It is not a style, and it clearly does not lend itself to a conventional pedagogy. It was, in a sense, the opposite of that.
That said, there is a valid pedagogical dimension in becoming more sensitive to sound itself — and for that you do not need Sunil Da or Beethoven or Bach. You need your fingers, or a gong, or any instrument. The barrier to entry is effectively zero. You can practise it sitting in this room right now, listening to the fan, to the ambient noise. That attentiveness is itself a kind of practice.
Where technical knowledge becomes necessary is in translating that sensitivity into composition — and there, you would study Bach, Mozart, Brahms. Not Sunil Da. For me, they form a larger picture: Sunil Da illuminates the introspective, inward dimension of music, while the Western compositional tradition shows the architecture — the form, the structure. Bringing those two things together is the task for the musician of the future: not treating them as separate styles, but as two aspects of one unified experience.
Interviewer Can you speak about the East-West dimension of Sunil Da’s music? The tension and integration between the raga framework, with its fixed drone and melodic improvisation, and the Western harmonic tradition the Mother brought?
Mrityunjay As a student I was always drawn to this question, and as a composer now I think most serious musicians recognise that the East-West dichotomy is not really real — it is a spectrum, not a binary. But it is still useful to see where a composer is positioned on that spectrum.
With Sunil Da I found two distinct qualities. The first is the cultural dimension: the Indian classical raga framework on one side, Western harmony-based thinking on the other. The second — and this took me longer to come to terms with — is the compositional language itself, which is strikingly simple. Simple diatonic, tonal music. No extended harmonies, no harmonic adventurism. As a student I could not understand this, because in my mind music of the future meant ever greater complexity, ever greater pushing of the language of sound.
I am still pushing that inquiry, but what I keep returning to is the simplicity. And what I mean when I say his music is ‘more Indian than Indian classical and more Western than Western’ is this: the essential experience behind Indian classical music — a connection to the psychic, an inward movement, which the Mother has spoken of — is there, but freed from its cultural container. And the essential experience behind Western harmony — that sense of richness and vitality which Sunil Da describes with such vividness the first time he heard the Mother play the organ — is also there, freed from its European context. Both are present, but as human experiences rather than cultural styles.
He could have pushed further — microtonality, alternate tuning systems, the influence of contemporaries. A friend of his was apparently going to play one of his tracks to Olivier Messiaen, and they were debating which track to choose. So he was in touch with that world. He simply chose not to go there. Which means his adherence to diatonicism, to scale-degree melodies that are essentially 1-4-5-1, was a conscious expression of his inner direction.
I am slowly learning to respect that simplicity more deeply. There is a glory in a simple major chord held out for a long time — the way Bach would sustain a pedal tone before resolving. That essential feeling of moving from one harmonic field to another is captured perfectly in Sunil Da’s music. And the melodic phrasing has the organic looseness of Indian classical playing. The two work together to create expansive contractions and releases of energy that eventually become neither Eastern nor Western — and yet both at once.
Interviewer Can you speak about the musicians who have touched you most deeply in your own journey — and also about the Mother’s relationship with music? Which composers were dear to her?
Mrityunjay As a student I deliberately tried to expose myself to as wide a range of styles as possible — from the purest Mozart through to noise music and grindcore. I have genuinely engaged with all of it. So for me the question is less about figureheads and more about what all these traditions mean in a larger sense.
That said, one composer has been particularly important to me recently: Toru Takemitsu. Until I heard his music, I did not know that contemporary classical music could take you inwards. It can lift you, move you, do many things — but for me personally, only rarely did it draw me into myself. Takemitsu’s way of handling timbre, his break from conventional melodic frameworks to create a language entirely his own — that was a significant realisation.
As for the Mother: she was very clear in her guidance about what music was beneficial for inner growth. César Franck is one composer she mentioned explicitly — as someone who was not merely occasionally in touch with the psychic, but who was consciously working from the psychic plane to express.
But here I want to add something, because the risk with these frameworks — psychic, vital, mental — is that we get entangled in labels. Brahms, for instance, wrote in his memoirs that to touch the divine you cannot use the power of thought or emotion: you must use the power of the soul. That same sincerity exists in Western music too. The language and the cultural context are different, but the impulse is the same.
From this perspective, I think all music carries particular kinds of experience. Indian classical music has historically leaned towards the inward and introspective. Western harmony has an expansiveness, a richness and largeness — and even the instruments that developed to express that impulse were different: the orchestra is a Western form. What Sunil Da could do, with electronic instruments, was bring that orchestral breadth together with the inward melodic significance of the Indian tradition. That, I think, is what makes his music singular.
Ultimately, though, the framework of ‘more’ or ‘less’ spiritual, higher or lower, will always fail us. The development of the individual is what matters. Until we are there, we will keep circling around structure and technique without ever touching what the music is actually about.
Interviewer A lot of music produced today for the pop charts feels entirely disposable — consumed and discarded. Whereas something like ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’ has a permanence within its genre. What makes music last?
Mrityunjay I think the trajectory you are describing is, at its core, a trajectory of consciousness — not just of musical styles. And what endures in music is what points to something beyond itself in terms of consciousness. On that basis, one could argue that Sunil Da’s music might last a very long time in the arc of human evolution, because it points to something the cultural moment cannot contain.
But that leads us into difficult territory. What about the Mother’s own organ recordings? If the argument is purely about consciousness, do we then say those last longest of all? We cannot begin to evaluate more and less in those terms without becoming destructive.
What Sunil Da’s music keeps reminding me of is the need to move past hierarchy entirely. That is also, I think, the starting point for any new pedagogy of music: not more or less, higher or lower, but a living experience of what the music is actually doing. There is no more or lesser in the source of Sunil Da’s music. There was a life lived in a particular way, in a particular place, with a particular work being done — and this was the result.
Interviewer The beauty of it also captures the consciousness of that moment — what was being radiated, transmitted. The music was, in a sense, fertiliser for all the ideas that were being born at the time. That is why it remains so relevant in Auroville.
Mrityunjay There is one more thread I would like to bring in, and it may be a good place to end.
As a student, my interest in the evolution of musical history kept pulling me towards the evolution of culture, and then towards the evolution of consciousness itself — which sounds impossibly large, but has to be addressed at some point, because that is what the evolution has actually been. In that search I found one thinker enormously helpful: Jean Gebser, the Swiss philosopher.
The parallels between Gebser’s formulations and Sri Aurobindo’s were, for me, strikingly clear. Teilhard de Chardin has a similar trajectory. All three posit a teleology to evolution — a direction, an aim. This is unfashionable in much contemporary thought, which prefers to say we are simply moving, without any particular destination. But Gebser and Sri Aurobindo both say clearly: the human being is not the final stage. We are a transitional being.
Gebser is particularly interesting because where Sri Aurobindo speaks from direct inner experience, Gebser is mapping the manifestations of that same experience in culture and history. The catastrophe of the two World Wars, which he witnessed while writing, he read as a clear sign of a particular consciousness structure breaking down and remaking itself. He poses a striking question: is it life and the world that are dying around us, or is it our structure of consciousness — with which we built those worlds — that is dying? I think that is a powerful lens for any serious conversation about music, culture, and the future.
Sri Aurobindo, in The Ideal of Human Unity, speaks about cycles in the evolution of consciousness and says that we were at the cusp of the subjective age. Understanding what that actually means — for a collective and for an individual — and grounding our thinking about music, art, and pedagogy in that understanding, is serious work. Philosophical work, certainly, but above all life work.
Because Sunil Da’s music always brings us back to this: it reminds you of what you are as an experience. It reminds you that there is so much that is unspoken, unexpressed, still to be charted and created. That, for me, is the real meaning of creativity — not a cultural category or a historical moment, but a quality. It is fully present in his music. Which is why, I believe, the Mother said that his music comes from the world of harmony. That is evident in the sounds themselves.
Interviewer Thank you so much for speaking so beautifully about Sunil. We will have you back again soon.
Mrityunjay Thank you.
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