Naresh Sohal
Indian composer whose works made an impact at the Proms
NARESH SOHAL, who has died aged 78, was one of the few Indian composers to make his mark in western classical music; his works, blending the sounds of the Subcontinent with European harmonic traditions, were performed by the BBC Symphony Orchestra, the Israel Philharmonic and the New York Philharmonic.
He was born in Punjab on September 18 1939, the son of a civil servant and poet. While studying Maths and Physics at college he mastered a harmonica, but when a local musician refused to teach him Indian music on the instrument he went in search of a more open-minded approach. Ending up in Bombay, his first exposure to western classical music was a radio broadcast of Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony heard during the monsoon.
Determined to seek out more of the canon, he arrived in London in 1962 with £2 in his pocket. At first he took a series of menial jobs, including one in a factory where he scalded his arm with acid. He joined music publisher Boosey & Hawkes as a copyist and was soon being entrusted with complex scores by composers such as Benjamin Britten and Iannis Xenakis. It was Xenakis’s Eonta which showed him that music could be about ideas and not just melodies.
Sohal was taken on as a student by the composer Jeremy Dale Roberts. His first orchestral score, Asht Prahar, a tone poem based on the Indian concept of the eight periods of the day, was completed in 1965. It was heard five years later when the Society for the Promotion of New Music sponsored a performance at the Royal Festival Hall conducted by Norman Del Mar. The BBC broadcast his vocal piece Surya in 1971.
An Arts Council bursary in 1972 enabled Sohal to turn to music full time, and he moved to Leeds University to begin a study of microintervals, an ideal topic for a composer from India, where the octave has 22 divisions rather than the 12 heard in western music. Composition got the better of him, however, and the study remained unfinished.
Back in London he won the 1974 Young Composers’ Forum with a chamber work called Hexad and was commissioned to write The Wanderer, based on the old English poem, which was performed at the 1982 Proms. In 1983 he moved to Edinburgh, where things started well with Gautama Buddha, a ballet commission from the International Festival that was also performed in Houston, Texas. But in 1994, fearing the rise in Scottish nationalism, Sohal returned to London. Three years later Satyagraha marked the 50th anniversary of Indian independence with a curious blend of a meditative Indian tune with the empireevoking anthem Rule, Britannia! It was conducted by Zubin Mehta, who championed Sohal’s music in New York and Tel Aviv.
The Cosmic Dance (2013), his second Proms commission, was 55 minutes in length. The Telegraph’s Ivan Hewett described it as “a brightly coloured ‘novelty’ of the kind Sir Henry Wood might have approved”, adding that “the piece was indulgently over-extended.”
There were hopes of writing an opera and Sohal met Salman Rushdie, his potential librettist, at an Indian restaurant near Baker Street. But the project foundered because of their desire to write only for the main stage at Covent Garden rather than the smaller one that was on offer.
Sohal played chess, enjoyed photography, was a capable homeopath and bowled a nifty off-spin googly.
In 1987 he was awarded the Order of the Lotus by the Indian government, the first non-resident Indian to be so recognised. Four years later his low income was the subject of an investigation by the Inland Revenue, but this was dropped when Sohal pointed out that he was virtually a vegetarian, seldom drank and refused to teach because “it dilutes your creative purpose.”
Naresh Sohal met the writer Janet Swinney while at Leeds, although they only married in 2013. She survives him.
Naresh Sohal, born September 18 1939, died April 30 2018