Moving Forward

FORMATION OF SIFAS ALUMNI MUSIC WING 

When the SIFAS Alumni was first formed more than 3 yrs ago, there was never a music wing. I was not involved in the previous SIFAS Alumni committees. Despite being an ex-SIFAS student myself, I was not very involved in SIFAS programs after my guru left SIFAS. For the past 10 years, I have been a member of the People’s Association Singapore Indian Orchestra and Choir. 

At the beginning of last year (2011), I met our current President, Ms Gomathi who urged me to join the SIFAS Alumni. After our chat, I decided to join the Alumni and signed up. My decision to join was also motivated by the fact that my musical path in SIOC was heading in a direction which was very different to what I expected for myself. I also wanted to do something for the younger generation and promote Indian classical music. 

The younger generation learns about classical music but does not stay beyond a certain time or after graduation. The reason they cite for their early retirement is their studies and hectic lifestyle of Singapore. I wanted to change all of this. Together with me, Sai Akilesh and Sai Vignesh both joined the SIFAS Alumni. 

During last year's SIFAS Alumni committee elections, I ran for the post of Music IC. Once elected, I brought in Akilesh and Vignesh to help build my sub-committee. 

Our task was to form a SIFAS Alumni Orchestra. Our Senior Alumni, Rajandra became our Orchestra conductor. We also consulted Mr Radha Vijayan for advice during this process. Our main obstacle was to in recruiting members. Most of the older Alumni did not want to join or were not interested to come back to SIFAS. We went around asking most people but to no avail. There were only about 5 musicians able to commit to the orchestra. During one of the meetings, another Senior Alumni, Mrs Nirmala told us to start of with we have instead of waiting. By seeing us start, others would join us. That really pushed us forward. 

We started practices with our small number of musicians. Our group was small but we had fun in the process. Slowly a few others joined us. We had our first performance during the 2011 SIFAS Academy day. It went very well and people became keen to know more about this small group of us. From there we slow had graduating SIFAS students to join us. Numbers eventually did grow. We continued with our weekly Sunday practices. A proper structure was starting to fall into place. 

Our latest performance was held during the SIFAS Music and Dance Festival 2012. We had very good reviews about the orchestra. As I was confident that we were capable of performing on a bigger platform, I decided together with my team that we should commence with efforts toward our first major production. We currently have about 20 members and we are hopeful that the strength will be increased to 30 members by the end of 2012. This will give us some performance strength for our production. It makes me very happy to see the Alumni music wing reach to this standard within a year. My team and I will strive to materialise this dream of a major production and create an awareness of classical music to the younger generation. This is my passion and dream. 

Moving Forward…..



By: Thulasidas (Music In Charge of SIFAS ALUMNI)