Sitar Maestro Ravi Shankar Dies at 92

Jagadeesh Nv/European Pressphoto AgencyIn this Feb.7 2012 file photo, Pandit Ravi Shankar performing at a concert in Bangalore, Karnataka. 

Ravi Shankar, the Indian sitarist and composer, died Tuesday in a hospital near his home in Southern California. He was 92.

Mr. Shankar had suffered from upper respiratory and heart ailment in the last year and underwent a heart-valve replacement surgery last Thursday, his family said in a statement.

The legendary musician's collaborations with “Western classical musicians as well as rock stars helped foster a worldwide appreciation of India's traditional music,â € Allan Kozinn wrote in The New York Times.

Mr. Shankar, whose formal name was Robindra Shankar Chowdhury, was born on April 7, 1920, in Varanasi, to a family of musicians and dancers, Mr. Kozinn wrote. “His older brother Uday directed a touring Indian dance troupe, which Ravi joined when he was 10.” In a span of five years, “he had become one of the company's star soloists,” Mr. Kozinn wrote. “He also discovered that he had a facility with the sitar and the sarod, another stringed instrument, as well as the flute and the tabla, an Indian drum.”

The Grammy-award winning artist was trained in both “Eastern and Western musical traditions,” Mr. Kozin wrote.

Altho ugh Western audiences were often mystified by the odd sounds and shapes of the instruments when he began touring in Europe and the United States in the early 1950s, Mr. Shankar and his ensemble gradually built a large following for Indian music.

His instrument, the sitar, has a small rounded body and a long neck with a resonating gourd at the top. It has 6 melody strings and 25 sympathetic strings (which are not played but resonate freely as the other strings are plucked). Sitar performances are partly improvised, but the improvisations are strictly governed by a repertory of ragas (melodic patterns representing specific moods, times of day, seasons of the year or events) and talas (intricate rhythmic patterns) that date back several millenniums.

Mr. Shankar's quest for a Western audience was helped in 1965 when George Harrison of the Beatles began to study the sitar with him. But Harrison was not the first Wester n musician to seek Mr. Shankar's guidance. In 1952 he met and began performing with the violinist Yehudi Menuhin, with whom he made three recordings for EMI: “West Meets East” (1967), “West Meets East, Vol. 2” (1968) and “Improvisations: East Meets West” (1977).

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