New Albany musician to host upcoming BBC radio program

Jul. 8—NEW ALBANY — A New Albany musician is providing a global perspective on the classical music world in an upcoming radio show that will be broadcast to international audiences.

Jon Silpayamanant, a Thai-American cellist, composer and transcultural researcher, is the host of the upcoming BBC Radio 3 program "World of Classical," a three-part program that will begin this weekend. He is an adjunct professor of cello at Indiana University Southeast's music department.

The program "traces shifting global trends across different musical cultures." In addition to hosting, Silpayamanant also wrote the script for the show.

The hour-long episodes each include 45 minutes of music. Throughout the show, he discusses the history of classical music across the world and delves into issues such as colonialism and slavery.

"It's about the music and me making connections between the types of music," he said.

Silpayamanant said classical music has often been focused on Western culture, and he wants to see a shift to a more global focus.

"Classical music has been written all over the world for centuries, but we never hear about the symphony from South America or the cantata from South Africa or the opera written in the Philippines," he said. "But these have been there for just as long as it's been in Europe because of colonization."

Silpayamanant was born in Thailand, but he grew up in New Albany and graduated from New Albany High School. He studied cello performance at DePauw University.

He eventually moved back to New Albany and began teaching at IUS, where he teaches with the IUS School of Arts and Letters Music Department and Arts Institute.

He has been composing consistently since 2004, and he performs with several local groups in the Louisville area. He is the founder of the Saw Peep Intercultural Orchestra and a member of the new A/Tonal music group.

In his work, he has studied the history of different styles of music across the world. Another musician was originally in consideration for the BBC Radio 3 program, but when he couldn't do the show, the musician recommended Silpayamanant for "World of Classical."

The radio program will begin Sunday with an episode called "Pious Voices and Plucked Strings." This episode focuses on early music and the development of musical notation, which varied across different cultures ranging from European countries to Ethiopia.

"It's talking about notation as a global phenomenon, because obviously other cultures have developed their own notation systems, and it's not just purely a Western thing," he said.

The second episode, called "Courtly Dances, Imperial Advances," will air July 17. It will talk about the ways patronage, empires and colonialism shaped the creation and performance of classical music. For example, the episode includes court music from Italy, Thailand and Japan.

"It's all these different types of court music that have a very different form than the church music from the earlier period," Silpayamanant said.

The third episode, "Nationhood and New Sounds," is focused on the evolution of concert music and cultural exchange of music across the world and will air July 24. He talks about artists such as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Claude Debussy, as well as ensembles and musical forms developed in places such as the Balkans and Zanzibar.

"Some of it is tied to modeling themselves after Western orchestras or Western ensembles," he said. "Some of those emerged because of their own traditions that emerged."

One of the musicians he highlights in "World of Classical" is Siti binti Saad, a singer from Zanzibar who pioneered a genre called taarab that mixed Arabic styles with Eastern African percussion.

Silpayamanant has also been interviewed on another BBC radio program called "Classical Commonwealth" looking at the role of classical music in the British Commonwealth and British colonies, and a follow-up will be broadcast in coming weeks, he said.

"It's been a learning experience, because radio production is a much different experience than live music production or even recorded music production," he said.

He said he appreciates the opportunity to showcase "wonderful music from all around the world."

"These composers have been around for centuries — we just haven't been focusing on them," Silpayamanant said.