Expertise:

Interdisciplinary Arts, Intercultural Performing Arts, Globalisation and Culture, Contemporary Music Composition, Indian Art Music, Intercultural Music, Cultural Life in Germany, Discourse on Research-Creation, Media Arts, Contemporary German Theatre, Opera, Experimental Music Theatre, notation intermedia work social historical anthropological contexts

Language(s) spoken:

English, French (able to conduct interviews in French), German

Professor Sandeep Bhagwati is a multiple award-winning composer, theatre director and media artist. His compositions and comprovisations in all genres (including six operas) have been performed by leading performers at leading venues and festivals worldwide. He has directed international music festivals and intercultural exchange projects with Indian and Chinese musicians and leading new music ensembles. He was Professor of Composition at Karlsruhe Music University and Composer-in-Residence at the IRCAM Paris, ZKM Karlsruhe, Beethoven Orchestra Bonn, IEM Graz, CalArts Los Angeles, Heidelberg University and Tchaikovsky Conservatory Moscow.

In 2014, a retrospective at the Time of Music Festival in Viitasaari/Finland showcased his compositions and comprovisations. The 2023/24 season of the Quebec Society for Contemporary Music SMCQ was dedicated entirely to his work, with countless performances and premieres, a children's comic book about his life, a pedagodical guide on his oeuvre and other publications and honors.

As Canada Research Chair for Inter-X Arts at Concordia University from 2006-2016, Professor Bhagwati founded and currently directs matralab, a research/creation center for intercultural and interdisciplinary arts. His current work centers on comprovisation, inter-traditional aesthetics, the aesthetics of interdisciplinarity, gestural theatre, sonic theatre and interactive visual and non-visual scores, interdisciplinary 'comprovisation,' live-dramaturgy, and experimental performance topologies.

He was, between 2009-2011 director of Hexagram Concordia, the research-creation centre for arts and technology, and from 2018-2022 director of the international TENOR Research Network for Technologies in Notation and Representation. He is a co-founder and editor of "TURBA-The Journal for Global Practices in Live Arts Curation".

He has founded and is the musical director of three ensembles of trans-traditional experimental music in Montréal ("Ecstasies of Influence"), Berlin ("Extrakte") and Pune ("Sangeet Prayog"). Extrakte has recently been reformatted as the global musicians network "Sabdagatitara", of which he is the artistic director and which will be ensemble-in-residence at the Darmstadt Spring Meeting in April 2025. In May 2025, he will also be a faculty member at the "Soundweavings" Workshop at the Banff Centre for the Arts. In his theoretical work, he has introduced two new terms to musical discourse: "comprovisation" and "trans-traditional musicking", both now widely used.

He is a sought-after keynote speaker and public speaker at conferences and in venues worldwide. He has published widely, mostly in book collections and periodicals. The first collection of his writings on trans-traditional musicking will appear at Wolke Verlag in 2026 in a bilingual (english/german) edition.

He has worked with many leading musicians of many diverse traditions including Wu Wei, Moritz Ernst, Nguyen Thanh Thuy, Gabriel Dharmoo, Vinny Golia, Catherine Milliken, Marco Blaauw, Mei Han, Moritz Eggert, Anja Lechner, Stefan Østersjø, Elinor Frey, Zal Sissokho, Lori Freedman, Jieun Kang, Jocelyn Clarke, Marie Annick Beliveau, Lucy Zhao, Didem Başar, Kouame Sereba, Taavi Oramo, Lorraine Vaillancourt, Shubha Mudgal, Simon Rattle, Dhruba Ghosh, Sarah Maria Sun, Vincent Royer, Aneesh Pradhan, Sameer Dublay,  Mike Svoboda, Dave Taylor, Peter Evans, Marc Soustrot, Uday Bhawalkar, Gebrüder Teichmann, Kiya Tabassian, Peter Ruzicka, Lau Bonitz, Mark Applebaum, Aiyun Huang, Nicholas Isherwood, David Rosenboom, Farhan Sabbagh. 

As well as with renowned ensembles and orchestras such as Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart, Quasar Saxophone Quartet Montréal, Hezarfen Ensemble Istanbul, China Found Music Workshop Taipei, Ensemble Modern Frankfurt,  Klangforum Wien, Nouvel Ensemble Moderne Montréal, Beethoven Orchestra Bonn,  Munich Philharmonic Orchestra, Arraymusic Toronto, Bozzini Quartet Montréal, Sonar Quartett Basel, Berner Streichquartett, etc.

He has also collaborated with many artists in fields other than music such as theatre personalities Johannes Schütz, Jürgen Gosch, Gerardian Rijnders, Jürgen Holtz, Pierre Bokma, and others as well as with poets/writers Monika Rinck, Ranjit Hoskote, Lance Olsen, René Daniel Dubois, Christian Filips, Yoko Tawada, Yang Liang, Arundhati Subramaniam, Dilip Chitre, Amit Chaudhuri, among others. 

Visit this expert's Faculty Profile