Krishna Nagaraja: Finding a home amid polskas, baroque and metal rhythms

“I tend to connect people. Because I play the viola, that gives me this status as connector in an orchestra. I have to listen to both sides of the story, the bass and the treble,” says musician and composer Krishna Nagaraja. 

This role as a connector is not restricted to an orchestral context, though. Nagaraja recognises it in various settings – across styles and genres.

“With Nordic folk music, this tendency helped me find parallels between folk and baroque music, as well as with progressive metal, Indian rhythms, contemporary music and my own musical idiom.”

This may first seem like a highly unusual combination but comes very naturally to Nagaraja. It’s based on his background and tradition, growing up near Milan with an Italian mother and Indian father who met in England. 

“This is the effect of being uprooted as a person or as a musician,” he says. “I didn’t grow up immersed in a specific Indian or Italian cultural tradition. The scope and mindset were quite broad, as my parents are both migrants.”

Nagaraja’s background is also reflected in his wide range of activities. He received his doctorate from the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki in 2022 (see the full public examination here) and is now conducting post-doctoral research on polymetry in Norwegian folk, late medieval and progressive metal music. His path to fiddling in Finland and Norway was winding, though. After a degree in classical violin performance in Italy in 2001, he switched to baroque violin, which he studied and performed all over Europe.   

“Then I discovered that my heart was more alto than treble, so I switched to viola. But in most of the baroque music I’ve played so far, the viola part is not the most exciting part. It’s in the middle and glues everything together; as Bach said, the viola is the centre of harmony. But if you play Vivaldi over and over again, you might get slightly bored,” he says with a wry smile.

On a whim, because deadlines for other master’s degree programmes had passed, Nagaraja applied for one in global music at the Sibelius Academy. 

“I had no idea what that meant, but it’s really incredible what they’re doing in that department. So by a funny twist of fate, I found myself in Finland. I liked it very much and 12 years later, here we are.”

Beam of light on a dark night

Nagaraja has worked with ensembles such as Meta4 and La Fonte Musica, grappled with building his own harmonic and musical language. Just before moving to Finland, Nagaraja co-founded the “folk-baroque” band Brú in an effort to explore the territories where Irish and baroque music could meet. Meanwhile, he’d also been absorbing Nordic polskas. 

“I fell in love with these weird tunes and very thick arrangements of violins and violas by great bands like JPP and Väsen. So when I moved here, I focused on Nordic folklore, which really resonated with me. I took lessons with Esko Järvelä of JPP and many others, which was mind-blowing.”

So how then did Nagaraja end up focusing on Norway’s national instrument, the Hardanger fiddle or hardingfele?

“Sometimes you meet someone or something in your life and for whatever reason, your mind kind of explodes. It could be a person or an animal. In my case, it was the sound of an instrument. It came just at the right moment as I was finishing my master’s degree.” 

He remembers walking on a dark winter night in Malmö, Sweden, listening to a Hardanger fiddle album by Synnøve Bjørset on his iPod.

“It was like the beam of light that delivers Mr Bean to the universe! I thought, ‘I want to do this’. The sound captivated me, the resonance, the language of the tunes, especially the drone-like quality, the melancholy,” he says. “There’s something inexplicably magic about the instrument and the spirals that it weaves around you. It’s connected to trance states like ecstasy, especially a certain strand of repertoire.”

No wonder then that the church once condemned the hardingfele as the devil’s instrument.

Nagaraja says that being guided to find a fele of his own by his mentor, Swedish fiddler Daniel Sandén-Warg, was a turning point in his musical life. On his Tales from Norway album with string quartet Meta4, Nagaraja drew on the mystical music of the Setesdal valley, the Unesco-listed “cradle of Norwegian folk tradition”. 

Released in 2022, the CD was part of his doctoral project, Polska Travels, exploring the history of the polska and its convergence with baroque music, among other themes. For instance, his Norwegian Suite for Hardanger fiddle on the album was inspired by the valley’s rammeslåtter (‘powerful tunes’). 

“These were notoriously associated with spells and hypnotic, suggestive powers. As a very rational but also spiritual person, this captivated me,” says Nagaraja. 

Metric ambiguity and metal

The other piece on the album, Stringar, draws on Norwegian springar dance tunes… and rhythms from much further afield.

“I started listening to these weird springar tunes, which sound in a way like polskas but they’re a bit deranged, very rhythmic. Sometimes you can’t really figure out the meter. Metric ambiguity has always fascinated me. It brought to the surface other areas where I’ve experienced this metric ambiguity, for example progressive metal. I’m a big fan of Dream Theatre, Meshuggah and TesseracT; very complex songs where you start headbanging to a beat and then the drums come in and you’re completely thrown off because the meter is something else. I find it so hypnotic!” 

This juxtaposition drove him “down the rabbit hole of polymetry, polyrhythms and metric ambiguity,” which is the core of his postdoctoral project. He recently completed the first part, an investigation of polymetry in certain Norwegian tunes. The next stage focuses on late medieval music. 

“One could say, ‘what the hell, what are you talking about?’. But there was a time in the 1300s and 1400s where the rhythmic complexity of music was incredible, very similar to the metric complexity of the 20th century,” he notes, pointing to György Ligeti’s fondness for Philippe de Vitry and other late Ars Nova or Ars subtilior medieval composers from France and Italy. 

“The surface level speaks of rocks above the surface of the sea, but if you go down, there’s a whole submerged world where unexpected encounters can happen. And that happened for me with rhythms coming from apparently different musical realms, including Nordic and Indian.”

Nagaraja did not hear much Indian music when he was growing up. He didn’t even visit the country until he was in his early 30s, an experience that was “quite intense”.

“My father, being a rather introverted, quiet guy, never really transmitted his cultural traditions to my sister and me. His family is from Bengaluru in southern India. I have cousins there and I’ve visited a few times as an adult and tried to learn these impossible rhythms and artistry.”

While there, he briefly studied Konnakol, the art of rapid-fire rhythmic pronunciation of syllables. 

“It deals with the complexities of Indian rhythms using a tool that we all possess, our pronunciation. It’s like a drum language. Once you get to the core of it, you understand that you can approach complex rhythms by simplifying and embodying them at a very accessible level,” he explains, adding that these “hidden rhythmical structures” partly led to Stringar.

“It creates rhythmic tension that is then resolved on the downbeat or wherever you want. And this is exactly what I wanted. So Indian music had a huge impact on that particular composition. I also used it in certain bits of the Hardanger fiddle suite, and for the first postdoctoral piece that I’m just finishing.”

That “rather challenging” polyrhythmic work is for Mariette Reefman, an Australian violist with the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra, who has played baroque and heavy metal and may perform it at their master’s concert in 2025.

His second postdoc piece will draw on medieval music for the Italian ensemble La Fonte Musica, who mainly play late medieval and Renaissance music on period instruments. The third is a commission for Meta4, to be premiered at the Kuhmo Festival in 2026. 

“I’m definitely going to throw a lot of progressive metal in this time!”

Improvisation and the fetish of the score

Even amid these genre explorations, Nagaraja still cherishes baroque music and Nordic polskas – along with the complex, multifaceted links he perceives between them.

“There’s historical proximity because the style of writing ‘in the Polish manner’ was very much in use in the late Renaissance and early Baroque period. It was a construction by German theorists and musicians. Scholars think that it laid the rhythmic foundations for what was then called polonaise or Polish dance, and some of what we now call polska,” he explains.

Nagaraja observes that based on many musical details, the modern-day Nordic polska and the baroque polonaise come from a very similar tree. 

“If not from the same tree,” Nagaraja elaborates. “After all ‘polska’ means Polish, so it migrated from central Europe to Sweden and then to Norway and Finland with merchants, travellers and court musicians.”

Nagaraja identifies with this musical wanderer.

“There’s a personal proximity that I feel with polska because it’s a traveller like me; it migrated all over the place and acquired different specific characteristics that are still evolving. I also tend to change depending on the context, whether it’s Finland, Italy, Norway or India. I try to absorb the local vibes and let this otherness change me.”

Another link between Scandinavian folk music and baroque music is improvisation. In folk and baroque, he also sees a parallel in that they took the musical score – or the oral tradition in the case of folk music – as a canvas, not as the ultimate truth.

“It’s intriguing if you compare that with modernity and the myth of the ‘work of art’ that comes to us through the score, the fetish of the score,” observes Nagaraja. “It’s extremely healthy especially for us classical musicians to do a bit of that and learn things by ear, bringing in some practices from the folk music world.” 

On the other side, conceiving music as it is done in the classical field might be valuable for some folk musicians, says Nagaraja. 

“There’s a lot of this kind of exchange of information now, especially in places like Finland. I try to treat scores from 300–400 years ago as testimonies from the past, to understand what they were really saying and give justice to the intentions of the composer. But those styles and composers are dead, and we’re alive. Music has to happen now – even if it’s from the past.” 

Featured photo: Claire Keogh