The Attar Project:

"Dazzling" technical command.”
Musicworks Magazine

"Visually and sonically exhilirating."
magizone

"I am really glad she didn’t become a surgeon"
Lulu

Beauty Enthralled - "A cross-cultural handshake to set the mind spinning."
NOW

Lulu’s Letter-box:

(Although Lulu is known to be rather private about her personal mail, she felt that Gabriola might be interested in what this stunning violinist, Parmela Attariwala, has to say about her journey as an artist, and her delight in getting to work with dancer Gitanjali Kolanad, and percussionist, Shawn Mativetsk. Read on … )

Dear Lulu,

I think the best place to start is to say that probably everything I’ve done musically was accidental. I didn't plan on becoming a musician. I always pictured myself as a doctor for Medicins Sans
Frontiéres somewhere in Africa. I even spent a year at the University of Calgary as a science major!

But the violin and my violin teachers had different ideas for me. A chance masterclass performance for cellist Janos Starker became my audition for Indiana University. I followed that with two years at the Conservatory in Bern Switzerland, which was violinistically great, but emotionally trying. Suffice it to say that until Switzerland, it had never occurred to me that part of the world didn’t believe that brown people could be Canadian. (I even tried to prove it by taking a Swiss guy on a date to a Canada-USSR World Junior hockey game where I sported a big Canada banner!) After that, I moved to London, where I fortuitously, and accidentally, enrolled in a Masters program in ethnomusicology at the School of Oriental and African Studies without really knowing what ethnomusicology was. It completely changed my life, completely changed my way of being a musician and conceiving of music. It was also a kind of personal therapy. In the process of specializing in North Indian music and writing a dissertation on Sikh poetry and music, I uncovered layers of cultural superstitions that had always hovered foggily in my otherwise very Canadian upbringing. I learned about Indian history, I learned how to understand behaviour
(especially religious ritual) in the context of history and circumstance, and I finally learned the
origins of North Indian antipathy towards female musicians (the British have a lot to answer for!).

Now, over a decade later, I'm back at the academic grindstone working on a Ph.D. in ethnomusicology and ethnic studies at the University of Toronto. I don’t want you to think that I’m primarily an academic, Lulu. My heart is a musician’s heart. My inner voice speaks through the violin. My spirit is a creative one that needs to explore, push boundaries and consider
new frontiers of musical experience. Music has always been my way of understanding the world, particularly the parts I don’t understand or can’t put into words. My academic side is an extension of my needing to consciously understand why music is important – not just to me, but to society. Though I hate to bring ethnicity into the picture, the truth as I know it, is that many who share my ethnic background don’t find music important. So, I’ve always felt the need to defend my choice to be an artist and have been able to explain this through academic questioning.

How do I define the music I will be playing for you? In fact, one can’t even call all of it music because I also move. When I chanced to meet Gitanjali Kolanad, the dancer who will be performing with me, I found her interested in working with moving musicians. Gita and I began creating a piece, “Piercing Embrace” in which Gita choreographed South Indian (bharata-natyam) poses
on me and I created music that was determined by my choreography.

The third member of our trio is Montreal-based tabla player, Shawn Mativetsky. Shawn and I will be performing a piece by Alberta composer Robert Rosen: the first piece I commissioned that attempted to fuse Indian and Western elements. Shawn and I will also be doing some improv – both free improv, and a traditional north Indian tabla solo. And yes, I began improvising by accident, too!

Parmela