Grammy® nominated composer Silvia Nakkach has been an exhilarating and unique bridge between American and South Asian musical traditions for more than 30 years. From a background in North Indian classical music and avant-garde composition, Nakkach has evolved her own style employing elements of minimal melodicism, electronic liminal sonorities, and orbital rhythmic materials that seeks to transcends the ordinary sense of time, and exploring the relation between music and space.
Her entrancing art-music draws elements from ambient and contemporary new music on one hand, and classical Indian ragas and sacred Afro-Brazilian chants on the other. Creating a language of its own, each of her dozens of released albums is a gentle rendition of her passionate and studious dedication to unusual vocal-cultures and extended sound atmospheres, a vital new repertoire perfectly attuned for global listeners. Beyond categories, Nakkach has cultivated a voice that transports the listeners into the heart of devotion, and her voice-work covers an enormous amount of territory.
Named by Utne Reader magazine as one of 40 cutting-edge artists that will shake the art world in the new millennium, she is an internationally renowned vocal artist, a recording producer, as well as a sought after educator and author. She is on the faculty of the California Institute of integral Studies (CIIS) where she created the premier certificate program on Sound, Voice and Music in the Healing Arts offered by a major academic institution. In addition, she has lectured widely in many prestigious universities across Europe, South America, and at the New York University (NYU), and Arizona State University (ASU) among others in the US.
Nakkach is also renowned as the founding director of the international Vox Mundi School of the Voice that has committed more than 28 years to the preservation of unusual vocal arts through performance, education, and spiritual practice, with ongoing programs and centers across the USA, Brazil, Argentina, Japan and India. Through the continued sponsorship of the Vox Mundi Project Study Abroad Program, she is able to travel extensively offering keynote presentations and performances of her original works, and training students and teachers across four continents and many cultures.
Nakkach is the author of the ground breaking vocal teaching technique and certificate – The Yoga of the Voice – that thrives in the integration of voice, body gestures, performance wellness, and states of meditation. Thousands of students and musicians worldwide continue to benefit from taking this course.
Nakkach holds Master’s Degrees in Psychology, Music Psychotherapy, and Music Composition from Mills College in Oakland, California. In addition to her many academic credentials, she has devoted more than 30 years to the study of classical Indian music and raga singing under the direction of the late maestro Ali Akbar Khan. She continues mastering the art of raga singing as a disciple of Dr. Ritwik Sanyal in Varanasi, India, learning the ancient classical art of Dhrupad singing and Nada Yoga, which explores the integration of subtle forms of sound and awareness.
A several times award-winning composer, sound designer, and a former psychotherapist, she is recognized internationally as a leading authority in the field of sound healing and the implementation of music to convey expanded states of consciousness. Her work has led her to participate in the research of microtonal singing and clinical uses of the voice to support emotional healing. Silvia’s therapeutic vocal techniques have become landmarks in the field of music healing, and widely used in Hospices, Wellness and Integrative Medicine centers.
“ When she sings wordless vocalese in a hushed voice, it’s like she’s whispering incantations into your ear”_ John Diliberto (Echoes Radio)
Her classical training and trans-cultural sensibility ensures that intellect and simplicity are always present in her approach to the voice and instrumentation. In addition to her proficiency in rendering the ragas of North India, a particular strength that Nakkach brings to her music is her experience working with the people of the Amazon, from whom she gained new insights about silence, the sacred, the magical, and the power of poetry and music merging as one indivisible art form. After three years of inquiry and studying the myths of creation and the sound poems of many tribes, her research resumed with the creation of a chamber opera Amazonia Insight (1991) that had performances world wide, and is one of the highlights of her composer’s carrier.
Nakkach’s albums have received extensive worldwide airplay, including on SiriusXM Satellite Radio, Pandora, cable TV’s Music Choice, PRI’s Echoes, and Heart of Space, and Nakkach’s Medicine Melodies and Grammy-nominated In Love and Longing, has been a Best Seller on Amazon in the New Age genre for past three years.
She has enjoyed fruitful collaborations with many great musicians such as: Paul McCandless, Pauline Oliveros, David Darling, John Beaulieu, Miguel Frasconi and the Glass Orchestra, Todd Boston, Jeff Oster, and Michael Knapp. Nakkach’s compositions have been performed by new music ensembles worldwide, and she continues to be immersed in a multitude of creative work ranging from music for film and new touring destinations.
She is a contributing author to various books including Music and the Human Process, Music in Human Adaptation, The Transpersonal Consciousness, and Music Therapy at the End of Life. In addition to many published scholarly articles her latest book: Free Your Voice (2012) is available by Sounds True publishers.
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