Urban Legend: Perfect symphony Ashley drums up a crescendo

The founder of the Indian National Symphony Orchestra, the only one of its kind in India, musician and conductor Ashley Williams is on a mission to bring western classical musicians from India the recognition they need. He talks to Darshana Ramdev about a rich legacy and meeting obstacles with unwavering passion.

In the early 1980s, the Taj West End in Bengaluru hosted some very special guests – Richard Attenborough and Ben Kingsley, who arrived in Bengaluru to make the iconic 1982 film, Gandhi. At the time, the man behind the musical scores was one William Joseph, a teacher at Baldwin Boy’s School in Richmond Town. His son, Ashley Williams, who was a teenager at the time, had been assigned the task of hand-writing the scores. “One day, I heard a volley of abuse coming from dad’s office in Baldwins,” Williams recalled. He ran in to find an agent demanding that Joseph pay her a commission. Williams was dispatched with a note for Attenborough, who arrived at their house, full of apologies, which included the remark: “You Indians are at each others’ throats for money.” At this point, said Williams, who recalled the story in his office in Koramangala, “We gave them the scores and declined payment.”

Much has changed for Williams since, although the dignity of art remains untarnished. Today, as he speaks of his work with composing greats like Illaiyaraja and A.R. Rahman, he says, “Musicians from the William Joseph Symphony Orchestra are always welcome with them,” adding, not immodestly, “They play with me!”

Instruments lie scattered across his office, rather predictably, of course, inside the William Joseph Music Academy in Koramangala. Construction work outside keeps up a relentless clangour, but Williams, who is hunched over his desk, appears barely to hear it at all. "I'm working on my latest production, Oliver Twist,” he announces, as we enter, gesturing to a notebook filled with seemingly unintelligible doodles until he explains: “This is the lighting flow. I like to take care of all the details myself, from lighting to costumes.”

A double bass takes pride of place in his corner office and catches our eye at once. “It's 150 years old,” Williams remarked, as he obliged us with a quick tour. “I found it in St. Andrew's Church and pieced it back together.” An ornate sitar laid out against one wall, he says, belonged to the Maharaja of Jodphur and dates back to the 1700s. He acquired it for the princely sum of Rs 5000, in Ulsoor! “There's one string missing and I can have them replaced, but the rest are originals and I don't want to displace them!” These antiques, which include a violin and an upright piano (which he stops to play for a minute) that's been in his family for generations, are hallmarks of a rich family legacy.

The founder and director of the Indian National Symphony Orchestra, which bears the distinction of being the only one of its kind in the country, Williams is a familiar name to any old Bengalurean, having been associated with some of the city’s most prestigious schools. His father, William Joseph, founded the Bangalore Orchestra, Bengaluru’s first. “I come from a hugely musical family, going back to my grandfather,” recalled Williams, in what is, incidentally, his first interview since 2004. His father gave his first performance at the age of three on the violin, a prodigy who found his heart lay in teaching. He died at 61, in the midst of playing the pipe organ at St. Andrews.

And still, somehow, Williams grew up thinking he would be a mechanical engineer. “My dad was one of the country's first automobile engineers. Me? I got kicked out of the course on my first day!” Musicians, he added, by way of explanation, “live life of on their own terms.” It was at the Asian Institute of Liturgy and Music in the Philippines that he came into his own as a musician, where two professors Dr Francisco Feliciano and Richard Mazo Jr, both of whom taught him conducting, became profound influences in his life. “On the piano, I would practice eight hours a day, with a flask of coffee and a pack of cigarettes!” One night, as he got off stage after a John Denver song at a rock club in Manila, he spotted the man himself, sitting quietly with a drink. “I introduced myself to him and he was surprised – he had never been noticed there before! We had a drink together and he offered to sign my book – a concept I hadn’t heard of before!”

Williams went on to become the youngest Indian to be offered the directorship of the Japanese Philharmonic Orchestra. “I was 24 and there was no internet to help them find me. It was all word of mouth.” His years abroad were filled with successes, from conducting the Japanese and Hope of Bangkok Philharmonic Orchestras to performing a back-to-back show with Zubin Mehta, widely hailed as the world’s foremost conductor. Still, unlike many musical greats, Williams returned to India – a choice he attributes to a “middle class mentality” and “stupidity with lots of passion.” Conducting the Bangkok Phil opened up a whole new world for Williams, who noticed that the orchestra was made up entirely of Asian musicians. “I thought, why can’t we do the same in India, too?”

Upon his return, he found a wealth of talent: capable musicians shaped by the rigours of the film industry. “The Symphony Orchestra of India, headquartered out of Mumbai, was the closest the country had,” Williams recalled. “Their plan was to start out with around 20 Indian musicians and increase their number slowly. Today, there are what, five Indians in the orchestra? That’s how the Indian National Symphony Orchestra came to be, born out of Williams’ desire to start one comprised entirely of Indians. “An Asian Philharmonic is something we’re working on too,” he said.

Funding is critical, but little stands in the way of his no-nonsense approach. “A potential sponsor recently demanded 20 front-row seats, an intermission during which he could promote his product and the company banner across my backdrop. I said no. Music is a part of me, we don’t look anywhere else.”