An acclaimed Indian-American pianist, composer, and musicologist is among the recipients of so-called ”Genius Grant” for 2013, formally known as the MacArthur fellowship, that comes with $625,000 (approx Rs 4 crore) pocket money to recognize the brilliance of its winners.

Announced to much fanfare in September each year just before the Nobel season, the awards increasingly features Indian-Americans (the economist Raj Chetty is a 2012 awardee and computer scientist Shwetak Patel was recognized in 2011). But even by that token, this year’s fellow, Vijay Iyer, strikes a unique note.

He not only composes and collaborates across multiple genres and disciplines, but his scholarly research centers on the act of listening. Much of this goes back to his undergraduate degree (maths and physics at Yale) and graduate work (an interdisciplinary PhD program in Technology and the Arts, focusing on music cognition) that resulted in a 1998 dissertation titled Microstructures of Feel, Macrostructures of Sound: Embodied Cognition in West African and African-American Music.

Outside academia though, he is better known as a Grammy-nominated jazz pianist who has had a long-standing collaboration with the saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa (both have played at the Indian Embassy in Washington DC) and South Asian chamber trio Tirtha, featuring guitarist Prasanna and tabla player Nitin Mitta. Iyer is embarking on a new job as Professor of Arts and Music at Harvard University when news came about the Genius Grant, which does not in any way interfere with the plans of its recipients or how they choose to spend the money.

Among the 24 MacArthur Fellows for 2013 is Kyle Abraham, a dancer-choreographer who was living on food stamps just three years ago.

Source: The Times of India