Meet Juhi Bansal | Composer

We had the good fortune of connecting with Juhi Bansal and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Juhi, what role has risk played in your life or career?
It’s funny, because I don’t consider myself a natural risk taker at all, but it’s something I have learned to do over time. One of the places I find a lot of inspiration is in wild places – mountains and ocean – particularly hiking alone and traveling solo. I’ve slogged my way up tortuous mountains alone and sick because after a week hiking out there was no other way to exit than to push through, I’ve gotten lost alone in canyons and had to find my way out, I’ve fallen and taken beatings in the water surfing and learned to get back up. As unrelated as these things sound, I think those experiences have given me a much greater willingness to take risks – both in my personal and professional life. You learn a certain resilience through making mistakes – that more often than you think, things do surprisingly turn out ok. And I’ve also learned to keep learning – that is, both outdoors, and in music/admin/everything-that-constitutes-being-a-creative-artist – to keep studying, growing and expanding my skillset. It’s the only way I know to be smart about risk-taking: not to be afraid to make mistakes, but instead to learn from them, proactively find ways to fill in the gaps in your skillset, and not be afraid to ask for help when you need it.

One of the most exciting manifestations for me of the ability to take risks has been that the creative work that comes from that decision is much more interesting. I remember getting a commission during Covid to create an opera-digital-short (music with video to be streamed online) on the theme of Identity. And I had been thinking a lot about the Bangladesh Girls Surf Club (a group that I volunteered with many years ago) and wondering how they were doing between the Rohingya Crisis and refugee situation in the area where they live. I proposed to the producers a project that I thought sounded crazy and that they would never go for – combining Hindustani and Western Classical music and shooting locally in California to make a piece inspired by the Bangladesh Girl’s Surf Club, and to my surprise and delight they green-lit the project. That became my piece Waves of Change – to this day of the pieces I’m most proud of.

Please tell us more about your work. We’d love to hear what sets you apart from others, what you are most proud of or excited about. How did you get to where you are today professionally. Was it easy? If not, how did you overcome the challenges? What are the lessons you’ve learned along the way. What do you want the world to know about you or your brand and story?
I think one of the tricky lines to walk as an artist is that you need people to know what kind of work is the core of what you do, but also to keep the openness to explore new things that inspire you. I hope when people think about my music, at its heart what they see is something authentic, that celebrates the beauty of different points of view and ways of being. And in me as a composer that they see someone who works actively to bring attention to stories (particularly women’s stories) that need to be highlighted.

One recent project to that end was a commission from Songfest where I wanted to amplify the words and stories of the women of Afghanistan in the wake of the U.S. government’s departure. I found an incredibly powerful tradition of poetry from the Pashtun culture called landays, an oral tradition passed down through the women of communities where they speak of love, loss, grief, war, and self. The finished cycle, titled Love, Loss and Exile, drew on Afghan and Hindustani techniques as well as Western classical to try and bring to the audience the voices and words of these women.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kkMnIirdoA

Being open to a plurality of different perspectives is another broad theme that I really try to highlight in my work. My time in the outdoors has given me something of an obsession with the night sky – the true night sky as you only see it hundreds of miles away from cities – and the stories people through history have told about the stars. It fascinates me how much overlap there has been in the kinds of stories we tell – no matter where we are on the earth, what culture we belong to, what we believe in. That idea became the core theme of a choral cantata I wrote for LA Opera a few years ago, to celebrate different cultures, different ways of looking at the world through the stories we tell about the night sky.

Journalist Nadia Drake describes much more eloquently than I can:
“For millennia, the nighttime sky has been a tablet upon which we’ve inscribed our histories. It contains a richness that transcends those visible points of light, with multiple narratives layered atop the same glittering framework.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48ngiO_X8u4

If you had a friend visiting you, what are some of the local spots you’d want to take them around to?
I hope my friend would be up for an adventure, because we’d roadtrip to see the best of what SoCal has to offer. We’d make some kind of a circuit – up north to the Sierra Nevada for hiking (probably swinging by Death Valley on the way); cut west through Yosemite and make our way to Big Sur, and then south along the coast to come back surfing the way down. We’d also stop and check out all the burger and fish taco restaurants we could find along the way, there are so many great ones here!

Shoutout is all about shouting out others who you feel deserve additional recognition and exposure. Who would you like to shoutout?
To the women who inspire me by living daring lives, and the incredible musicians who help me bring their stories to people through music.

Website: https://juhibansal.com/we-look-to-the-stars/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/juhibansalmusic/?hl=en

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7p8Uzn-v2Xr1Zxwti4AjPA/featured

Other: Links to some of the pieces of music described specifically in the text: Waves of Change (inspired by the Bangladesh Girls Surf Club): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hwwFRV1Uwf4 Love, Loss and Exile (women’s poems from Afghanistan): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kkMnIirdoA In Perfect Light (from my cantata We Look to the Stars): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48ngiO_X8u4

Image Credits
– For my headshot, photo credit is to Nic Gerpe. – The photo of the Afghan girls is by Ricardo Magual, on Flickr (under a creative commons attribution license): https://www.flickr.com/photos/ricardo_mangual/8399709878/ – All others photos are mine