Rajesh Mehta (born 1964 in Calcutta now Kolkata, India): artistic director and founder ORKA-M 

Rajesh Mehta is an internationally renowned hybrid trumpet player, ensemble leader, composer, and engineer who makes music-artworks. Mehta began trumpet studies at the age of 10 in NJ, USA and graduated as an engineer from MIT in 1986 where his first musical mentor was MIT Music Lecturer, trumpeter and bandleader Mark Harvey. He also did 7 month of studies in the History of Ideas, Mathematics and Fuzzy Logic at U.C.Berkeley . Mehta won an Eloranta Award from MIT in 1986 for his project “Jazz en France: A study of a Native American music on Foreign Soil” which led him to 9 months of travels in France and Europe and subsequently to India and Asia. Upon returning to the US, he played semi-professionally in a variety of music contexts and after initial stints designing silencers for an acoustical engineering consulting company, teaching mathematics and the sciences through his business “Arc Tutoring Services” in the California Bay Area between 1987-1991, he devoted himself professionally to music with a year of composition studies from 1989-1990 at the Mills College Contemporary Music Center, Oakland with avant-garde jazz saxophonist/composer Anthony Braxton. At around the same time he discovered his love for South Indian Music (Carnatic Music) and was intensively exposed to contemporary visual art, film, dance and architecture.

Mehta was invited to Switzerland for his first professional music tour in 1991 and the rest is history – spanning a well-documented international professional playing, recording, composing, and producing music career based first in Amsterdam with parallel extensive tours with modern dance companies in France and musical projects in unusual acoustical spaces in Czech republic and then a 7 year residence in Berlin (1998-2005) with awards leading him to Cork, Ireland, and Chennai, India and finally to grounding in Mumbai where he is the founder/artistic director of ORKA-M: International Institute of Innovative Music (Mumbai). ORKA-M is an international platform for innovative musical production, research and educational activities with a specific focus on intercultural and interdisciplinary collaborations. ORKA-M will ultimately be a state-of-the-art physical facility with an Art Gallery, Performance Space, and sound and media lab.

He has done research on different kinds of music especially Carnatic music and his pre-occupation has been the finding of musical instruments and innovative notational methods that would aid in expressing his creative vision as a musician and a composer. He performs on his invention the “hybrid trumpet” – an extended instrument that has dramatically opened up new percussive and sonic possibilities as well as on a microtonal slide-trumpet which has an additional trombone-like slide for bending notes made by manufacturer Holton and which Mehta employs in collaborations with microtonal musics such as Carnatic Music. With a view towards inter-disciplinary and inter-cultural collaboration he has worked on a series of “imaginational maps” and “songlines’ jewels” which make use of musical notations as an art form. These are inspired by architecture, technology,dance, film and the visual arts and the three primary musical streams that have affected Mehta’s musical voice- namely jazz, contemporary composed music and Carnatic Music. These drawings and narrative paintings are notes and reflections of his musical ideas on paper and have lead to his interdisciplinary music-architecture series “sounding buildings” and his inter cultural music making ensembles such as “Trio ORKA-M”.

Barbara Friederichsen-Mehta (born in Munich, 1965), vocal director and co-founder ORKA-M

Started piano lessons at the age of 7 and studied music and art at the Pestalozzi Gymnasium in Munich until 1986, theater studies and private voice lessons in Berlin until 1988, and then studied classical singing, teaching, arranging at the Sweelinck Conservatory of Music in Amsterdam until 1994. She met ORKA-M’s founder/director Rajesh Mehta in Amsterdam where they lived together and then they shifted to Berlin from 1998-2005. She lived in Chennai with their two daughters Vinya and Lena, India during Mehta’s Senior Performing and Creative Arts Fellowship project “innovative music meetings:Creative collaborations with Carnatic Music” in 2005-2006 and then decided to partner Mehta’s vision for a pioneering platform for intercultural and interdisciplinary innovative musical projects in India and be the co-founder of ORKA-M:International Institute of Innovative Music, Mumbai .

She has sang in a variety of contemporary Opera and Theater productions, has led an educational singing project entitled “europa der kulturen” in front of chancellor Gerhard Schröder, has been a women’s choir conductor and voice trainer for many years, and has been the artistic partner of Rajesh Mehta’s music-architecture production series “sounding buildings” since 2001 producing a DVD production sponsored by MIT in collaboration with Architect Steven Holl in 2002, and had live projects at the Glucksman Contemporary Art Gallery in Cork,Ireland in 2005, as well as the New Music and Theatre festival in Rümlingen, Switzerland in 2006.