W
hen Rucha Lange arrived in Australia in August 2005, she had come to study accounting, not to build a musical career. Two months later, she was on stage singing at a Navratri celebration in Sydney.
“My cousin, she put a word out to someone that, oh, my cousin has just come from India,” Lange recalls. “And you know, she also sings.”
That first performance led to others. Twenty-one years later, the Sydney-based Indian-Australian vocalist is preparing for a rather different stage.
This October, Lange will perform at UNBREAKABLE, presented by SHIR Australian Jewish Music Festival in Melbourne and Sydney. The concerts bring together Jewish musicians with Indian-Australian, Iranian-Australian and Samoan artists, with music being used to explore peace, connection and social cohesion.
For Lange, it will be her first collaboration with an Australian Jewish music festival. “I’m feeling very excited and very happy with this whole concert prep and everything, because it’s a first of a kind,” she says.
Lange grew up in Ahmedabad in a Maharashtrian family that has lived in Gujarat for three generations. Music was always around her. Her grandmother Malti Lange was a well-known singer in Gujarat, while her father played the tabla.
“We always had music around. We always had artists coming home for rehearsals, for discussions. I was always surrounded by them,” she tells The Indian Sun.
In her teens, she began learning Hindustani classical music seriously and performed at youth festivals in India before moving to Australia at around 22.
Australia, however, was supposed to be about studies. Lange completed a Master of Accounting at Macquarie University and became a CPA. Today she works full-time in the treasury department of an infrastructure company.
Her father, she says with a laugh, had a practical reason for sending her here: “Music alone is not going to pay your bills!”
But music never went away. After her first Navratri performance, word spread. She sang at ghazal evenings and mehfils and later began collaborating with Australian musicians from different cultural backgrounds.
“I have done a lot of fusion gigs with different Australian musicians. Irish musicians, Italian musicians, like so many. And it has always been a very enriching experience.”
She also contributed Indian classical vocals and ragas to the soundtrack of the ABC television series Wakefield.
Her path to UNBREAKABLE came unexpectedly.
Festival director and violinist Ben Adler was in the audience at a concert where Lange was performing with Chorus Mandala. Among the pieces was A.R. Rahman’s “Tu Hi Re”, in which Lange sang an alap.
Adler later got in touch through a mutual friend. In another coincidence, Lange later discovered that she and Adler had both performed on the Wakefield soundtrack without knowing each other at the time.
“Life is a full circle sometimes, I feel.”
At UNBREAKABLE, Lange will perform one Hindi song, although she is keeping its identity a surprise. The song was chosen collectively around the concert’s message of peace, love and harmony.
For a singer grounded in Hindustani classical music, collaborating across musical traditions can mean negotiating different rhythms and structures. But Lange believes there is a common language underneath.
“Music, if we think it’s just 12 notes… so in that way, music is universal. Their rhythm cycles are different, our rhythm cycles are different… but the blend that comes out, it’s so beautiful, and so enriching, and always a learning experience for me, personally.”
UNBREAKABLE will also feature 22-year-old Daniella Gilboa, the former Israeli hostage who spent 477 days in captivity and will make her Australian debut performing her new single, “Where Everything Ends”, at the Sydney Opera House.
Against a backdrop of conflict and heightened tensions between communities, Lange believes music can create moments of connection. “I think that’s why music is such a thing where it brings people together, no matter what language, no matter what culture.”
And when audiences leave UNBREAKABLE, she hopes something simple remains.
“I hope that they feel that there is a lot of peace that music gives. I want them to feel happy. I really want them to feel that truly, you know, the world is one family. And we all can live together in peace, love, and harmony.”
UNBREAKABLE plays Melbourne on 22 October and Sydney Opera House on 25 October. For tickets, click here
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