Ariana Kim's dedication to the violin doesn't know any borders.

The GRAMMY-nominated SFCM alum defines the kind of global curiosity and scope the Conservatory strives to instill in its students. On a recent sabbatical from her teaching career at Cornell University, Kim journeyed in Karnataka, India, to study Carnatic violin with one of India's leading violinists, Mysore Manjunath, and his son Sumanth.

Growing up in St. Paul, Minnesota, Kim's path to music was… obvious: A third-generation musician, both her parents are violinists, and her mother began her on the Suzuki Method learning track when she was 3 years old. But her learning wasn't confined to the concert hall: Each summer, the family would visit Sandpoint, Idaho, where her father was music director of a chamber music festival.

"The whole family would move out," Kim says, "And my mom thought, 'OK, what am I going to do with three kids for seven weeks in Sandpoint, Idaho?' So we would drive down the mountain every day and go to fiddle camp. That was sort of my introduction to folk music in general: What happens when you only have a chord sheet? What happens when you are asked to take a solo? What happens when you learn something that's off the page?"

Kim arrived at SFCM with a different focus in mind, though. "I grew up with such a love for chamber music: I played my first string quartet in probably in third or fourth grade, and it just spoke to me," she says. "My dad knew Bonnie Hampton from the festival in Sandpoint, and when I learned you could major in chamber music at SFCM, I was like, 'What is this magical place?' Bonnie was one of the biggest reasons I came here; I admired her musicianship so much."

It was the dizzying rhythms and improvised melodies of Carnatic music, all underpinned by a tanpura drone, that drew in Kim. (Tanpuras, helpfully, can now be used through a smartphone app.) Through her playing career in New York, she wound up connecting with Manjunath and spent six months in India learning from him.

One immediate issue? Carnatic violinists play seated with the instrument held vertically and the scroll facing downward, like an inverted cello. "You get used to the traditional motion for so long, and honestly the thing I think that was hardest was to train my tricep to adapt to that, and getting used to the idea of navigating the fingerboard vertically," Kim says.

Adding to that is that Carnatic violinists tune their instruments to the root of a given piece, but only in fifths. Instead of a traditional GDAE violin tuning, the violin is tuned to a lower root, then a fifth, then those notes an octave higher. So aside from playing the instrument in a completely different posture, Kim also had to adapt to the new fingerings in this tuning: "Everything is different from what you've been doing for decades, so the brain has to kind of rewire." 

The violin's use in Carnatic music dates back to when India was being colonized by Europe, a relatively short history compared to the millennia that underpin the country's musical traditions. "Violin became a way to add another dimension to the Carnatic music that was already in existence, with its closest sibling being the voice," Kim says. "So a lot of the things that we do on the violin are meant to mimic a Carnatic vocalist, and in fact we practice a lot of those vocal traditions as we learn. My teacher would sing a phrase, and I would repeat it and then translate that to the violin." (One helpful hack Kim learned? Applying coconut oil to your fingers to play faster.) 

Ariana Kim.

Manjunath started Kim on the 72 "mother ragas" in Carnatic music before progressing to the gamakas, or note embellishments, that accompany them. There are more than a dozen kinds of these ornamentations in practice, which can be slurs into a target note from above or below, or a trill, just to name two examples. Each raga has specific tones that highlight its unique nature, and how a player navigates these notes using gamakas is part of the art of improvisation in Carnatic music. From there, Kim was introduced to the talas, the rhythmic units that, when chained together, create the form of a given piece.

Kim's new album, (un)common thread, unites her many musical interests. For the first half of Mozart and Beethoven, she used gut strings and played with a fortepiano, while the second of the record includes American folk songs, a raga, as well as Bulgarian and Macedonian folk songs, whose unusual meters of seven and 13 beats mirror the "odd" rhythmic groupings in Carnatic music. 

"I've found that there basically becomes a symbiosis between these styles," Kim says. "When you improvise on a Carnatic raga, it makes your brain think differently about a bluegrass tune. Even though the language and technique are different, it opens a new pathway: Improvising Bach makes me better at improvising in a Macedonian folk song."

By her own admission, Kim's time in India is only the beginning of her study of Carnatic music. "As is the case with classical music, it's a life journey and a life's worth of work so I'm really grateful to have been able to basically move to India just to dive deeply into the music, and there's still so much to learn."

Learn more about studying violin or string and piano chamber music at SFCM.