Acharyanet featured in the Hindu
AcharyaNet has been started by passionate student and connoisseur of Carnatic music, Sowmya Acharya, with a simple goal – to make great music and great teaching in Carnatic music accessible to the largest number of people. While Carnatic music is followed all around the globe, geographic distances and time constraints prevent students from getting the benefit of learning from top teachers. AcharyaNet aims to bridge this divide.
AcharyaNet is a community that uses the internet to bring together well known teachers of Carnatic music – both vocal and instrumental – and students who are passionate about learning Carnatic music. In order to preserve the integrity of the service, only teachers with established credentials are invited to join AcharyaNet. Students can look into detailed profiles of teachers, establish contact, schedule classes, avail of lessons, make payments, track classes – all online, all from the confines of their home.
Acharyanet also works with expert musicians and teachers in the field of Carnatic Music to create online video and audio lessons catering to the learning needs of all levels of students from basic to advanced. We already have lessons on geetams, compositions of the trinity, padams and javalis, Oottukkadu Venkata Kavi compositions and Bhajans taught by leading musicians such as Chitravina N Ravikiran, Shri PS Narayanaswamy, Smt Rama Ravi, Dr Sriram Parasuram and many more.
Our goal is to do our little part to help Carnatic music students have access to great resources and gurus wherever they might be. Music Unbound is our motto!
About Sowmya
Sowmya Acharya, a dedicated student of Carnatic music, gave up her career in the IT industry to explore the possibility of having a global Carnatic music community on the net. Sowmya who had to move homes during her growing up years, was more than familiar with the pain of discontinuity in a student’s musical education.Sowmya initiated Acharyanet in order to ensure continued accessibility to high quality musical instruction from established gurus for music students.
With the founding of Acharyanet (www.acharyanet.com), an Internet-based Carnatic music learning community in 2009, Sowmya has combined her technical expertise and her passion for music. She brings her sensitivity to the perspective of the teacher as well as the needs of the student into the design of Acharyanet. The vision behind this site was to provide an all-year round forum where students globally could benefit from the knowledge of Carnatic music stalwarts such as Neyveli Santhanagopalan, Chitravina Ravikiran and Lalgudi Vijayalakshmi. The site aims to preserve and propagate the specialties of different musical schools and the teaching methodologies which form the essence of each musical tradition. Instruction is carried out in a multimedia environment, which includes face to face tutoring via online services such as Skype as well as modular, learn-as-you-go video tutorials which can be downloaded from the website for a nominal fee.
The site caters to both vocalists as well as instrumentalists and is easy to use. The initial feedback from students has been heartening.
Says Sowmya “The student-teacher relationship is very special, more so in music, and often endures time and distance if cultivated in the right manner from the beginning.” Also on Facebook, the online registration for Acharyanet is free. As it continues to evolve, new services will be provided to facilitate an effective, innovative and engaging Carnatic music learning experience.