“Our life is constantly evolving, but we’re also experiencing cycles of days or moments that often look very similar — we have these “rituals” that happen every single day. But then every day is very different. So I like to treat my sonic objects in the same way.”
Arjan Singh Dogra
Arjan Singh Dogra is a composer and performer currently based in New York City, who creates art to understand and contextualise his relationship with time, nature, and his culture. Arjan’s music explores perplexing elements of lived experience, space, perspective, memory, and temporality, seeking meaning in the places where these elements intersect, interplay, and contradict. Having grown up in California, Arjan studied Hindustani Classical violin with Dr. Sisirkana Dhar Choudhury, and Hindustani music continues to play a key role in his musical practice. His work has been performed by ensembles including JACK Quartet, Sandbox Percussion, Arepo Ensemble, and RE:Duo, among others; he was a Fromm Foundation Composer Fellow at the 2024 Composers Conference, and was winner of a 2024 BMI Composer Award for his work ‘Live Salmon’. Arjan studied at Berklee College of Music and Mannes School of Music, studying composition with Christopher Cerrone. In autumn 2025, he will begin pursuing a DMA in Composition at Columbia University.
Sofia Ouyang sat down with Arjan in New York City to discuss layers of temporality, Hindustani traditions, cyclical structures, ideas of oneness, and viewing music through the “first person”…
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Sofia/PRXLUDES: Hi Arjan! Very happy to have you here. Tell me about your cultural and musical roots; how have they shaped your orientation as a composer?
Arjan Singh Dogra: Hi Sofia! I grew up mostly in the Bay Area in California, in the hills in the outskirts of the East Bay. There is a lot of grass, a lot of expanse, and everything. I think that scenery has impacted a lot of how I see the world. Being able to walk outside and go on a hike for hours, or hanging out with the cows — having that right next to me is very beautiful scenery to grow up in. It’s key to my music. I’ll explain how that ties into it later on.
I grew up in a Punjabi Sikh family; we would speak Punjabi and English at home. The culture around Sikhism (which I’ll call Sikhi, since that is how we refer to the practice) is very musical in general; all of the prayers, everything that we do is sung. Almost everyone learns a variety of traditional instruments — everyone learns music, everyone practices it. Even though I wouldn’t say I come from a “musical” family, everyone is just constantly doing it. So, it just feels natural for me to continue practicing music throughout my entire life. Outside of that, I grew up studying Hindustani classical music, which is very similar to the traditional folk and religious music in Sikhi and Punjabi culture. I studied Hindustani violin with Dr. Sisirkana Dhar Choudhury for over ten years. I will carry the lessons that I learned from Dr. Choudhury for my entire life.
While I was studying this music, I also grew up playing in the school bands. Being in America, band culture is very prominent throughout the public school journey. I picked up trombone, playing it through middle and high school. Being around wind band music, which so often is newly composed, exposed me to the idea of the living composer who is writing music today.
Practicing Hindustani music and American band music hand-in-hand was always an interesting balance, because they are two very different cultures — different ideals, different aesthetic, different ways of approaching music. While this tension of existing within these cultures is something I continue to grapple with, it also sparked my curiosity from a young age.
You mention growing up studying Hindustani classical music and being immersed in that sound world. What are some of the aesthetics, listening practices, or philosophical-conceptual aspects of this musical culture that is important to you — or that you’ve worked with in your practice?
As a performer of Hindustani music, I grew up improvising and also performing written works. When improvising, I was someone who tended to rush through my ideas; when I would perform an alaap — the unmetered, improvisatory beginning section that slowly introduces the raag — I would always tend to unfold the music a bit too fast. My teachers would tell me to wait a little bit longer, to not move on to the next thing so quickly. To just sit in an idea for a bit and really try to get as much as you can out of it. One of the hardest things to do is extend these sections of improvisations with limited material through 20 or 30 minutes, which the masters of this style do exceptionally. Always trying to find that patience was very, very important to me.
That led me to discover what I feel is one of the most important aspects of Hindustani music: the use of tempo and time as an expressional tool. In being taught how to express myself through Hindustani music, and seeing other people do it, the key distinction that makes someone a unique performer — where you can hear their voice in the style — is how they’re constructing and manipulating tempo. From the most small, minuscule rhythms — how a performer is moving between the beats — all the way to how they use large-scale form; how they pace through form, what kinds of formal sections they’re structuring the entire performance through. So tempo as a form of expression becomes very, very key.
For me, it then became a guiding thought as a performer and a composer: how do I find the exact right time to place an event? Of course, as an improviser, that is something that one develops intuitively; it becomes something that is very unique to the person. It’s an idea that I’m always trying to refine — how to find the right place for something. Because tempo is so expressive in Hindustani music, I like to describe it as being colourful, much like how we describe harmony or orchestration in terms of colour. I see time and temporal layers as having different colours, too, due to the vast amount of expressive possibilities that can exist.
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I’m really intrigued by what you said about having different temporal layers in music. To talk about pieces such as ‘Dil-e-Nadaan’ for string quartet — how exactly do you manifest these notions of temporality into a work of music?
I think the string quartet piece is one of the first pieces where I was really conscious of this idea. I really like playing with the counterpoint of different layers of tempo — tempo meaning “time”, and not necessarily “beat”. My music tends to use simple and fairly static BPM markings as a grid, around which I thread music that usually doesn’t land on or follow this grid — allowing me to freely stretch, shift, and squeeze time in a precise way. The tension between the grid and the music that’s weaved through it is one way to create the kind of counterpoint I’m describing.
I’m also fond of unfolding my musical ideas through the reiteration of those ideas. One method of unfolding is to slightly manipulate the construction of the idea in each reiteration, creating slight temporal shifts as the piece progresses. ‘Dil-e-Nadaan’ uses this technique quite a bit. There are times where the gradual transformation of an idea through reiteration is quite linear. This cyclic aspect of an idea being repeated, or reiterated, that also has an evolution through it, allows us to see time repeat itself in one way — but also move forward in another way. This creates the kind of temporal counterpoint that I’m really drawn to.
That’s really interesting. So these two seemingly contradictory notions — of linear sets of transformation and development, and this cyclical temporal return — do you see them as forces that conflict or create tension?
I think, in a beautiful way, they kind of go hand in hand. I’m one who likes to tie in my own experience of time as a human being into my music. Of course, our life is constantly evolving, but we’re also experiencing cycles of days or moments that often look very similar — we have these “rituals” that happen every single day. But then every day is very different. So I like to treat my sonic objects in the same way.
I think there’s a very beautiful coexistence between the cyclic and linear that can be explored. There’s ways to manipulate between these two ideas to create tension, and ways to manipulate it to create resolution. I see all these ways of manipulating different ideas of time, that can both coexist and conflict, as mixing and matching different colours.
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You mentioned this notion of music being able to manifest or explore lived experience. I’m curious to hear more about how the music that you write engages with aspects of lived experience…
I think the thing that really makes music the method for me to explore those ideas is how abstract the art form is, inherently. The concepts that I love to explore that deal with time — as you mentioned — but also memory, which is very related. Space, communication… All of these things, that are so hard to actually tangibly describe or speak about in an objective manner, almost become easier to discuss through music, because of how abstract music can be.
I find that abstraction allows me to construct representations of these vague ideas that can feel very tangible when brought to life in performance. For example, if I want to explore space in music, I can find ways to fill space, constrict it, or move between spaces through very real, tangible compositional techniques. Maybe I want to represent the vastness of the hills in the East Bay where I grew up; how that immense silence can be so quickly disrupted by a small creature such as a hare. I can construct the feeling of this space in this specific moment through aspects of music-making such as registration and dynamic.
One piece that beautifully illustrates this idea is ‘to hold the sun in the palm of your hand’. It begins with a fleeting, poetic — almost spiritual — image of a tree holding the sun. Could you walk us through how you explored that image, and all the emotional and perceptual connotations it carries?
That piece really began not just with the image, but the fact that the image lasted for such a short time. I was walking, and I saw a tree that was “holding” the sun — because everything in the solar system lined up so perfectly to allow me to witness this at the perfect time. But of course, the sun set, the earth rotates; things fell out of alignment very quickly.
To represent this image and the alignment, I create[d] this very spacious, almost hocketed “melody” that was moving through the different instruments. At a point, this musical object begins transforming through its repetition, so that the performers that were once hocketed begin to line up. Once that shift happens, this formerly-hocketed melody becomes just two chords, that the ensemble are breathing, inhaling, and exhaling in unison. That moment where the ensemble has finally reached unison is very short, and breaks very quickly afterwards.
The second part of the piece that follows is almost a dance, where the ensemble is mostly in rhythmic unison. In this section, I was thinking about how celestial bodies move — which is very similar to how I view time passing. If we picture how planets revolve around the sun, it’s elliptical; but once you view this in terms of the sun and the solar system moving through the Milky Way galaxy, the movement becomes helical — because now this spiral is actually going somewhere. And once you take that into the context of the Milky Way moving through the universe, you get even more layers of movement that are all happening at the same time.
So what follows that first moment of alignment in the piece is this dance that represents a helix — one that is almost always returning to very similar cycles, but is constantly evolving or (in this case) devolving — into the ending of the piece, where the sustains that exist between all the dance moments end up winning the “dance battle”. This devolution also comes with the loss of the hocketed rhythmic unison across the ensemble, and a return to individuality.
That’s really incredible. How do you imagine or position the listener in your music?
I like to meet the listener in the middle. Due to the level of abstraction in my music — and music in general — I’m able to provide a canvas, or build a house, that the listener can then go ahead and furnish. I’m taking these abstract ideas and building something that is almost tangible — something that allows the listener to fully imagine and realise their own interpretation of the idea. So in a way, the listener becomes both very perceptive of the exact thing that I’m trying to communicate, and also able to conjure an image themselves. That’s how I imagine my relationship with the listener to be.
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In all of these ideas and concepts you’ve mentioned, one thing I find really interesting is how these extra-sonorous concepts are translated, or manifested, through sonic means. What musical parameters come to mind first for you — what do you tend to foreground in relation to the ideas you’re working with?
I think the music itself — the notes and the sound — is the thing that comes from me that is inherently instinctual. I really like to view the sonic objects I’m using, and also the ensemble itself, through first person. Therefore the music that I am writing on the page — the notes, harmonies, textures, motifs — are things that come out of instinct. I’m careful to say that it’s derived from Hindustani classical music; but when you study a musical style for most of your life, that becomes part of your DNA and is inseparable from you. So the pitch material I use, the textures that I use, are truly coming from within me. And how I manipulate them becomes the composition and the act of giving this object life.
I think of ensemble writing in the same way. My orchestration deals a lot with hocketing, with heterophony, where there is very little counterpoint in the traditional sense of that word. But I like to imagine ensembles, no matter how large they are, as one body. So even if I’m writing for an ensemble that is say an octet — in this case it was a quartet, with ‘to hold the sun in the palm of your hand’ — I composed for them as one body that is all moving together. Almost like four different limbs of one person. Orchestrationally, I love to create these sort of meta-instruments when combining the sounds. It seems like only one instrument is playing, but the instrument is the ensemble itself.
How does this affect the way you treat timbre?
For me, timbre, register, pitch, orchestration… All of these things are so inherently connected. And physical movement, of course — the action itself. When I’m thinking about a pitch, I’ve already also thought about how that pitch sounds on the specific instrument, and the action the performer takes to play it. So it’s all very intentional and interconnected. I think that comes simply from the fact that I’m a performer myself, who plays a couple of instruments in a variety of families; I’m a brass player, a woodwind player, and I play violin. So if a pitch or sound comes into my head, it’s because I’ve already imagined what it takes to play it.
There’s an organic yet complex wholeness in your thinking; a dissolving of boundaries in how you relate to music, and how music relates to what we might call “beyond” music, though really it’s all part of the same thing, just like the experience of life.
I think that idea is something that is so powerful for me. Culturally, growing up — sitting down and talking with my mom about philosophy, culture, and Sikhi — that sense of oneness is an ideal that’s been carried through generations before me. It’s something that’s passed down to us. One of the most important ways to view life in Sikh and Punjabi philosophy is to see everything as a kind of oneness. So I like to think that this is something that will come instinctively to me. When it comes to music — and how I view my music from the first person — maybe it’s as if I’m crafting an idealised version of myself, with the qualities that I one day hope to embody.
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Your piece ‘Khulasa’, which premiered at the 2024 Composers Conference, was written during a period of personal and musical transition. What aspects of this piece were you experimenting with, and how did they shape your process?
I did quite a few things in this piece to represent how I feel leaving my comfort zone. The first was quite literal — leaving behind the techniques of musical pacing and unfolding I usually rely on. A lot of my music deals with very slow progression, where an idea transforms over time through reiteration, and I would pace those transformations mostly by instinct.
But for this piece, I started asking: within these sections of transformation, could I speed things up or slow it down in ways that weren’t instinctual? What would happen if I picked my second or third compositional choice, instead of the first one that came to mind? I was much more hands-on in managing the structure and shaping the form, rather than just letting the material unfold on its own — which is what I’m more used to. I was also experimenting with switching between different sonic worlds and tempi instantly, like flipping an on/off switch instead of using a gradual fader. It felt like accelerating through the lifespan of an idea rather than observing it slowly.
That was the personal part. But in a more meta way, I also wanted this piece to present a first-person perspective for all involved in the listening and performance of the work. I started thinking: how could the ensemble feel the way I was feeling? How could I make the audience feel the same way too? That came through quite literally in how I handled tempo, texture, and especially silence. I tried to use silence very deliberately; exposing certain players at moments that might feel uncomfortable to them, but in a cathartic way.
And for the audience, too: if I placed silence in the right spot, it could create discomfort — not in a negative way, but in a reflective way. There’s one section in the middle where the music moves through this slow, modal, very soupy space, and then suddenly it devolves into complete nothingness. There are so many ways to be an audience member in that moment. Some might keep imagining the modal sound world replaying in their mind; some might suddenly become self-aware — of themselves, their breathing, the sounds they’re making. In a way, the audience becomes part of the piece. And that can be uncomfortable for an audience used to sitting passively and watching a performance from a distance. So the piece ended up being sort of meta; I wanted everyone to feel what I was feeling while writing it.
Like the intimacy and vulnerability. You communicate that.
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How do you think your compositional process has changed since that piece — since stepping out of your comfort zone?
That piece was really fun to write because it made me much more conscious of how I was manipulating the listener’s experience of these different worlds — by truncating sections, extending things, shifting pacing. In a couple of the pieces I’ve written since then, I’ve been exploring those same ideas.
Of course, one piece is never enough for me to fully explore the idea of manipulating my own sense of intuition. I recently wrote a piano piece for a pianist that had a programmatic need to his commission. Within that framework, I had a lot of fun moving between different sonic worlds — sometimes really quickly, sometimes slowly — just playing with how I can move the listener through these environments. But I think there’s a strong balance between this newer approach I’m developing and the part of my process I still really value: my intuition. That’s something I want to carry with me. But I’m always hoping to keep adding more techniques to my arsenal, and am excited to find out what the next one will be.
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Considering your conceptual and sonic interests — the psychological and philosophical landscapes you grapple with in your practice — is there any kind of tension for you in that process? In terms of how you’re trying to explore certain ideas in your music…
I think I have a very clear idea of what this is for me over the past several months. You mentioned how in my music I’m always seeking this idea of oneness — seeing the ensemble as one being, viewing the music on the page as a living being, almost through the first person.
Something I’m struggling with is how the audience plays a part in all of this. I’ve thought a lot about how I want the audience to listen to my music, and how I’d like to treat them — but the boundary between the listener and everything else still feels too strong to me. That said, I do think I can find concrete ways of solving it. For example, in ‘Khulasa’, I mentioned how I used silence as a way of treating the audience — really making them feel like part of the piece. That was one moment where I felt like I was able to break down that barrier, where something about the audience’s role began to shift. That felt like a step toward dissolving the line between myself and them.
But I think the biggest struggle is figuring out how to continue to replicate that in other forms. Hindustani music is actually a great example — because in that context, the barrier between performer and audience almost doesn’t exist. It [the musical occasion] becomes a kind of conversation. The performer on stage is constantly getting feedback from the audience, who are generally far more vocal than a traditional Western concert audience. When something great happens, they let the performer know — and that creates a real back-and-forth. The performer then has a sense of how to move forward in the piece based on what the audience is enjoying and responding to.
Replicating that within this world of extreme abstractness feels incredibly difficult. But it’s something I really want to find a way to achieve. Time, space, memory… These are things that I find ways to emulate in my music, and they’re already hard to describe. This kind of communication between the audience and the music is similarly hard to describe. But I do think it’s possible. It’s doable; I just haven’t found the solution yet.
What are some projects or collaborations you’ve been working on that are coming up? And what kinds of things are you currently exploring musically?
The piece that I’m working on right now, that I’m really focused on, is a new percussion quartet for Sandbox Percussion. I’m so excited to be writing this piece, because they are outstanding performers. This piece is actually, for the first time ever in my work, exploring levels of indeterminacy. There are moments where the performers actually have more control than I do over where and when things happen, which is really scary for me — since I’m usually so precise with timing and rhythm. But I figured this would be the perfect place to explore that, because percussion itself can be such an inherently indeterminate medium.
There are also a lot of indeterminate pitch ideas in the percussion piece, where I’m treating unpitched instruments as pitched instruments, and relying on the resonance they produce to create harmonies. Of course, I won’t know exactly what those harmonies are until the performers bring them out of the instruments; so that adds another level of indeterminacy. Again, that’s something I’m not usually comfortable with, but I also think: what’s the point of being a composer if you’re not experimenting constantly?
Outside of that, I’m working on a solo viola piece that I’m a little behind on — but almost done with, I swear. It’s for a dear friend of mine, Jace Kim, who I’ve known since the very beginning of my undergrad years. It’s been really special to collaborate with someone I’ve known for so long as a friend.
I’m also writing a new large ensemble piece, because I’ll be going to Aspen this summer to work with the Aspen Contemporary Ensemble. It’s a piece that explores memory — memories that are veiled, almost attainable and tangible, but not quite. I have this very specific memory of hearing my grandfather listen to the radio while he was in the shower. I was, of course, outside of the bathroom, and the melodies were passing through the water, the tiles, the walls. So I could hear them, they were familiar, but I could never fully grasp what the actual sound was.
Your reiteration and repetition of sound objects in slightly different ways… That, in itself, makes memory such a poignant topic in your pieces. There’s a way in which you present to the listener different angles and shades of a similar, recurring object.
Yeah, of course — because that’s what memories do. When an event actually happens, it’s one thing; but every time we recall the memory of that event, it inherently transforms into something else over time.
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Learn more about Arjan and his practice at:
