page_title: Asian Music Circle
section_title: First Western performances by Ali Akbar Khan and Ravi Shankar
hierarchical_section_title: Asian Music Circle / 1950s / First Western performances by Ali Akbar Khan and Ravi Shankar
caption_attribution_description: English: Ravi Shankar and colleagues holding cups of tea
context_page_description: The Asian Music Circle was an organisation founded in London, England, in 1946, that promoted Indian and other Asian styles of music, dance and culture in the West. The AMC is credited with having facilitated the assimilation of the Indian subcontinent's artistic traditions into mainstream British culture. Founded by Indian writer and former political activist Ayana Angadi and his English wife, Patricia Fell-Clarke, a painter and later a novelist, the organisation was run from their family home in the north London suburb of Finchley.
  In the 1950s, with Yehudi Menuhin as its president, the AMC organised the first Western performances by Indian classical musicians Ravi Shankar and Ali Akbar Khan, as well as Vilayat Khan's debut concerts in Britain. During the following decade, the Angadis introduced George Harrison of the Beatles to Shankar, initiating an association that saw Indian music reach its peak in international popularity over 1966–68. The Music Circle had its own London-based musicians, some of whom played on Harrison's Indian-style compositions for the Beatles, including "Within You Without You" from the album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.
context_section_description: In 1955, through his role as AMC president, Menuhin gained funding from the Ford Foundation and John D. Rockefeller's Asia Society to stage the Living Arts of India Festival, in New York. His original choice for the festival's featured musical performer was Ravi Shankar, after Menuhin had attended a private concert by the sitar virtuoso while in Delhi, in February 1952. Shankar was forced to turn down the opportunity, in an effort to save his failing marriage to Annapurna Devi, and instead recommended his brother-in-law, master sarod player Ali Akbar Khan.
  The Living Arts festival, held in April 1955, marked both the first formal recital of Indian classical music in America, when Khan played at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), and the first appearance on US television by Indian classical artists, after Khan and his accompanists, as well as Bharat Natyam dancer Shanta Rao, performed on the arts and sciences show Omnibus. While in New York, Khan recorded Music of India: Morning and Evening Ragas (1955), the debut album release for Indian classical music. In addition to concerts at the MoMA – Khan's first outside India – Menuhin and the Asian Music Circle arranged other recitals for what amounted to a short US tour.
  Menuhin subsequently organised for Khan to play in London later that year, at St Pancras Town Hall. The AMC then brought Ravi Shankar to Britain, where the sitarist made his Western concert debut in October 1956 with a performance at London's Friends House. After Shankar's 1956 visit, arrangements for his annual UK concert tours were shared between the Music Circle and promoter John Coast. The AMC also brought sitarist Vilayat Khan to the UK for the first time, a musician considered to be the era's leading exponent of sitar, together with Shankar.
caption: Ravi Shankar, pictured in Bombay during the recording of his score for the 1955 film Pather Panchali
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