Kavi Pau and the Symphony of Two Worlds

Kavi Pau has Gujarati heritage, parents who were born in Kenya, and a double first from Cambridge. They learned harmonium and bhajans from a community elder in a traditional Indian household while simultaneously learning western piano at school. By the time they were five or six years old, they were already doing something the two traditions could not quite account for: going to their western music lesson and playing the Indian music they had learned on the harmonium. “They’d say, where are you learning this from? How come you’re playing this?” they say. The question followed them all the way to Cambridge and several years beyond.

Kavi Pau is a composer, conductor and singer. In 2021 they founded the Third Culture Collective, now one of the UK’s most distinctive organisations in the space where South Asian and western classical music meet. The collective has produced a sold-out symphony at the Royal Festival Hall with Gujarati folk legend Osman Mir, collaborated with the world-leading choir Tenebrae at the Barbican, performed a Ramayana tone poem at the V&A, toured India with AR Rahman’s Sunshine Orchestra in Chennai, and taken its South Asian majority orchestra, the first of its kind in the UK, into rooms where South Asian audiences have rarely seen their own experience reflected on stage. After the call with us, Kavi heads straight to a singing lesson.

“I will never be the western classical music elite person at Cambridge. And I’ll also never be the Indian classical musician who has studied ragas for their whole childhood. It’s a mistake to try and pigeonhole yourself into one of those.”

The two traditions did not simply coexist when Kavi was growing up. They pulled in opposite directions. Indian music, as Kavi learned it from Pravinaben Patel, the community elder who taught them, was an oral tradition: you listened, you replicated, you built from what you heard. Western music, as the school taught it, was about reading notation, following the score. “On the western side, I would be meant to be reading the sheets,” Kavi says, “so sometimes I’d go to the western lesson and I’d be playing the piano by ear, which is much more of the Indian tradition.” The teachers noticed. The question of where this was coming from was not rhetorical.

The feeling Kavi describes from that period is one of tension but also of possibility. “It was a blessing and a curse,” they say. The two parallel tracks were cross-fertilizing almost as soon as they started. Cross-fertilizing is their own word, and it is an exact one: the material moved between traditions at the level of method, not just repertoire, in how you hold knowledge, how you transmit it, how you decide what a finished piece of music even is.

What Kavi did not do, for a long time, was let the two halves be visible in the same room. At Cambridge, studying composition and conducting at Gonville and Caius College on a choral scholarship, the environment rewarded expertise in Bach, Beethoven, Mozart and Brahms. “I didn’t reveal anything about my Indian background,” Kavi says. “It didn’t feel like the right place to do it.” They describe it as a migrant mindset: you optimize yourself for the game you are playing. To win at Cambridge music was to be the best western classical musician in the room, and so that is what Kavi became, with a prize-winning double first in 2018 and several years of teaching back there after graduation. The Indian side waited.

The Third Culture Collective began in 2021, four years after Cambridge, with Kavi posting videos on social media of themself doing the thing they had been keeping separate: singing in an Indian style while playing western classical harmony on the piano. “I was probably a little bit bored during lockdown,” they say, “and I thought, oh, why don’t I resurrect these old things.” The videos got a strong response from friends who had not known this was possible, had not known this was a style of singing someone could do. Kavi describes it as being like a magnet: they put something out and started collecting other people who wanted to be part of the same thing.

They are careful about what they call it. “I don’t see myself as a fusion,” Kavi says. “I’m not some kind of fusion of cultures. I have my own identity.” The Third Culture Collective is not a shortcut, not a pop beat under Indian vocals or an Indian instrument placed decoratively in front of a western orchestra and asked to play along. What Kavi has built is an organization that refuses that model at the level of process: every project is bespoke, developed through research and development workshops in which musicians from both traditions are in the same room, learning from and with each other, before anything is performed.

“It’s not a kind of write the music, turn up and deliver the program,” Kavi says. The choir Tenebrae, one of their most significant collaborators, spent intensive sessions rehearsing in an Indian space, sitting on the floor barefoot, absorbing the physical and cultural context in which Indian musicians learn, before the program was made. The result, Kavi says, is music that “feels like one voice. It doesn’t feel like a you know X plus Y.”

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The Symphony of Gujarat, which sold out the Royal Festival Hall on 17 May 2025, is the clearest example of what the Third Culture Collective’s process actually demands. Kavi had been introduced to Osman Mir’s music in 2021 and fell in love with it. When the opportunity finally came to bring the folk singer together with the collective’s South Asian majority orchestra, the practical problem was substantial. Osman Mir’s band does not fix compositions in bars and beats. The music is improvised. There is no score to give the orchestra.

“We had to come up with a new way of writing music down for the orchestra,” Kavi says, “so they know, this is where you stop and like here’s some improvisation and then this is where you come back in.” Before bringing anyone to London, Kavi sent a Cambridge-trained pianist to India on an overnight train to test whether this would work in a rehearsal room with Osman Mir and his band, across a language barrier. “They couldn’t communicate in the same language and yet they had such a strong bond because they were playing the same music,” Kavi says. “I thought, this is what Third Culture Collective is about.”

The night at the Royal Festival Hall, sold out, with Osman Mir and his son Aamir performing alongside a South Asian majority orchestra and a packed South Asian audience, was something Kavi describes as indescribable. They had grown up going to that hall to watch the London Symphony Orchestra and the best conductors in the world. “For me to be standing there not only conducting my own orchestra but also my own pieces and my own kind of vision,” they say, “with a sold-out crowd… it felt like, yeah, indescribable.”

“The best manifestation of what a third culture sound is: one of my favourite artists had agreed to work with me and put his sound in my hands.”

What the South Asian majority orchestra and choir produce is not simply representation, though it is that too. It is something sonic. When professionally trained western musicians who have grown up around South Asian languages are given music to sing in Sanskrit, Hindi, Urdu and Gujarati, the sound they make is different from what a western choir produces. “They have a learned repertoire in their head of what various syllables and various vowels should sound like in these South Asian languages,” Kavi says. “The whole is greater than the sum of the parts.”

What Kavi keeps coming back to is the feeling in the room. In a conventional collaboration, the Indian or ethnic artist arrives to perform with an orchestra that has been rehearsing separately; the two entities do not interact, the orchestra provides the strings in the background, everyone goes home. In the Third Culture Collective’s South Asian majority orchestra, the trained western classical musicians in the ensemble have grown up around the same music the Indian band is playing. “They feel like they are a part of that event,” Kavi says. “They are not just providing the strings in the background.”

One of Kavi’s earliest goals, they say, was to bring their grandmother, who does not speak English, and their director of music at Cambridge, who comes from a family of Oxford and Cambridge organists, into the same concert hall at the same time. Last year that happened. They describe it as extremely powerful, and you can hear why: the whole mission of the collective is crystallized in the image of those two people sitting in the same audience, watching the same stage.

One of the Third Culture Collective’s most discussed pieces is a reworking of Bach’s BWV 82, originally an oboe part, for bansuri flute. Kavi describes it as an experiment in challenging the sacredness attributed to western classical music: why, in multicultural London today, should Bach’s music exist only on the instruments for which it was originally scored? “I love Bach and I think he shaped the course of western classical music,” they say, “but why is it wrong to put some of his music on Indian instruments in today’s day and age in multicultural London?”

The process itself was a demonstration of the gap between traditions. Kavi read Bach’s written score and verbalized it, adding an Indian flavour, and the bansuri player then learned it by ear and memorized it, playing what he heard rather than reading a page. The chain runs from Bach writing a note in the seventeenth century to a piece of paper surviving three hundred years to Kavi singing it in an Indian style to an Indian instrumentalist recreating it on a flute. When critics comment online that the piece cannot be touched, that Bach wrote it for the oboe and that is how it must stay, Kavi finds this gently absurd. “Bach himself was reworking his own music,” they say. The manuscripts show it plainly.

The broader conviction is that rules in art are not handed down but invented, and that the sacredness we attribute to past artists reflects how we have chosen to remember them rather than how they actually worked. “Those people were also just trying to like make ends meet, put money on the table for their families, would rework music for various occasions,” Kavi says. The invented traditions around them, the dress codes, the etiquette about when to clap, the idea that certain music is untouchable, Kavi does not set out to dismantle these directly. What happens instead is that the Third Culture Collective performs, and the rules simply fail to arrive.

At the Southbank Centre last year the audience clapped when they wanted, whooped when they wanted, stood up and danced and got into mild trouble with the stewards. Many of them had never attended an orchestral concert. “You’re almost inventing a new tradition without having any reference to a previous one,” Kavi says. That, more than any act of confrontation, is how the old version starts to look narrow.

Kavi keeps learning. After this call there is a singing lesson in the Indian ghazal style. The sound engineering knowledge, mixing, mastering, knowing how to mic an orchestra, was taught to themselves because the gap in their classical training needed closing. Some colleagues ask why they still take lessons. “As soon as you think that you don’t need to keep learning, that’s when growth stops,” Kavi says. The genre, they think, has barely started. “There’s an absolute ocean of how the cultures can intersect.”

The collaborations they describe most warmly are the ones that collapse expected categories. A recent piece with a musician of Indian descent based in Germany produced something they call “a weird Pandora’s box”: Indian folk music, German opera, new German compositions and English church organ music in the same room. The rule Kavi applies to every collaboration is the same one they apply to the Third Culture Collective itself: neither tradition is placed on a pedestal, neither is decorative, both are equal. “It’s very easy,” they say, “if you don’t have the right resources, the right funding, the right skills, the right people, for one of them to just get pushed down.”

The BBC, the Southbank Centre, the V&A, the Barbican, all of them opening their doors has meant something, Kavi says. It is validation, yes, and it is renewed possibility. But it is also evidence. “It proves there is a thriving audience for this kind of music,” they say. The collective started in Kavi’s bedroom five years ago. The audience, it turns out, was always there. Someone just needed to invite them in.