Alum

Annette Philip

Position
Artistic Director
Affiliated Departments
Expertise
Indian music
Telephone
617-747-6152

For media inquiries, please contact Media Relations

Career Highlights
  • Performances with A.R. Rahman, Airto Moreira, Buster Williams, Victor Lewis, Lew Soloff, Danny Gottlieb, Pandit Anindo Chatterjee, Ghatam Giridhar Udupa, Barrie Lee Hall, Jack DeJohnette, and Mark Soskin
  • Vocalist and pianist
  • Founder, Berklee India Exchange
  • Leader, Annette Philip Quintet and Artistes Unlimited
  • Member, Women of the World, the Makanda Project, and the Maxim Lubarsky and Andres Espinoza Duo
  • Recordings include En Route (Artistes Unlimited), Mehfuz (Euphoria), and The Promise (Hudson Gloria)
  • Voiceover artist for Discovery Channel 
Education
  • B.M., Berklee College of Music
  • B.A., Lady Shri Ram College, Delhi, India
In Their Own Words

"I'm teaching Berklee's first contemporary Indian vocal ensemble. It's combining concepts of Indian classical music and the Indian tradition in art, along with Western harmonic and arranging concepts. We have students from all over the world. It's a nice little family. This is starting from scratch, but it's not a beginner's course. We jump straight into it. You learn as you go along. It's about evolving and imbibing a new culture."

"My first love is working with multiple voices, and in India I have a group, over 250 members now, called Artists Unlimited. The whole concept of circle singing is something that is so very powerful. Circle singing is a concept that as far as I know Bobby McFerrin introduced to the world. It's very organic. He assigns a part to the bass singers, and another interlocking part to the sopranos, and something else for the altos, and something else for the tenors, and maybe he would improvise over it. It's a very dynamic form of composition; it's always improvised.

"One of the students started a circle singing group at Berklee. You have to really surrender to the moment. I think in all music that's what we're trying to encourage our students to do, to surrender and be totally present in the moment. And I feel that circle singing is a very noncompetitive, nonhostile, supportive, healing, and liberating space to just give yourself to and then see what happens."