Pandit Shivkumar Sharma

Shivkumar Sharma was born in Jammu on 13 January 1938. His father, Pandit Uma Dutt Sharma, was a vocalist and tabla player who worked at Radio Kashmir, and the boy's first training was in voice and tabla from about the age of five.

It was his father's idea that the santoor — a hundred-stringed Kashmiri folk dulcimer, struck with light wooden mallets — might be adapted to classical music. At around thirteen Shivkumar began to study it at his father's wish.

He gave his first Bombay performance in 1955, at seventeen. The reception was sceptical: critics argued that an instrument whose strings are struck, and whose notes decay at once, could not produce the meend and sustain that Hindustani raga music requires. He spent years answering that objection through technique and through changes to the instrument.

In 1967 he recorded Call of the Valley with the flautist Hariprasad Chaurasia and the guitarist Brij Bhushan Kabra. The album travelled far beyond the classical audience and settled the santoor's place. With Chaurasia he later formed the composing duo Shiv-Hari, whose film scores began with Silsila in 1981 and continued through Chandni, Lamhe and Darr.

He kept a classical concert career throughout, and taught his son Rahul Sharma, who plays the santoor. He died in Mumbai on 10 May 2022.

Sharma's work on the santoor was at once technical and physical. He increased the string count and reset the bridges to widen the instrument's range across three octaves; he developed a way of drawing the mallets across the strings to approximate meend, the slide between notes on which Hindustani melody depends; and he moved the instrument off its stand and onto his lap, which gave him finer control over damping and touch.

The result was an instrument that could sustain a full khayal-style exposition — an unhurried alaap, then the rhythmic layakari the santoor had always been suited to. Every santoor player in Hindustani music since works in the space he opened.