Ustad Vilayat Hussain Khan

Vilayat Hussain Khan was born in 1895 into the Agra gharana, a family that traces its music to the dhrupad singer Haji Sujan Khan. His father, the singer Natthan Khan, died when he was six, and he was trained by elders of the family — among them his uncles Kallan Khan and Mohammad Baksh, and Ghulam Abbas Khan, his grand-uncle, who supervised the training of the family's children. He also learnt from his cousin Faiyaz Khan.

Unusually in a world where musicians often concealed their teachers, he acknowledged in writing that he had learnt from forty-two gurus, naming even those who had taught him a single composition. The list includes Faiyaz Khan, Alladiya Khan, Abdul Karim Khan, Bhaskarbuwa Bakhle and Mushtaq Hussain Khan.

He became known less as a concert star than as a teacher and composer — a vaggeyakar who wrote bandishes in many ragas under the pen name "Pran Piya". He taught openly, and his students included Mogubai Kurdikar, the actor Durga Khote, Ram Marathe, Jagannathbua Purohit, Gajananrao Joshi, Menaka Shirodkar (mother of Shobha Gurtu), Girija Kelekar, Yashpaul and Karan Singh, the former ruler of Jammu and Kashmir.

He died in 1962, aged sixty-seven. His son Yunus Hussain Khan carried the Agra gharana forward. In 2012 his fiftieth death anniversary was marked in New Delhi with a concert organised by the Ustad Yunus Husain Memorial Society.

Remembered as the acharya of the Agra gharana — its store of compositions rather than its star — and as a vaggeyakar whose "Pran Piya" bandishes are still sung by Agra singers.