Profile
Nisha Chand
“… single handedly reviving what has been lost under the modern march of the talent-absent acoustic folk moguls who believe that a monotonous beat with a few selected words can be ‘genius’” - DJ Yeo
Nisha’s musical journey began at the age of 7 when she started learning to play the violin. Her first large scale performance was at the age of 9 at the Beck Theatre in Hayes and shortly after, at the age of 10 she had performed at the Royal Albert Hall.
It was here that her passion for music grew. She attended a Saturday morning music school in addition to the normal 5 day school week. Nisha had the opportunity of joining the Hillingdon Schools Symphony Orchestra and going on a tour of Prague at the age of 15. She also sang in the Hillingon Girl Singers choir led by the inspirational and very American, Jo McNally. With both the choir and orchestra, Nisha continued to perform at large well known venues (Queen Elizabeth Hall, Royal Festival Hall) and at local venues such as the Compass Arts Theatre throughout her teens.
Nisha was also inspired by the composers whose music she played in orchestra and wrote her own pieces from the age of 11. It was in secondary school that she started learning piano and composed using this instrument with inspirational direction from her secondary school music teacher, Greg Hayes. Her writing at the time revolved around song-writing and composing pieces for string ensemble or piano and voice.
At the age of 16, Nisha was commissioned to compose the score for a youth theatre production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”. This was received by the audience with much positivity and needless to say was a huge success.
ABRSM Grade 8 Violin and Grade 8 Voice were achieved by the age of 17 and Nisha went on to achieve a BA in Music and English (Joint Hons) and P.G.C.E in Secondary Music teaching from Canterbury Christchurch University. During Nisha’s time at university, she moved from classical singing to jazz and was coached by Angela Elliot. Nisha continued her popular music based song-writing, contemporary music writing and continued performing – though this time it was in a 12 piece funk band in which she gigged at the Mint Bar (Camden), Brixton Academy and various London student unions. Nisha’s university composition lecturer Colin Riley, inspired her to break away from moulds and to experiment with composing contemporary music, much of which was already inherent within her. She found this voice during her second year at university.
After graduating from university and teaching, Nisha found that the composition process became “as natural as breathing”. Her pieces grew day by day with every experience encountered as did her passion to communicate her music with others. Nisha has been fortunate enough to recently attend seminars led by David Arnold and Nitin Sawhney.
Nisha was also recently awarded an individual masterclass session with world famous lyricist Sir Tim Rice – long term musical theatre collaborator of Andrew Lloyd Webber.
Nisha is currently working on her debut album which will be released in mid 2010. She is also writing music for film, dance and TV and is the Artistic Director of L’espace (song-writing project) who will be releasing a single in early 2010.
Nisha is very pleased to recently have been co-opted as Director, onto the board of governors for Artasia.
Nisha is open to collaboration with artistic individuals. Please get in touch via the contact page.
