Dr Pete Yelding is a sitarist and cellist. He is the 7th documented generation of a family of travelling performers of Romani origin. As a cellist he has a rooting in West African Griot traditions, numerous Folk & Pop traditions, noise music and contemporary Western “art” music. However, he has dedicated most of his career to playing raga-based music and using ragas as a framework for creative projects and interdisciplinary collaborations.
His sitar training began when he encountered Hindustani music in his first year of music college and felt a deep affinity with the tradition. After over a decade of preparatory study in the UK, he travelled to Kolkata, where he became a student of sarod master, Ustad Irfan Muhammad Khan — the last hereditary proprietor of the oldest lineage of sarod and sitar players, the Lucknow-Shahjahanpur Gharana.
Pete is now one of only a handful of musicians in the world dedicated to propagating the expansive repertoire and unique style of the Lucknow-Shahjahanpur Gharana. He establishes in his performances a raw, but tender, evocation of whichever raga he is presenting. He seeks to rehabilitate for modern audiences the deeply stirring, heavier sound of past sitar and sarod luminaries, such as Ustad Ilyas Khan, Ustad Umar Khan, Ustad Yusuf Ali Khan, Ustad Sakhawat Hussain Khan, Ustad Ishtiaque Ahmed Khan and Ustad Waliullah Khan. Pete’s playing will entice audiences drawn to visceral melodic atmospheres and hypnotic, rhythmic textures.
Over his professional career Pete has collaborated with artists such as Zinzi Minott, Mammal Hands, Kuljit Bhamra, Iqbal Khan, Talvin Singh, Sura Susso, Jonathan Mayer, Shagufta Iqbal, Amadou Diagne, Dizraeli; and organisations such as the Royal Shakespeare Company, Bristol Old Vic, SAMA Arts, Cape Farewell, Birmingham REP, & Zero Classikal.
He was awarded a Leverhulme scholarship to study Composition at Birmingham Conservatoire in 2008. In 2014 he commenced his Masters in Creative Practice at Goldsmiths College. During this time he continued to develop his sitar training, pursued academic inquiry in Ethnomusicology and Sociology, as well as diving deeper into composing and improvising on the cello.
In 2019 he received Arts Council funding to develop his practice with Ustad Irfan Muhammad Khan in Kolkata. This led to a PhD funded by the South, West and Wales Doctoral Training Partnership at Bath Spa University (in partnership with University of Exeter), which he completed in May 2025. It was titled: the body as musical archive: sustaining the embodied knowledge of the Lucknow-Shahjahanpur Gharana through translations between sarod, sitar, and cello.
His wider academic work revolves around entangled musical histories, embodied musical knowledge, and finding ways to move beyond the continuing Eurocentrism, racism and capitalism present in music studies and music institutions. He has led a number of presentations, workshops and lectures on his practice, musical traditions that relate to his practice, and reconfiguring musical spaces.
featured photo: Nic Kane.
Dr Pete Yelding 