Tanjore Viswanathan, 76; Flutist, Expert on Music of India

Tanjore Viswanathan, 76, a celebrated flutist and authority on Indian music who taught at Wesleyan University, died of a heart attack Tuesday at a hospital in Connecticut.

Viswanathan, who was born in India to a well-known family of musicians and dancers, came to UCLA on a Fulbright scholarship, then returned to India to lead the music department at Madras University.

He earned a doctorate in ethnomusicology from Wesleyan and joined the faculty, teaching south Indian flute music and singing for 25 years. While at Wesleyan, he founded its Navaratri Festival, one of the nation’s oldest festivals of Indian dance and music. He also taught at CalArts.

His family includes Srimati T. Balasaraswati, the late south Indian classical dancer, and Lakshmi Knight, considered one of India’s premier Bharata Natyam performers.

In 1990, he received a Ford Foundation grant to conduct a six-month workshop on reviving and preserving compositions from his family’s repertoire.

He recorded seven albums and was the first traditional Indian artist to be honored as a National Heritage Fellow by the National Endowment for the Arts.