Ustad Abdul Wahid Khan (1871–1949) was born in the village of Kirana in Uttar Pradesh — the same village that gave the gharana its name — and is recognized, alongside his cousin Abdul Karim Khan, as co-founder of the modern Kirana vocal tradition. The two men were parallel heirs to the same extended musical family, both drawing from a lineage rooted in Bande Ali Khan, the nineteenth-century rudra vina master whose aesthetic shaped the gharana's foundational character. Abdul Wahid Khan's own primary teacher was Langde Haider Baksh Khan, a direct disciple of Bande Ali Khan, under whom he trained at the court of Kolhapur from the age of twelve.

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His most distinctive contribution was the development of the Mirkhandi style of alap — a method of exhaustive, combinatorial elaboration in which the notes of a raga are systematically permuted before moving forward. An alap in this style could sustain for nearly an hour, unfolding with a patience and logical completeness unlike anything else in the tradition. He also held on principle that the antara of a khayal composition should never be repeated, and should be positioned within the rhythmic cycle so that it did not fully occupy its span — an act of deliberate understatement that kept the emphasis on melodic depth over structural display.

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Abdul Wahid Khan lived reclusively, performing primarily at dargahs and in the presence of Sufi saints rather than at public concerts, and he forbade the recording of his music for fear of imitation. Only three recordings survive — Raga Patdeep, Raga Multani, and Raga Darbari Kanada — secretly captured from a 1947 All India Radio broadcast two years before his death. They are among the most treasured documents in the Hindustani classical archive.

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Ustad Mashkoor Ali Khan (b. 1957) is one of the foremost living exponents of the Kirana Gharana. Born in 1957, he carries the tradition through an intimate family lineage: his father was Ustad Shakoor Khan, the celebrated sarangi master and Padma Shri recipient, who was himself the nephew and direct disciple of Abdul Wahid Khan. Shakoor Khan, though primarily revered as a sarangi virtuoso, was a complete musician in the Kirana tradition and gave his son many years of intensive talim, transmitting a musical inheritance that connects to both founding branches of the gharana.

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What most distinguishes Ustad Mashkoor Ali Khan within the Kirana world is the scope of his compositional knowledge. In 1998 he was awarded the title Bandish Nawaz — master of bandishes — by the Salt Lake Cultural Association of Kolkata, in recognition of what is widely described as one of the largest repositories of rare bandishes in the world. He has documented hundreds of rare compositions for archival preservation; his collection includes centuries-old works inherited through the family lineage, among them bandishes composed by Bande Ali Khan under the pen name "Sabras" — compositions of which only Kirana musicians are considered custodians, and which very few living artists know. His long tenure at the ITC Sangeet Research Academy in Kolkata has made this work of preservation as much a calling as performance: he has spent decades systematically recording rare bandishes that would otherwise be lost.

His singing embodies the hallmark qualities of the Kirana school: an unhurried, note-by-note unfolding of raga at a deeply meditative pace, exceptional command of meend (the sustained glide between notes), and an intonational purity that treats each swara as a world unto itself. He has performed at India's most distinguished classical music festivals — including the Sawai Gandharva Bhimsen Festival in Pune and the Dover Lane Music Conference in Kolkata — and received the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award in 2015.

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Pandit Pran Nath (1918–1996) was one of the great Hindustani vocalists of the twentieth century and the most consequential bridge between the Kirana Gharana and the American musical avant-garde. Born in Lahore, he left home at thirteen after hearing Abdul Wahid Khan perform at a music conference and immediately sought him out as his guru, going on to study under him for nearly twenty years.

The discipline he absorbed demanded extreme patience with individual notes: each swara was to be sustained, explored, and inhabited before moving forward. Pran Nath internalized this completely. His performances — often a single raga unfolding over forty minutes or more — moved with glacial deliberateness, the voice tracing microtonal inflections and long meends with an almost architectural precision.

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In 1970 Pran Nath traveled to the United States at the invitation of composer La Monte Young and artist Marian Zazeela. Young, Terry Riley, and Zazeela became his devoted students, studying under him in the traditional guru-shishya manner for decades. The Kirana principles they absorbed — drone, Just Intonation, the sustained tone as primary musical event, the spiritual weight of extreme slowness — became foundational to the minimalist aesthetic that Young and Riley had been developing, leaving a permanent mark on American new music. Pran Nath taught at Mills College and the California Institute of the Arts, and received the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award, India's highest honor for the performing arts. He died in San Jose in 1996.

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His recordings are few but essential. Earth Groove (1968) introduced him to an international audience; Ragas of Morning and Night (Gramavision, 1975) remains one of the defining documents of Kirana vocalism on record.

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Michael Harrison (1958–2026) —

Composer and pianist Michael Harrison encountered La Monte Young while still an undergraduate student. Young brought him to New York as his protégé to study composition, performance, and Indian classical music. Living in Young's Tribeca loft during this formative decade, Harrison moved within a circle that included Terry Riley, John Cage, Philip Glass, and Marian Zazeela — and most importantly, he became a disciple of Young and Riley's guru, Pandit Pran Nath, traveling to India with Pran Nath and Riley for extended periods of study and practice.

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That formation shaped the course of his work. Harrison forges a new approach to composition through Just Intonation — the system of tuning based on pure harmonic proportions — blending classical traditions of Europe and North India. He pioneered a structural method in which the proportions of harmonic relationships organically determine pitch, duration, and dynamics, and invented the "harmonic piano," a grand piano capable of playing 24 notes per octave, documented in the Grove Dictionary of Musical Instruments. Philip Glass has called him "an American maverick." His major works include Revelation (Cantaloupe, 2007), called "the most brilliant and original extended composition for solo piano since the early works of Frederic Rzewski" by Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Tim Page; Time Loops (Cantaloupe, 2012), chosen for NPR's Top 10 Classical Albums of that year; and Seven Sacred Names (Cantaloupe, 2021), described as "music of positively intoxicating beauty" by Steve Smith in The New Yorker. He is a recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship and the NYFA Artist Fellowship.

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Elliot Cole (b. 1984) —

From 2021, Dr. Elliot Cole studied intensively with Michael Harrison and Ustad Mashkoor Ali Khan, while working in close collaboration with Harrison across much of his late work, including Passage, Au fort, les âmes sont, and The Raga Cycle. Of Cole, Harrison said, "I don't know any Westerner who is approaching the music with as much seriousness and depth... [he has] a unique and important position for carrying on the transmission of this lineage."