Ganesh Anandan was born and raised in Bangalore City, south India where he studied Karnatic music for several years namely the flute with G Venugopal and the mrdangam with KK Parthsarthy. In 1976 after completing university (Bcom) he moved to Canada where he studied music theory and piano privately. He took part in a variety of workshops including Cuban Bata rhythms, Brazilian Samba and was a member of the Université de Montréal’s Gamelan Ensemble for a year. Since then Ganesh has returned to India on several occasions to continue percussion studies with TN Shashikumar at the renowned Karnataka College of Percussion studying the tavil — a ritual two sided drum and the kanjera — a south Indian tambourine. He had workshops on the bodhran and tar with Glen Velez (USA) and the tammurriata and tammurrelo with Allesandra Belloni (USA) and Carlo Rizzo (Italy).
Since 1994 Ganesh has been transposing south Indian rhythmic concepts and drumming techniques onto tambourines, frame drums and alternative surfaces. He has developed a dynamic personal playing style that combines the karnatic method with a variety of personal finger drumming innovations.
In 1998 he founded FingerWorks, a trio of frame drummers dedicated to hand and finger percussion music. He wrote compositions for the trio and invited guest artists Glen Velez in 1999, Carlo Rizzo in 2001, and Ramesh Shotham in 2001 to perform with the trio.
Ganesh Anandan has been awarded several grants from the Canada Council for the Arts and the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec. Among his personal projects was an interdisciplinary collaboration with the sculptor Paskal Dufaux entitled Espace Shruti in which Anandan conceived and built percussion instruments based on the Indian 22 shruti octave and Dufaux built a sound architecture to house the instruments and the performance.
Since 1990 Ganesh Anandan has worked with artists and companies including Oregon (USA), Bob Brozman — Slide guitars (USA), Debashish Batacharya — North Indian slide guitar (India), Omar Sosa quintet — (Cuba, USA), Carlo Rizzo — polytimbral tambourine (Italy), Glen Velez — Frame drums (USA), La Nef — Medieval and Ancient music (Canada), Michel Lemieux & Victor Pilon — Multi-Media Performance (Canada), Malcolm Goldstein — Violin (USA), The Karnataka College of Percussion — (India), Ramesh Shotham (Germany), OS Arun — Karnatic vocal (India), Ramasutra (Canada) and Amit Heri — guitar (India).