All posts by rbedgar

music, Odor, raga, South Indian, veena

Ragas, Time, Notime

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A raga is a scale to be explored (along with certain rules for its playing).

On a sitar and some veenas, there are sympathetic strings that vibrate when their pitches are played on the melody strings, and that are also occasionally struck with the little finger.

The sympathetic strings are tuned to the pitches of the raga. Striking them is like projecting a photograph of everything that is possible. A synchronic snapshot, as opposed to the diachronic articulating of the melody.

Neither the veena (South Indian) nor sitar (North Indian) are designed to produce chords. There are no chords in traditional Indian music. But there is this continued reminding interplay of timeless existence of all possibilities versus the soul’s narrative of the specific.

Indian musicians are extremely sensitive to pitch. They know a ragas by its feel. They learn to play each systematically, but when they have learned to explore the raga, they move within it, and know it.

I think of the raga as having an odor, a smell. And there are hundreds of ragas, and an Indian musician knows the range of their feelings. When the sitar player strikes the sympathetic strings it’s like waving the incense: the air is filled with its scent, and the melody runs and weaves through it, writing its life in time.

Oceans

Post Card

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My oceans mark time

Like gulls hear language.

Let’s part the boats from ports

Loosen boards from bindings

Lean and sway, trough and crest

Sweep as our oscillating bodies

Swim perpendicular to current, painting

Sine waves in sea as a

Turquoise cloud precipice

Sets up tomorrow’s climb.

Irradiating restless light

Irrigating lost thought trenches and

Icy reflecting oyster teeth.

Iridescent lightning stencils palm trees

Island escapes then falling back

Fading day draws scarabs from fronds

Fire spews sun spurs, sand melts to glass

Freed star sparks absorbed in inky night

Floor sand and sanspurs cool sun down

Frothy salt and seaweed floating to us.

Larry Bakke, mis-en-scene, poem

Misinterpretation

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I love the late Dr. Larry Bakke’s statement about viewing objects in the Ames room: “It’s easier for us to believe that a person is impossibly sized than it is for us to believe that the room isn’t made of regular rectangles”.

The Ames room was old when I went to school, it is older now. But it still works: even when we know that we know we are caught in the illusion of our own presuppositions.

It takes travel, experimentation and creativity to break our preconceptions. And sometimes it is necessary for us to be willing to withhold our judgements based on them. Why is it in our society that blind action is considered so compelling? If a president and his cabinet purchase the good will of Americans through misguided action, what does that mean for the rest of our society? Certainly actions are important, but once a gun is aimed, the action of pulling a trigger renders any later consideration irrelevant. If your judgement is wrong, and your judgement destroys another person, you are not worthy of the responsibility that comes with your position.

The Ames room has a specific architecture. When we look into it, we have a map in our minds that we use to interpret it, one with which we will base our actions. But the map is not the territory. One’s judgement should not be based upon a single model, but upon many. In a similar way, images do not denote, they connote.

Life presents mis-en-scene after mis-en-scene. We can approach them like a speed reader, interpreting and acting as fast as we can run through them. But such an approach will not get one closer to reality. What is speed reading to a poem? And what aspect of life is less like a poem, and more like a newspaper headline?

This is why society so often destroys its artists and poets: because it does not perceive their difficult images and words except within its own context, except as misinterpreted by its own perspective. It reduces artists and poets to misfits. This is the conceptual map of the newspaper headline, of the rush through judgement, of the end of justice.

John Cage, music, Steve Reich, synaesthesia, Vygotsky, Zone of Proximal Development

The Thing at the Edge

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I remember that when I was back in college, Steve Reich made the statement that it wasn’t how you made the music, what was important was whether it was good music or not. And the statement puzzled me, because more than anyone Reich had introduced process into composition, process that led to unintended sonic textures. Well, maybe more than anyone except Cage. But what values did Reich use to determine what was good music?

I’d listened to as wide a range of music as I possibly could, from every inch of the globe, from every electronic and music concrete blurt, and from the very oldest to the current. And what I loved most to hear was something that I absolutely hadn’t ever thought existed.

If something is really foreign, your reaction is not usually intense. If something well known is played badly, you have an intense reaction. But if it’s truly unlike the art you make, you will not recognize the art in it on first blush. It will take repeated exposures, and learning about how it is made, and what rules are followed, and what came before it, and what the instrument that generates it is like to play etc. After a while, you’ll start to feel the inner parts, and you’ll perceive the play it has.

But at the edge of Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development, you do have a reaction. This is again intense, because your mind and senses are rushing into the experience to get a solid taste of it, to map it and perceive it. To perceive its beauty.

And for me, this is what I’ve come to believe is the “good music” that Reich refers to. I know it isn’t a definition that is pan-cultural, but I could imagine someone following that thread and making sense of it. Someone might argue that beautiful music is music that conforms to certain architectural ratios. I can agree, but the beauty needs a person who is ready to resonate with it.

And so I’ve come to value the beautiful over the new. Not because I think it is more important. But because I know it’s a healthy place for a person to have a nest. And because I know that as one perceives, the locus of that nest must change, as percept becomes concept. The thing, then, is always a balance among self, object, and sensory perspective.

aesthetics, anesthesia

Anaesthesia

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Anaesthesia, the lack of all aesthetics. The problem isn’t having bad taste. It’s having no feeling. I look over my life, and my biggest mistakes were when I just didn’t feel enough to correctly guide my actions.

My Father an electrical engineer, once told me that he considered metaphor basically a mistake. He was an analyst (and an excellent one I believe), but didn’t like feeling things very much unless he’d had a drink. But feelings rising in him were almost always smothered by a rush of anger. For him anger was a circuit breaker for feelings.

I think my seeing this as a trait/strategy led me to want to find an alternative in metaphor. For this purpose, for me, metaphor works because it comprises a meaning that no longer exists when the components are split. The division kills the phenomenon. Metaphors, symbols and meaning float for me above their component atoms, like the cloud of percussion attack sounds float in the air above the pitches of Steve Reich’s Music for Mallet Instruments. And while analysis may stop the meaning, it does not prove that the meaning doesn’t exist.

Once I understood this, I could make peace with my dad’s analysis, and place it in relation to my Mother’s art. And I made the choice to create meaning wherever and whenever I could, because it was as important as creating anything else in this real world.