it's about time

OKAY. I've been instructed to "update [my] blinking blog you blobberous blank of bluish blorsnackle" by none 'nother 'en Niall, gnostic gnarly norseman that he is. I've been holding back for want of, shall we say, epic sweep, but perhaps that can't be helped. Things stand much as they did two weeks ago; an occasional brush with the screaming masses at the rail station, a daily thali, hours of (sore, but) pleasant practice, and a current book: David Copperfield. Since the last entry I have thoroughly enjoyed 'Fathers and Sons' by Turgenev, liked okay "Silas Marner" by George Eliot, and learned two dozen new words from "The Information" by Martin Amis. (Among them: recidivist, gravid, crenellated, and etiolate. I wouldn't dream of denying you the pleasure of looking them up.)

Kala is playing three concerts at the Dover Lane music conference in Kolkata; I've chosen not to accompany her because of the expense. As irony would have it, Dover Lane is where I originally envisioned scouting for a teacher, back in October, when I viewed the upcoming trip in a rather more protracted way. Now, thinking about Kala's imminent departure, I'm beginning to eye Kashmir and Nepal on the map with a bit hungrier of a stare, imagining colder mornings with relish.

In the last entry I said something to the effect that I would elaborate on the lessons and the teaching process, and what it's doing to my grey matter in general; since I have little else to write about, I think I'll follow through with this. At the moment I am working on two ragas...

(A bit of tech 1: a raga is, informally, a limitation on what notes one can use in an improvisation, often with further limitations on what order they may be played in. In itself, this isn't complicated. If in C major I allow myself C, D, F, G, and A, in any order or permutation, I will be playing a bastardization of raag Durga. There is also a pair of main notes, called the vadi-samvadi, in Durga's case C and G, that even the illegitimate must highlight. The execution of a raga is significantly more difficult than its structure, and is subject to warring aesthetic sensibilities. All Raag Sangeet (Indian classical music) follows a prescribed pattern that begins with no momentum and gradually builds to the greatest climax that the performer can manage (One criterion for judging a musician's 'stuff'). Needless to say, in something so organic, it can be difficult to delineate right and wrong (or better and best) decisions for different parts of the performance. Thankfully, this is helped by the presence of composition. Compositions are short, generally between, say, 4 and 8 lines, divided into two sections, the asthayi (low) and the antara (high). They may be cut up in any musical way and used as a springboard for improvisation; often the first line (called the pakar, gat or characteristic phrase) is returned to at the appropriate time in the rhythmic cycle, which works well for developing secondary motives in between the familiar phrase.)

...which complement each other well...
(A bit of tech 2: The aforementioned Durga complements Lalit, which I have named in a previous entry, in that Lalit's notes are, in the key of C ascending: B, Db, E, F#, Ab, B; back down: C, B, Ab, F#, F!!!, E, Db, C. The perspicacious reader will notice that the larger Lalit contains Durga, if Durga is transposed as starting on B. This is MUCH clearer in sound than on paper--in fact, Raag Sangeet is a completely oral tradition. Only in the last fifteen years have bound compilations of compositions and raags come into being, and, along with the plethora of recordings now available, are changing the music from a set of localized stylistic traditions into a sort of repertory form, if you will allow for a very loose definition of 'repertoire'.)

...and am due to present them...

A bit of tech 3: a presentation of a raag involves three main sections, called alap, jor, and jhala/bandish/gat/whatever. The alap is a tempo-less exploration of the relationship between the notes, beginning in the middle octave on the tonic (or the vadi-samvadi). The improvisation climbs down, returns, climbs up, and returns. The jor is the repetition of the alap's structure with the introduction of the taal, or time; in the instrumental tradition this is done unaccompanied. In the vocal tradition (which I am studying) this is done with the tabla, within the framework of a composition. The gat/jhala/bandish/whatever is rhythmic improvisation within a composition, often on a different composition than the jor. Singers will also intermittently increase the tempo of the composition as they build their performances to a climax, which could take twenty minutes, or two hours. The presentations I will make will likely have a 3-minute introductory alap, a ten-minute alap within a composition, and about ten minutes of improvisation within a second composition.)

...to Kala at our next lesson on the 22nd. Our lessons take two forms: she teaching me by call and response, or she critiquing me while taking phone calls. She is an incredible technician, and the technical aspect of our lessons has reached a point where I need much more than a day to rein in some of the lines. There is also an affectation of Indian singers called "gamuk", an (onomotopeic, I think) shaking of the voice. It's very intense, and like vibrato in western music, has the added advantage of covering up small intonation irregularities. The main technique to wrestle with, however, is the constant sliding and shifting, often playing each note in a line with one finger, as fast as you please. Oy!

So how is all this information affecting how I think about teaching? Well, that's not the big shift. The big shift is the frequency of the lessons, the number of students (two--next month I'll be the only one) and their makeup. Growing up, I had one music lesson a week, and certainly never had dinner and tea at my teachers' houses, nor accompanied them to their concerts, during which a lot of valuable information is divulged about the music (and the way they play it!). The nicest part about a daily lesson scheme (with multi-day breaks) is that a teacher can prescribe a manageable amount of work, and a student can actually move ON for pete's sake, instead of weeks of lugging C.P.E. Bach's Fantasia in Q minor to R. Todd McPherson's house to be told time and again that I need to stop looking at my hands.
I have only had three violin students so far, in life. The first was an ex-coke addict, whose name I forget, no--Dave Stryker. Dave played a bit of squeezebox, and wanted to learn Celtic fiddling, too. We met when I was playing in the Boston subway (Downtown Crossing, the orange line. Ah!) for my bread and butter, and naturally I'd try to teach anybody. We had our lessons at Berklee. He could barely hold the bow, and for $20 a crack, I don't think he got much more out of our lessons than a friendly smile and a tape of me playing 'Cooley's Reel'.Next was Beryl Pettigrew, my father's sexagenarian predecessor at East High in Duluth. Beryl spends his saturday afternoons at the 'Toga, a bar of ill-repute that, on saturday afternoons, temporarily gives sway to "The Billy D Route 66 Quartet" (which, if it weren't for a certain Paul Ierino on piano, would barely be music; as it is, Paul plays beautifully, and could play with anybody. Paul gave me my first jazz lesson ever, when I was 14. He taught me the blues scale and 'Autumn Leaves' to play it over, thus cementing his position in my mind as a guy who knows the score.) Beryl, who plays the viola in the Duluth-Superior Symphony Orchestra, plays clave along with the latin tunes at the 'Toga. I used to sit in every week, a few summers back, and Beryl enlisted me to show him a bit of jazz violin. We had maybe six or seven lessons, and as far as I know, what he got out of his twenty-five bucks a crack (my rates have gone up!) was a written out solo to "Stella by Starlight" during which, if he was playing it correctly, he bowed on the offbeats.Last was Slade, a thirteen-year old eighth-grader. Euphemistically, her mother employed me to teach her some exciting fiddling and improvisation, (subtext: she's creative) but really, she had fallen to the back ranks of the junior high orchestra and needed to practice SOMETHING for goodness' sake if she wanted to improve her position the following year (which, I won't neglect to mention, was in Dad's freshman group). Each week, as I pulled into the driveway, I was greeted by Luna the dog, who had benifited as much from the previous lesson as anyone else, perhaps by a biscuit. I tried to inspire Slade to write a song, on the violin or the piano; I tried to teach her "Over the Waterfall", I tried in vain to explain how improvisation works. Of my three students, she may have made out the most poorly: for her mom's twenty-five bucks a crack (it was the same summer), she got little more than a hope of future political favoritism, which isn't really my Dad's sort of thing.

So the secret is out: I'm a BAD teacher. So far. But I think that after this student-teacher experience, I'm going to go about it in a different way. 1. THEY come to ME. Absolutely. No question about who rules the roost. Come in, stay, learn. You haven't done ONE thing! Get OUT! Take your damn Metallica CD with you! Etc. 2. Longer than an hour lessons, if there's a call for it. Don't schedule the students back to back--then if there's some real progress, it's not decimated by the doorbell. 3. Make the lessons expensive enough to be painful. You want it, come and get it. If you CAN'T afford it, we'll work something out (like Kala's student Siddharth, who comes over every once in a while, always for free.) but you'd better learn your stuff, bub. 4. (this has little to do with Kala, but is my own addendum) You may not study only violin--sorry. Go get a cheap hand drum, and expect to do a lot of singing. Do you have a guitar? Etc. I have a suspicion that I won't do a lot of teaching on these terms, but at least what I will do I'll feel good about. No more $160 cassettes of Cooley's Reel for my future students, boy. Just you ask 'em.

OKAY, THIS SHOULD CLEAR ME FOR THE NEXT TWO WEEKS. Sheesh, Kip. They're called TRAVEL UPDATES. You have not provided travel, and you have only written about the past. Change the heading to BRACKISH BLABBERING, you blank of bluish blorsnackle.