Al-chemical Music

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 Alchemical Music           

Seated on a wooden bench in the Santa Monica Church at old Goa last week, I was ambushed. It was a subtle but steadfast ambush by the mellifluous notes rendered by the Goa University Choir concert “History of Tenderness”. A nascent ensemble, GU Choir, the first university choir in India,comprising of students from Goa University and members of the Goan community, is slowly evolving into a concert choir under the tutelage of maestro Santiago LusardiGirelli.

An aesthetic, cultural and musical revolution is at play in the landscape of Goa. Rooted in the theme ‘East Meets West’, an artistic laboratory, with Girelli at the helm of affairs, is augmenting the culture of global communities through its alchemical music. Green Goa is pitched tobecome Global Goa in word, line and page.

The musical register of Goa is old, with members of a family playing instruments and singing at homeduring late evenings, over glasses of wine and hors d’oeuvres. The Monte Festival, started in 2003, presents diverse cultural traditions ofWestern and Indian classical musicagainst the backdrop of the setting sunat the courtyard of Capela da NossaSenhora do Monte (Chapel of Our Lady of the Mount).Similarly, Rudolph Ludwig,a pianist and composer, and the executive director of KetevanGoa World Music festival, has continually invited Indian and Western world class musicians and dancers to perform at the Art Chamber in Calangute.  Sonia Shirsat has been constantly regaling Goan audiences with plaintive Fado numbers.Luis Dias, the physician-turned musician at the Mint House, has been inviting musicians from abroad to showcase house full concerts at different venues in Goa. Dias is also the director of Child’sPlay Foundation, a classical music program for street children on the lines of El-Sistema, Venezuela. In fact,Girelli first came to Goa to train these students and started the Camerata Child’s Play Foundation ensemble in 2012. Talking about his work with underprivileged children in Goa, Argentina and the Amazon,Girelli says that music changes lives. Children undergoing music training learn to look at life from a different perspective and are able to harness positive energy for better lives.

Girelli’s presence in Goa has been an upward arc for music in all its forms. What completely bowls over a music aficionado steeped in the adage ‘music is the language of the soul’, is Girelli’s philosophy.

Girelli’s concept of a university choir is not just a performance playfield but a fecund ground for exploration, innovation and realization of avantgardeideas. Girelliis creating symphonies between acoustically varied forms of music. He is breaking across boundaries of geography and  history to create bewildering fusion art such as  when his choir enunciates words ofKabir and Gandhi set to Gregorian Chant or and He opines that achoir is an artistic community that seeks perfection, and thatits main goal is to create a musical experience of beauty. Each member of the choir is a seeker. Beauty is regained and truth is distilled in hearts of those who come together to sing.when a melody of bhakti ragas resound seamlessly to Christian texts by S. Francis of Assisi and M. Luther King. The CarminaBuranaCodex fromthe XII Century or some J.S. Bach Cantatas fuse with Indian instruments like Tablas, Sitar, Bansuri and Tanpura. Native South American music from 10th and 11thcenturies merges with Indian music and traditional Goanmusic from the Portuguese period. The audience might be recovering from the previous medley when Japanese haikus will ring tosimilar intonations from Indian and Western music.

A holy syncretism of radically diverse genres of music from varied sources has the musical audience shifting from strangeness to a zone of comfort and bliss – threshold of a new home that promises harmony. Girelli says that it is in the intersections of musical diversities that new meanings are sought and sealed.

A sediment of different tongues lines the concerts’ singing vocabulary. Hindi, Konkani, Sanskrit, Portuguese, Swahili, Latin, Greek, German, Spanish, French, Latin, Italian, Quechua, Aymara and Nahuatl (indigenous Native American languages), Bozal (Spanish and Congolese with Portuguese influences), form a heady mix to enthral the audience at once. Music is captured in every possible mood, from a devotee’s hallucinations to romantic rapture and Sufi-inflected philosophical ruminations in line with Rumi’s “All religions. All this singing. One song. Peace be with you.” The Peacemakers by Karl Jenkins was beautifully rendered by the choir during the Monte Music festival (medley of languages and religious texts praying for peace in every human heart).

The ensemble evolved to another level with the advent of the Ketevan World Sacred Music Festival, the brainchild of the Artistic Director Santiago LusardiGirelli and Executive Director Rudolf Ludwig. The choir had wide exposure to many artists from across borders. Flutists, violinists, pianists, cellists, sitarists, fadistas, and choral ensembles collaborated to render the universal song of love and joy. For UtsavLal, the concert pianist, Ketevan was an incredible experience.He said,“It generated a great cross-communication of ideas, new projects between all the musicians and artists and I think this is what makes a festival stand out.”

Besides, the lecture series on music appreciation titled –‘Western music in dialogue with philosophy, history, literature and anthropology’, led by Girelli, has been a crowd-puller since its advent three years back. Aided by power point and live/recorded performances, the audience participates in the journey of music from the Gregorian chant to contemporary times.

Every new talent shifts the culturography of Goa. Goa’s appetite for multiculturalism and creativity and Girelli’s penchant for syncretic music has created a symbiosis. Goa is richer of both its unions - the arranged marriage which the Portuguese crafted four centuries ago, and the rather more recent affair with the global music community. We wish the ménage‘atrois to continue unbridled!
(Santiago LusardiGirelli is a Choir and Orchestra conductor, performer, composer and scholar of theological philosophical traditions of the East and Wes

Socratic Philosophy

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The Thinking Man

We are all familiar with Plato’s text ‘Dialogue’ and the ‘Concept of Irony’ by the Danish philosopher Kierkegaard, 2 millennia apart. They talked about Socrates and the Socratic philosophy. What is it about Socratic philosophy that absorbed them, such that they spent their entire lives studying Socrates and adapted him into their own writings? 

Kierkegaard went to the extent of calling himself ‘The Socrates of Denmark’ in the 17^th century.

Socrates, referred to as the ‘Wise old Fool’, was a 5^th century BC thinker and philosopher. He was like a present day flaneur who walked the streets of Athens, observing people, witnessing events and engaging in conversation with his fellowmen. The exchanges usually turned out to be heated debates between Socrates and a person on the street and ended in the person walking away abruptly in a huff. 

The issue at hand could be, for example one which is often quoted in his works, that of an individual who had taken his father to court on matters of property. Socrates would always say that he knew nothing about such matters and would like to be enlightened about the goings on, in this case the dispute of the person with his father. Half way through the explanation by the person, Socrates would turn on him and start cross examining him about his intent in the matter. The debate would work to a point where the person ran out of arguments and reached a point of ‘Aporia’ – loss of words. Here the person would feel stripped of all masks and leave hurriedly. Over a period of time the Athenians felt uncomfortable, cornered and outright humiliated in a dialogue with Socrates.

In lucid terms the essence of the famous Socratic dialogue was to ask people, “Are you a good human being?” Kierkegaard applied the same philosophy in his times and asked, “Are you a good Christian?” We are familiar with the Rene Descartes quote during the beginning of the enlightenment period ‘I think, therefore I am,’ whereby we associate free thinking by man as having begun during this period. But the philosophy that a thinking human being is the measure of all things actually came with Socratic thought. The thinkers in the enlightenment only reinforced and made the thought contemporary in a climate of scientific study and rationality.

Socrates was made to drink a cup of poison (hemlock), after his trial where he was charged with imbuing mortals with superior subjective thinking process, contrary to the traditional belief that men could reform their ways only by the grace of God.  The Athenians vested their faith and belief in matters beyond their comprehension to the Oracle at Delphi, but Socrates said that the Oracle existed within a human being and by introspection he could attain to truth by himself in each matter.

 He saw himself as the Gadfly of Athens, who needled, irritated and provoked people to confront their Oracle.

Socrates also spoke of ‘Daimon’ - a voice inside him which stopped him from doing certain things. He said that it did not urge him towards things to do but acted in the negative – guiding him to refrain from certain actions. Over his lifetime he had come to rely on this voice, which was different from his will and intellect. It segregated his whims, moods and fancies and weakened their hold on his mind, illuminating the diamond which lay at his core – the soul. The rulers were aghast to learn that he valued Daimon and called it the God inside him. They charged him with having other Gods than the ones that Athenians worshipped at the Oracle of Delphi and sentenced him to death. 

On hearing his death sentence, Socrates only laughed and ridiculed the court, and said that the Daimon had not once stopped him during his trial, therefore all was well and it was all in God’s plan.  

‘Maieutic’ – midwifery is another term linked with Socratic thought. He explained that he was a midwife just like his mother, facilitating in the search of truth within his fellowmen and delivering them of folly. All in all he left a revolutionary philosophy (for which he gave up his life too) for mankind. Aided by his tropes of Daimon, Maieutics and Gadfly, he vested complete faith in the power of man’s thinking self.

Hegel, the German philosopher before Kierkegaard, too is known for his immersive study on Socrates. In contemporary times, Michel Foucault stressed on the idea of ‘each thinking man for himself’ and exposed the power structure of the state with bureaucracy and economics. The idea is to rationalize and be alert to inner trolls and outside systems that short change the freedom of a human being.

Hegel. Kierkegaard, Guru Nanak, Gandhi, Foucault have proclaimed the Socratic thought as panacea for the subjectivity, irony and crisis of modernism. That’s an amazing genealogy worth examining!

Doris Lessing Books

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The Best Literature of Contemporary Times

Dear readers, I am embarking with you on a quest to revisit the best literature of the post-modern period. Keeping this pretext in mind, the oldest person to receive the Nobel Prize for literature in this time frame was Doris Lessing. The Times ranks her the fifth in the list of 50 greatest writers of Britain since 1945. She passed away in 2013 at the grand age of 94 years spanning a long accomplished career in writing novels, poems, librettos, plays, biographies and short stories. Philip Glass lent music to two of her novels turning them into operas. Born in Iran, where her father was posted, she moved to Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) at the age of five and thereafter moved to England only when she turned 30.

Her childhood impressions of racism and the apartheid in Africa, where her father owned a farm, groomed her to look at life with skepticism. Her unsparing writings portraying the harsh landscape of English colonization and exploitation in Africa angered the British administrators no end in the Dark Continent. Diversifying to other areas of controversy, she persisted in picking out the unpalatable truths of man-woman connect, dystopian England, disillusionment with communism, politics of revolutions, drugs and the youth. The targets of her vocal ire in recent years portrayed former President George W. Bush as ‘a world calamity’ and modern women as ‘smug and self-righteous’. She also raised hackles by deeming the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States as ‘not that terrible’.

Since her writing spanned a larger part of the past century and she became the conscience of the post-modern world, it is worth having a close look at her oeuvre. Her first book ‘The Grass is Singing’ is the story of poverty and racism in a Rhodesian farm. A critique based on her first-hand experience at a farm in Africa, she uses her impressions to etch out the story of Mary Turner, an independent white woman married to an ineffectual and unsuccessful farmer. The dawning ennui and increasing poverty reaches a dangerous point with the arrival of Moses, a virile black servant. The relationship of Mary and Moses locked in the binaries of attraction and repulsion against the backdrop of racial strife climaxes to an electrifying end and showcases the troubled nature of truth.

Lessing then embarked on the first of five deeply autobiographical novels from ‘Martha Quest’ to ‘The Four-Gated City’ - works that became part of her ‘Children of Violence’ series. Although Martha’s story is not in first person, yet it is an intimate account of the 15-year-old girl’s thoughts and reactions. Sometimes the voices of her mother, father (of British descent) and an old inappropriate man appear too, but the reader is preoccupied with the feisty character of Martha exclusively. The reader is terrorized and flabbergasted by her shenanigans. But then they realize that it is a young woman’s impressionable mind trying to make sense of the world around it and come into its own. The other characters are just there to increase and evolve Martha’s experiences of life around her. That prejudice regarding the Cohens being Jews (do they really control the world? Was Hitler really an opportunist?)Their neighbors, the Rosenbergs (Dutch) and other Welsh or Irish farmers complete the picture of the colonial versus the native Banto people the kaffirs. Martha’s internalizations along with her isms - colonialism, racism, socialism and feminism slowly evolve with the leisurely pace, and a pilotless novel gives shape and form to a strong woman, at the brink of her first stepping into the adult world.

In ‘The Cleft’, which is science fiction, she begins with a utopian female world, spawned and inseminated by the sea, till it is destroyed by the birth of a monster, a boy. The monsters are killed as soon as they are born, but then the eagles save the monsters and take them to the other side of the hill. This is followed by a quasi-parody of traits generally attributed to males and females. The objective is to give us food for thought in what concerns the often troublesome relations between genders. Read it if you don’t want to take for granted the patterns of such relations. ‘Cleft’ or ‘squirt’: the only thing clear is that there can’t be one without the other – in spite of the gruesome battle of being pitted against one another.

‘Summer Before the Dark’ is a personal revolution where each woman, including the protagonist Kate Brown, defies age-old gender roles.  Kate’s anxiety over the mundane and existential fills most of the pages. Neighbor, Mary can’t help but cheat on her husband and often forgets the names of her various partners, remaining guiltless. Young Maureen simultaneously seeks stability and freedom from relationships. Happily, their journeys reject standard modes of behavior, and they all think, feel, and act in their own accord, finding moments of clarity as they do so.

‘This Was The Old Chiefs Country’ is her collection of nuanced stories on colonial Africa ‘the amorphous black mass, like tadpoles, faceless, who existed merely to serve’ the English settlers, ill at ease, the gamblers and moneylenders searching for diamonds and gold, and the presence, latent always in the blood of Africa itself, its majectic beauty and timeless landscape’, writes Lessing.

Reactions by readers to her bestselling book ‘The Golden Notebook’, hailed for its strong feminist content, upset Lessing very much. She failed to understand how readers could pigeonhole her book into one slot, and not comprehend its vast scope. It is a story of a quest to find balance through self-discovery. The process involves writing separate journals (marked by different colors) by the protagonist Anna Wulf, bringing diverse streams of her life together into one – the golden notebook. Finally, Anna goes through a nervous breakdown which delivers her into a space of clarity and self-realization. 

Doris Lessing's writings always had a leisurely in-no-hurry-to-get-anywhere pace. The day-to-day ordinariness of her stories is deceptive, for in this everydayness of life characters grow and truths are formed and destroyed.  Lessing, a self-taught person who dropped out of school at 14, grew up reading the romantics, philosophers, memoirs and biographies. Her influences could have been Virginia Woolf and Emerson who extolled intimacy of day to day living in their stories as a way out of the crises of modernity. She etched an art, unique and uncommon, with her writing and science fiction too, based on roots of existential issues facing mankind today. Let’s order our Doris Lessing reading list and take on our quest with the best literature of the times!

Kari by Amruta Patil

http://epaper.navhindtimes.in/NewsDetail.aspx?storyid=10542&date=2016-08-07&pageid=1

                                                                Graphic Kari

In a world where gender definitions are being challenged and readdressed, ‘Kari’ - the graphic novel by Amruta Patil is a publishing milestone towards that utopia. It is a fictionalized reality of young adults living in smog city (Bombay), with a lesbian relationship at its center. The novel shifts through shades of relationships in multifarious hues, echoing Vikram Seth’s ‘Golden Gate’ through Californian yuppiedom. But considering the deviant forms of the two works, that’s where the similarity ends.

Kari, the butch, works through the muddles of her psyche (“The circus isn’t in my life. It’s in my head”) and finds herself in the end. This come after she ploughs through landscapes of her soul mate Ruth (who leaves her in the beginning), parents, friends, her friend Angel’s dying, and yes, cats and Lord Ganesha.  A story that begins with a failed double suicide, ends on a hopeful note - “I still love Ruthie more than anyone in the world, but I won’t be jumping off ledges for anyone anymore.” It’s through the everydayness of living life between work and home (Crystal Palace in smog city which she shares with two other girls and their boyfriends) that she unravels herself and nails back into place that which had come undone.

The evocative graphics are etched in bold black lines with grey undertones and are broken by a few coloured panels which signify optimism and light through claustrophobia. Inspiration for the sketches ranges from the cubists, Flemish still-life and the modernists (washroom panel) to pop art.  Andrew Wyeth’s painting ‘Christina’s World’ (which forms the back cover too), with a few subtle alterations, works lucidly into the storyline. Another panel with a nude painting is as provocative as Edouard Manet’s ‘Olympia’. If in the 1863 painting,  ‘Olympia’ looked the viewer in the eye, inviting them at her own terms, Amruta’s nude in front of a mirror is asking “Here I am wondering why I amn’t looking like Sean Penn”.

The linguistic vitality of the novel is what makes it a literary delight. The song that Amruta sings in her sassy, swaggering style is embellished with lyrical poetry.  She has embroidered a garden of flowers, with each blossom piping a different tune and yet seamlessly merging with others to render a beautiful poetic tapestry. Colloquial idioms blend into modern English lingo and philosophical phrasings rest on intriguing, delightful metaphors.

Although the centrality of the novel is a girl-to-girl love relationship, there are many other connections which hold together the fabric of Kari’s being - the spiky yet sustaining bond between the roomies Billu and Delna, the artsy colleague Lazarus, the ad making work-life, and above all, the poignant relationship she builds with Angel, the dying woman. It’s remarkable how Amruta weaves this thread, between the protagonist and the cancer-ridden lady, who is a cantankerous, brusque character stripped of every hypocrisy (in the face of death), and imparts Kari wordless wisdom. “Do you mind it was your dying I was drawn to?” asks Kari. “Looking for your fix of decay again, Kari – go play with people your own age”, replies Angel brusquely.  The austere, yet powerful, handling of this part of the story by the author gives it a punch that affects the reader profoundly.

The metaphors in the novel are potent and striking.  In the beginning, the fall from the top of the building ends up in the black sewer flowing all around the city. In saving Kari, the sewer makes a boatman out of her. In her dreams every night, the boatman (Kari) rows though waste waters of the city, unclogging blockages and commiserating with the discarded. Heaving mass of human activity evokes Noah’s Ark and Charon conveying souls on Styx.  It is also a descent into the recesses of the mind where the dark elements of our consciousness are confronted and unclogged, paving way to a more sustaining life.

In the end, Kari becomes Kd Lang whom she had watched on TV, during the Grammy awards in 1997, without really understanding why her heart glows with excitement. “Kd was handsome, preening. Me, I was mute, with no way to explain myself to myself or to anyone else.  But this genderless one made her feel that if she stood in a room with this creature, her heart would be in serious peril.”  The portrayal of Kari and her quest echoes the feminist search for identity on her own terms, the struggle for sexual independence, away from the patriarchal roles and images of a woman.

Here I must mention the meditations on the cityscape by Amruta. Just as New York City in ‘Bridge’ by Hart Crane and  London in ‘Wasteland’ by T S Eliot are anchors, so does Bombay in ‘Kari’ feed the drama of life. “The airlines lady who travels in the same compartment as us day after day, has bruises on her arms and face today and her eyes keep welling, but no one asks her why. Our eyes dart towards her, but we go back travelling in too much proximity. Two inches from one another and expressionless.”

 Irony surfaces at the end of reflections on life - wry comments like arrows that have found a mark. At the end of a late night party, Kari remarks, “I stare at men and women change from elegant and upright to fawning and drunk. “

In her very first attempt Amruta has succeeded in painting a canvas livened by poetry on love and life – a significant voice on writings from India!