Education Indian music music: layakari practice riyaaz tintal
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The Half-Speed Switcheroo: Rhythmic Cycle Practice in Exhaustive Detail
Let’s go back into the problems of working within rhythmic cycles (too many climate-change letters makes a dull blog, I know).
One of the most productive strategies for practicing rhythmic awareness is the half-speed switcheroo (note: I am not a nomenclatural traditionalist, so if you need paramparik lingo you’ll be disappointed). In this type of practice, a composed line is moved in and out of half-speed, first at the most important points of the taal (in tintal, that would of course be sam and khali), then at secondary, tertiary and quaternary points.
Let me demonstrate.
We’ll continue working with the simple sargam composition in Bhoopali:
The melody begins at khali, so the first shift into half speed will happen there, too. I’m just going to notate the transform using the first line; you can do the second line yourself (or make your students do it). Paper notation is useful but not really necessary; it’s a very good exercise to go through every aspect of this without writing anything down, keeping it all in your head, ears, voice and hands.
Education music Warren's music: games improvisation
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Musical Game Structures
Quite early in my musical life I became interested in Game Structures. I’ve already mentioned discovering some avant-garde composers through my high-school library’s bizarre decision to subscribe to “Source: Music of the Avant-Garde” during my junior year (two issues/year…and at the end of the year, noting that I was the only person who ever read them, and that I read them constantly, the librarians gave the magazines to me; they’re on the shelf behind me as I write). A few years later, living in Cambridge, I worked with Karl Boyle, who was writing some quite astonishing music that radically transformed the conceptual frameworks of everyone who participated in it.
Particularly important was a set of three pieces called the “Sound/Movement Murals,” an attempt to create performance structures which would engage musicians and dancers in the interpretation of a single set of instructions; all of us were “reading off the same score.” They were performed on stage in Boston; if I recall correctly it was as part of a festival of performance art.
These pieces have continued to influence me, off and on, for the last thirty years or so. Perhaps Karl has them somewhere in his files, and perhaps he would consider releasing them for others to learn from. I hope so.
In 1996 I was developing a music and music-making curriculum for the City of Boston’s After School program. As part of the materials, I wanted to include samples of alternative “notations,” so I generated a few pieces for inclusion in the curriculum (which is still available through Arts in Progress under the title “Ways of Listening”)
Education environment Politics: Brian Baird energy use habits USA Today
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Month 3, Day 16: Personal Habits and Public Policy
This one goes to the National McNewspaper. Some days I just look through the big publications to find something worth writing about. USA Today had a good interview with retiring Rep. Brian Baird (D-WA), and he made a lot of excellent points about the need for changes in our energy use patterns. Read the comments if you’re a fan of idiocy. Climate-change news seems to bring out a particular kind of mindlessness that is absolutely resistant to information or logic.
So USA Today heard from me. Plus which, I put this letter up in the comments, which should earn me a bunch of derision from the clueless denialists who’ve stunk the place up. What fun.
Brian Baird has the right idea. We need to make big changes in our habits of energy use if we want to avoid the worst effects of global climate change. Shorter showers, better equipment maintenance, more careful driving — all of these can go a long way to reducing our national level of greenhouse emissions.
But it’s not enough. Why? Because some of the worst offenders aren’t individuals. A massively polluting corporation cannot reduce its carbon footprint by taking a shorter shower or driving at the speed limit. As long as energy conservation leads to a lessening of profit in the short run, no corporate entity can be expected to go along with it. If wasting energy becomes more expensive, corporations will find ways to conserve. Which is why we need laws and enforcement mechanisms.
Neither voluntary behavioral changes nor legislative strategies are sufficient by themselves. Once America recognizes the severity of the crisis, we will have a genuine national response to the looming climate emergency — bottom-up (from the citizenry) and top-down (from the government). There is no time to waste. All of us need to change our habits, and all of us need meaningful climate legislation on the President’s desk.
Warren Senders
Education music: ear training epistemology Music education oral tradition
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About Listening and Learning
A few years ago I was talking about Indian pedagogy to a mixed group of musicians and school-teachers in a classroom at New England Conservatory, and I asked for a volunteer. One girl raised her hand, and I enlisted her as a “student” in the Indian sense. With the drone in the background, I sang a short series of notes and looked at her expectantly. “Bonnie” reproduced them, a bit tentatively for all that she was a trained singer with an acute ear and a lovely voice. I tried another set of notes; she was a bit more confident this time around.
I decided to up the ante.
Education Personal: family John Senders Personal
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It’s My Father’s 90th Birthday!
Happy Birthday, Dad!
When I was a kid he came home from work with a 16mm projector and a reel of film. “We’re going to watch a movie,” he said.
After dinner he threaded the projector. It was film of him, carrying out an experiment on the quantification of difficulty — while driving a car down Route 128.
When people asked me or my brother what my father did for a living, it was not an easy thing to explain.
It still isn’t.
We’re off to a family get-together with a lot of people celebrating at a Chinese restaurant in Cambridge. It should be fun.
Education Indian music music: muscle training practice rhythmic cycles riyaaz tabla
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Practicing Inside Rhythmic Cycles
One of the most challenging areas for many students of Hindustani music is working within rhythmic cycles. The ready availability of tabla machines has not solved this problem, because the core issue has more to do with not knowing how to practice than with not having a tabla player available all the time.
It is helpful to spend some time analyzing the various components of rhythmic-cycle practice. Once a singer begins this work, the cognitive load goes waaaaaay up; a lot more brain cells are required to keep all the elements of the musical equation under control. While holistic, gestalt-oriented practice is a must, it can be very helpful to break things down into smaller components and approach them with reductionistic ruthlessness.
To be competent in rhythmic-cycle-based improvisation, a singer must:
1 – be able to process rhythmic information concurrently with intonational information. That is to say, you have to be able to hear and feel the beats without getting distracted by them to the point that you go out of tune.
2 – be able to recognize important beats in the cycle and recalibrate according to position. That is, you have to hear crucial structural points and have enough cognitive strength available to lengthen or shorten your melodic line if necessary.
3 – be able to make coherent melodic shapes of specific lengths. In performance, it’s not enough to start an improvised melody at a specific point in the rhythm and finish it at another point — the melody you’re making needs to make sense. And (as if that weren’t enough) it needs to make sense at several levels; it has to be correct in raga terms, and it has to have gestural integrity. Those two are emphatically not the same thing.
Let’s take those distinct skills in turn, and I’ll discuss some ways of approaching them in the course of your practice.
Education environment Politics: Barack Obama consumerism economics
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Month 2, Day 20: Dis is a system?
Continuing on the theme of economic reformation, and using a rather intellectual mathematical analogy to convey why our present system of economics is fatally flawed. Thanks to G2Geek at Kos for that; it’s not something I would have thought of, and it makes me look really really smart.
Dear President Obama:
I supported you vigorously in the election, volunteering, donating, phonebanking and advocating as strongly as I could over the course of the campaign. In the past year, however, you’ve hired a number of people who I believe compromise your Administration’s ability to strive toward the goals we all share.
Your economic advisers are locked into a faulty and destructive model of economics. Lawrence Summers and Timothy Geithner, for example, are advocates of “limitless” economic growth as a universal good. But it is self-evident (or should be) that we live on a finite planet. Advocating indefinite and continual economic growth in a closed system like Earth is analogous to mapping an infinite plane onto a Euclidean solid. Which is impossible. An infinity cannot be a subset of an integer.
Leaving aside the ethical questions of putting the same people who broke the economy in charge of fixing it, leaving aside the obscene profits accrued by individuals and firms who are closely linked to Geithner, Summers and Bernanke, the most important thing is that you need economic advisers who understand that “limitless” economics does not work on a limited planet.
If we remain a society of consumers, we shall all of us be consumed. It’s happening now, Mr. President, and it’s not pretty.
Respectfully yours,
Warren Senders
Education environment: video
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Education environment Politics: gratitude intelligence Rachel Maddow
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Month 2, Day 12: A Fan Letter to (Who Else?) Rachel Maddow
If you haven’t watched Rachel Maddow explaining why a day or two of heavy snow doesn’t mean that global warming is a lie, you owe it to yourself. Take ten minutes and savor her graceful, clear and funny exercise in truth-telling:
I get a little worn down from constantly chastising the denialist idiots in our media and politics, which made writing a letter of thanks to Rachel Maddow a huge pleasure. Note that I offer her the analogy I used in yesterday’s letter — perhaps she’ll use it sometime. That would be a moment to savor.
Dear Rachel Maddow — I write to thank you for your genuine journalistic integrity on the subject of climate change. The issue of global warming and the devastating consequences to Earth’s capacity to support humanity (and the web of life upon which we all depend) are obscured by highly paid denialists, and our media almost without exception refuse to address the subject with respect for scientific method and integrity. Instead, the professional pundits hew to a doctrine of false equivalency in which two contradictory statements are given “equal time,” regardless of their actual truth or falsehood.
Which makes your show of February 10 a landmark by any standards. Your ability to explain the sometimes counterintuitive concepts behind climate change is virtually unique in the world of broadcast journalism; while I’m glad you’re doing what you’re doing, it’s a tragedy that you’re virtually the only person in broadcast journalism who’s doing it.
Thanks to an ADD-afflicted media and an utterly mendacious opposition party, the number of Americans who don’t believe climate change is happening has increased; fewer and fewer of our population are ready to address these problems head-on, and that’s making a terrifying and dystopian future for our grandchildren and their grandchildren in turn. Please keep highlighting climate issues. There is nothing more important for America and the world in the long run, for if we get this one wrong, there won’t be any chance for a “do-over.” You reach millions of people each day, and your calm and careful voice inspires confidence — while your readiness to skewer liars and hypocrites inspires trust.
At the beginning of 2010, I made a resolution to write a letter a day to politicians and/or media on climate-change issues. My daughter is five years old; I want her to grow up in a world rich in nature’s possibilities, a world where humanity’s accomplishments are not vitiated by our endless production of toxic trash. Most of my letters are scolding ones, for there is a lot of scolding that has to be done. Every so often, though, I get to write a letter like this one — thanking someone for doing the simple but difficult work of telling the truth. It is a pleasure to see you doing what you do. I hope you do it for a long time to come.
Let me close by offering you an analogy that I used in a recent letter addressing the same idiocy you discussed on your February 10th broadcast: the idea that heavy snow disproves global climate change. Perhaps you’ll be able to use it sometime. I wrote: “To say a freak snowstorm disproves the reality of global climate change is as misguided as saying the swollen belly of a starving child disproves the reality of world hunger.”
My daily letters often feel like shouting into a hurricane; your voice is a crucial one. Thank you again for your important work. Don’t give up!
Yours sincerely,
Warren Senders
P.S. – Thanks also for your devastating takedown of James Inhofe. That man gives dishonesty and hypocrisy a bad name.
Education environment: inappropriate Nazi analogies stupidity superbowl
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Month 2, Day 9: A Luxury Sedan Letter
I understand nothing about professional football. As far as I can figure out, it is, in the words of Ashleigh Brilliant, “Violence punctuated by committee meetings.” So I was only peripherally aware that there was a major cultural event this past weekend featuring very large men hurling spheroids about a grassy field while wearing brightly colored costumes and colorful helmets. I gather that one of the commercial organizations involved in the activity “won,” while the other “lost.”
And yet, I find myself involved in the aftermath of the SuperBowl. Daily Kos diarist A Siegel noted an advertisement from Audi which he described as “The Most Environmentally Unfriendly Super Bowl Ad” in a lengthy post the other day. I read it because I read all of his work…and it provided me with the hook for today’s letter, which goes both to Audi of America and to their advertising agency, Venables Bell and Partners.
Dear Audi of America — I write to protest your recently aired advertisement, the “Green Police” Superbowl commercial. While I have no doubt your advertising agency meant the TV spot to be a tongue-in-cheek approach to environmental awareness and its increasing importance in society, the effect of the ad was to trivialize ecological concerns (on the one hand), and to stigmatize those who are trying to effect meaningful change in world environmental policy (on the other).
Your ad shows “green police” arresting and brutalizing people who are using plastic bags, failing to compost their food refuse, burning incandescent bulbs, and luxuriating in hot tubs — responding with grossly inappropriate force to real and imagined environmentally unfriendly actions. Thus the advertisement promulgates a view of ‘going green’ that suggests a totalitarian police state — not a positive and sustainable future.
It is a bizarre irony that ‘green police’ is a term for The Orpo, or Ordnungspolizei, the uniformed regular German police force in Nazi Germany, notably between 1936 and 1945. Owing to their green uniforms, they were also referred to as Grüne Polizei (green police). And, in a chapter of history that senior Audi personnel would probably rather not remember too vividly, the “Green Police” were well and thoroughly implicated in Hitler’s genocide, providing manpower for deportations, ghetto-clearings, and massacres.
It’s probably true that most Americans (especially those who are fixated on competitive football) have little sense of history. But that’s no excuse for evoking some of Hitler’s foot soldiers in a totally misleading way. Ordinary citizens and politicians with an interest in environmental protection might find it offensive to be equated with Nazi lackeys, don’t you think?
Rush Limbaugh and his ilk have already saturated the brains of American conservatives with phrases like “eco-Nazi.” The last thing we need is a well-respected auto manufacturer to fall into their camp; judging by the immediate reaction of conservative commentators, that’s exactly where you’ve landed.
Pull the ad immediately. It’s misleading, offensive, and as far from funny as you can get.
Yours sincerely,
Warren Senders
Venables Bell & Partners
201 Post St., Ste. 200
San Francisco, CA 94108
United States
Phone: 415-288-3300
Fax: 415-421-3683