Education environment: consumerism corporatism sustainability
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Month 2, Day 8: Help! I am Trapped in a Consumerist Fortune Cookie Factory!
I just sat down and wrote this thing, and then spent the next hour wondering who to send it to. For the moment, faute de mieux, it’s going to my local newspaper. If anyone has any suggestions, please pass them along.
If humanity as a species is to survive, we must change the way we treat our environment. But for this to happen, we must recognize that the ongoing destruction of our planet’s biodiversity, atmosphere, and oceans is the result of a disastrously misguided conception of economic values. Americans have been told over and over again that our contribution to the common good is to consume. After September 11, then-President Bush famously instructed Americans to go shopping.
When we go shopping, what do we do? We buy thousands of dollars’ worth of plastic merchandise, manufactured in the Third World and packaged in vast quantities of plastic armor which is immediately torn off and thrown away. The products themselves are likely to get used up, destroyed and discarded before too many months have gone by; a trip through an American suburb on “garbage night” shows innumerable trinkets and appliances destined for the landfills. From this perspective, our economy appears to be entirely based on buying things and turning them into trash as quickly as possible.
And, obviously, this economic model is bad for the long-term health of our society. Aside from the fact that ultimately we’ll run out of resources to destroy (the most immediate of which is “peak oil,” the point where our store of hydrocarbon fractions begins to dwindle inexorably), a consumerist model is bad for our mental health. We exhort our children to give back as much as they take, but unless we exemplify these values in our own lives, it’s just moralistic prattle for the youngsters — another example of grownup hypocrisy.
The next few decades will determine whether we live in a world that offers our children and their children the hope of a meaningful future, or a blighted, poisoned landscape clogged beyond recognition with toxic trash. We can’t fix the climate unless we transform our economy. And the way to transform the economy is to focus all (that’s ALL) our power and attention on living in ways that give back more to the Earth than we take out. Americans are woefully ignorant of how to do this; I know I am. But for our grandchildren’s sake, we’d better start learning.
Warren Senders
Education music: music learning practice riyaaz
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Two Techniques for Regulating Your Practice
More from the Brian O’Neill Interview. This post has the two of us discussing two techniques for controlling the use of practice time to maximize ROI.
The Technique of a Hundred Beans
WS: Here is a very good technique that my teacher showed me for helping to regulate one’s practice: Get two bowls, or cups, and, from the supermarket buy a bag of kidney beans or garbanzo beans or something. Garbanzos are good for this. Count out a hundred of them. Put them in one bowl. Transfer one bean from the source bowl to the target bowl after each repetition of the line.
Later, I introduced a refinement. You see, you take one lick and you repeat it exactly a hundred times. My refinement was that sometimes in those bags of garbanzo beans you get one that’s misshapen or miscolored or something. I put that one in there, and whenever I got that one, I improvised for the same length of time. So at some point, I’d get a little vacation, and it was always a pleasant surprise.
BTO: What’s the unit of time per garbanzo bean?
WS: It was one lick, whatever the lick was — you know, typically not more than a minute. A hundred minutes is a long time!
BTO: Oh, each repetition?
WS: Yeah, each repetition. Finish a repetition, transfer a bean — This is the way to really regulate repetition.
If you don’t repeat it, then you wind up thinking that you know it, but not really having it there when you need it. It’s gotta be like tying your shoes, you know? It has to be completely fixed in muscle memory.
Index Cards
One way of handling the question of “what should I practice today?” is to get some index cards. On each card you jot down the nature of a particular practice, along with a stipulated length of time — however long that particular practice is going to last.
“Expanding & contracting, going up six notes and going down, and then doing that from the tonic, third and fifth of the natural minor scale.” 10 minutes
“Four-note paltas in Raga Kafi, from Mandra Pa to Tar Ma.” 20 minutes.
“Major 7, Dom 7, Minor 7 and Min7 b5 arpeggios in all twelve keys, through the cycle of fifths.” 25 minutes.
“Sightreading from Captain O’Neill’s book of fiddle tunes.”10 minutes.
“This specific piece of complex bol-bant in ‘Piyu pal na laagi mori ankhiyaa’ (Raga Gaud Sarang).”15 minutes.
“Fast scales in 16th note triplets across a two octave range, sung & played on guitar. 20 minutes. Starting at metronome thus-and-such, going up to at least metronome thus-and-such.”
And, so, every time that you invent a new practice, you note down what it is. Then, after a little while, you wind up with a batch of cards; you have, perhaps, 15 or 20 cards.
Then, after you’ve done your basic warm-ups, you shuffle the cards, and whatever comes up, you do that. And then your practice for the day is however many cards you can fit in the unit of time that you have allotted to practice. And then, here’s the nice part: the next day, you don’t just start where you left off — you shuffle the cards again.
Which means that some of the time you wind up doing the same practice three days in a row. But over all, over the space of, say, two weeks, you wind up meeting everything in there, and experiencing it as a sort of total repertoire of stuff to do. Then you may observe, in the course of those practices, “Huh, it really seems like in this part of this thing [= practice, card], I’m really not making it.” Then you design a lick that embodies that particular [problematic] thing, and that’s when you do the technique-building, metronome-incrementing practice (described in “One Lick for Two Hours.” Then you go back to that same practice [on the index card] next week or something, and you’ll ace it!
Education India Indian music music: drone gesture R. Murray Schafer silence Singing Imagination tamboura texture
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Some Thoughts on the Drone
The drone lives at the center of Hindustani music, and yet I think its significance has rarely been stated completely. To say that it affirms or creates the tonality is to state the obvious; rather, think of the number of musical systems in the world in which the drone is implicit or only occasionally stated. Why then is the tamboura so essential in Hindustani music? In concerts, a singer often gestures to the tamboura players, indicating “more force, more volume!” — why?
R. Murray Schafer, that marvelously creative Canadian composer and educator, offers us a complementary pair of terms, gesture and texture. Hindustani melody is gesture refined and elaborated; gesture with fractal sub-gestures endlessly revealing themselves to careful listening. The complement to a gesture is a texture, where elements are sustained with enough consistency that they form a ground, a backdrop — a context within which isolated ideas can be heard and appreciated.
atheism Education environment: humor Roy Zimmerman
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Because Tom Lehrer Isn’t Performing Anymore…
We have Roy Zimmerman instead.
For which I am profoundly grateful.
Here’s “Creation Science.” He’s a heck of a guitarist, too.
atheism Education: AUM cluelessness fundamentalist encounters
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Sometimes they do it to themselves.
Years ago I got a student referral from a colleague. J_____ called me and wanted to begin studying Indian music. I explained the scheduling and fee structure to him, and he seemed anxious to begin.
“But,” he then said, anxiously, “you’re not going to make me meditate or anything, are you?”
I assured him that I would be teaching music, not meditation.
He came and started lessons. As part of developing his voice production, I instructed him to sing the tonic Sa while moving his lips from a wide “AAAAAAA” slowly through all the intermediate vowel positions, listening to the sweep of the overtones as his lips moved from “OOOOOO” to “UUUUUUU” and finally closed on an “MMMMMMMM.” He enjoyed that and commented repeatedly how it seemed to help his singing voice gain resonance (true, dat).
J_____ was a pretty musical guy, and he started to make progress with the first raga we selected. He struck me as someone who craved the “exotic” quality of augmented seconds, so I started him on Raga Bhairav — always effective as an auditory icon of India. He learned some alap phrases and grasped basic sargams pretty rapidly; I taught him some rhythmic variations on a sargam composition and he internalized them quite well.
I said, “It seems to me you’re ready for a song, J______.” He replied, “Well, okay, but it can’t be anything Hindu.”
I said, “What?” He repeated himself, and asked, “Is the song you want to teach me a Hindu song?”
I replied, “Well, many of the songs of this tradition reflect Hindu themes in their lyrics. It’s kind of unavoidable. Why is it important to you to avoid a song with a Hindu theme?”
His answer? “Because Hinduism is an evil religion.”
Uh-huh. I asked him how he knew this, and he replied that the minister at his church told him so. Which is how I discovered that the guy who was taking raga lessons from me was in fact a hard-core fundamentalist nut-job. His minister had delivered a whole string of sermons on the eeeeeevil Hindus and their terrible idolatry and caste system and cow-worshiping and eight-armed gods and on and on and on. And J______ had swallowed the whole thing, hook, line and sinker.
Which was why he had wanted to be sure I wasn’t going to teach him meditation.
So we had a little conversation, and I suggested that maybe all religious traditions had some stuff in their closets they perhaps shouldn’t be too proud of, like the Inquisition. He was taken aback, and said, “Aren’t you a Christian?”
“No,” I said. “I’m an atheist.”
He left, rapidly. Three days later I got a call from him.
“Warren, this is J_____. I’m not going to be able to keep taking lessons from you, because, um, because, aaah, er, um, I…, I…., ummm, I, er, um…don’t have enough money to continue. But I want you to know that I’ve really enjoyed the lessons, and I’m going to continue to do the overtone exercise every day the way you showed me, because it seems to be really good for my voice.”
Which is how I got a gen-you-wine bible-thumpin’ intolerant ignorant fundie whackjob to spend a bit of time every day…saying “AAAAAOOOOOOOOUUUUUUMMMMM” over and over.
Bringin’ it all back OM.
Education Indian music music: practice riyaaz
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More Notes on Practicing
More material taken from my long-ago interview with my student Brian O’Neill. This discusses a practice technique called:
One Lick for Two Hours
Now, when you’re trying to build up speed and technical fluency the following exercise is very useful:
Compose a line (preferably in your head) 2 or 3 notes at a time… and keep building it up until you have something that covers the range that you want to cover and includes whatever kind of technical things you want to address (scalar segments, intervallic jumps, whatever).
Switch the metronome on (at around 60 bpm) and do the line in half notes, keeping the metronome not on the downbeats, but on the upbeats (2 & 4). That is, your sung articulations and the metronome’s strokes aren’t happening at the same time.
Go through the whole line in sargam, in neutral syllables, and in open vowels. If you’re an instrumentalist, go through the line using individual articulations on each note, then with a legato approach.
At which point you double the speed, so that the same line is now sung in quarter-notes, one note per pulse. The metronome needs to stay on the offbeats! Again, do it in sargam, neutral syllables and one or two open vowels.
Then go back to the original tempo and revisit that for a few iterations.
Now move the metronome up a click. If you have a digital metronome, go up by three or four beats per minute.
Repeat the process exactly as before, and when you’re done, move the metronome up another few bpm.
Eventually you’ll get up to mm 120, which is exactly double your starting tempo. Do the same exercise at that tempo…and then shift the metronome back to 60.
Only this time, maintain the same sung/played speed you had at mm 120 — with the metronome at the slower tempo. Now you’ll be singing the line in quarter and eighth notes relative to the speed of the metronome.
Repeat the alternation of “single” and “double” speed, with the metronome still on 2 and 4. (For extra credit, why does this practice work better when the metronome’s on the offbeats?). Keep going up by a few bpm at a time.
Eventually you’ll reach a point where you can go no further; a point where your technique is on the edge of failure.
Don’t stop the practice just yet. Instead, back down by a notch or two, repeat the material, then back down again. Do this eight or nine times, so that when you finally conclude the practice, you’re midway between your maximum speed and mm 60.
Stop.
Go take a walk or something. That’s enough of that practice for the day.
This is not a ten minute practice, this is a two hour practice. Two hours on one lick. The important thing is to keep that process going, all the way up and then retreat, incrementally, back down to about halfway from your original starting point.
This gradual up and down incrementation turns out to be very useful for building a solid technique at all levels of speed. It’s boring as hell, but it works a treat.
I remember sitting down to practice in my apartment in Pune. I was practicing Yaman, I sat down to practice, and I practiced one line for about an hour and forty-five minutes — using this metronome technique. Then I finished, I turned off the sruti box, and immediately my doorbell rang. And I went over and it was Atul, the sitarist in my ensemble. And he said, “That was incredible!” I said, “You were listening to the practice? How long were you there?” He said, laughing, “Oh, I arrived just before you began!” So he had been outside my door for an hour and forty five minutes listening to me go over the same thing and he was completely thrilled to have heard this practice. That was very interesting to me. Not everybody would find that interesting, but Atul did.
Education Indian music music: paltas patterns permutations practice Raga riyaaz
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Thinking About Palta Exercises
More of the material from my long-ago interview with my student Brian O’Neill. Here, I discuss the permutational practice routines known as Palta Exercises.
Hindustani musicians already know what I’m talking about. Western musicians will describe them as short phrases transposed up and down a scale: 123, 234, 345, 456, etc.
Paltas can be practiced within ragas, of course, but they are also useful for practicing ear-training and pattern manipulation inside scales.
To clarify the distinction: a palta in Raga Bhimpalasi would accommodate the omission of the second and sixth degrees in ascent, and the inclusion of these notes on the way down. Violating the raga’s rules of motion is off the table. On the other hand, a palta in Kafi Thaat (the Dorian mode, if you will) would not have any such restrictions.
Here’s a useful way to do paltas:
Pick a scale — any scale, preferably one that has 7 notes. Take a single short pattern (let’s call it a “cell”), and transpose it up and down in the scale.
For example:
S N S / R S R / G R G / M G M / P M P / D P D / N D N / S N S
N D N / D P D / P M P / M G M / G R G / R S R / S N SAnd once you’ve memorized it, then do another pattern.
S N D / R S N / G R S / M G R / P M G / D P M / N D P / S N D
S R G / N S R / D N S / P D N / M P D / G M P / R G M / S R G…Again, do that for 10 minutes.
And then alternate the two patterns, one after the other. Do it all from memory.
Then combine the two patterns:
S N S / S N D
R S R / R S N
G R G / G R S
M G M /M G R
P M P / P M G
etc., over as much of a range as you feel comfortable singing or playing.Then try combining the two in the other order:
S N D / S N S
R S N / R S R
G R S / G R G
M G R / M G M
P M G / P M P
etc.Try doing two iterations of the first “cell” and one of the second:
S N S / S N S / S N D
R S R / R S R / R S N
G R G / G R G / G R S
etc.Begin making up your own combinations of cell sequences, always using your memory to keep the material fresh in your mind’s ear.
Try, instead of alternating cells, alternating successive notes of the two different cells. S N S / S N D thus becomes S S N N S D; S N D / S N S becomes S S N N D S.
Instrumentalists should be singing these patterns as well as playing them. It is also a very good exercise to sing while fingering them on your instrument (without activating it in any other way). This builds a powerful cognitive link between instrument and voice that pays off in future fluency and expressiveness.
Education Indian music: hindustani music practice rhythmic cycles riyaaz tala theka
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Understanding Tala – Internalizing Talas and Thekas
A thread on rec.music.indian.classical (USENET) attracted my attention today.
It started with a request:
“I am learning ICM at my own and also attending community school once in a week. I have following question when I tried to practice at home.”
1) In Teen Taal (16 Beats) From which beat the composition/bandish/alaap etc. starts ? i.e. should I start from Taali or Khali which beat #. ( I am using Radel DigiTaalmala)
2)Is there any book available to teach me the basic concept of starting composition with any Taala ? (means which will show me that in “xyz” taal – the composition will start from taali or khali or 3
or 4th beat etc.)Your advice/response will be highly appreciated.
With Kind Regards
Chandrakant
I responded as follows, in what strikes me as a pretty good summary of the advice I am frequently giving my students about working with theka:
There are two different issues at play here.
One is to understand the internal structure of the tala.
To do this it is very useful for a vocalist to practice theka
recitation. Note the relationships of the tabla bols to the tongue
and laryngeal position.All important right hand strokes use unvoiced dental “t” sounds: ta,
tin, tun tet. Na is the anusvar of that tongue position. Recite “ta
tin tin ta” over and over; experience the difference in overtone
structure between the “a” vowel and the “in” phoneme as each is
triggered by the “t” tongue attack.All important left hand strokes use the velar consonants. Ge and
Kat. Ge is a voiced velar that is sustained on an “e” vowel, Kat
begins with an unvoiced velar and ends with a retroflex “T” stop.Recite “Ge Ge Ge Ge Kat Kat Kat Kat” over and over, experiencing the difference between the voiced sustained and the unvoiced stopped velars.
But what of strokes that use both hands? Discover for yourself that
it is impossible to say “Ta” and “Ge” simultaneously. Try it; your
tongue won’t be able to do it.So how to speak the syllables for these strokes? Simple. Change the unvoiced dentals of the right hand to voiced dentals: ta + ge = dha; tin + ge = dhin, etc. Recite “Dha Dhin Dhin Dha” and feel that there is sonic activity taking place in two places in your vocal mechanism. Your vocal chords are making a steady stream of impulses (basically “uh uh uh uh uh uh” since shaping vowels is done by the mouth), and your tongue is articulating lightly between your teeth (“ta tin tin ta” etc.). The front of your mouth is the high drum, your throat is
the low drum.Now recite theka for a long time, and experience the rise and fall of impulses in your throat and mouth as you move through the cycle. Pay particular attention to the return of your vocal chords on the 14th matra, emphasize “dhin dhin Dha DHA” — that’s the sam.
In order to understand the relationship between the bandish and the theka, it is very useful to recite theka while listening to vocal recordings. In this you want to have standard professional accompanists; attempting to recite theka while Zakir is embellishing is much more difficult. On many older recordings, tabla is very low in the mix. I often tell my students to listen to someone like Veena Sahasrabuddhe as her recordings are generally mixed very well and the tabla players are people like Omkar Gulwady, who keep beautifully flowing theka without much finger-chatter.
Listen to many different bandishes while you recite. Observe the many different ways they have of coming to the sam and maintaining a relationship with it.
A useful exercise is (once you know where the sam is located on a
particular bandish) to sing one line of the chiz, then recite theka
*from the point in the cycle where the song begins*. Thus, an 8-beat mukhda would start on khali; one would sing the song text once, then recite, starting at khali: “Jabse tumhi sanga LAagali / Dha tin tin ta ta dhin dhin dha DHA dhin dhin dha dha dhin dhin dha / Jabse tumhi sanga laagali / Dha tin tin ta ta dhin dhin dha DHA, etc., etc.” A five-beat mukhda, on the other hand, might yield something like “Bolana LAAgi koyaliyaa / ta ta dhin dhin dha DHA dhin dhin dha dha dhin dhin dha dha tin tin / bolana LAAgi koyaliya / ta ta dhin dhin dha DHA, etc., etc.”Practice these approaches assiduously and enthusiastically and you will gain many interesting rhythmic insights.
Warren
atheism Education: epistemology scientific method
by Warren
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Scientific Method, Scientific Purpose, Scientific Spirit
Just found this quote from Chauncey D. Leake in the most recent issue of Humanist magazine. He paraphrases Edwin Grant Conklin in this beautiful summary of the ways science does what it does:
“The purpose of science, he said, is like that of religion — to find out the truth about ourselves and our environment. The method is one of continual skepticism, self-critical and self-corrective, seeking data which are independently verifiable. The methodology proceeds either by experimental reasoning with logical and consistent coherence as in mathematics, or by observation, tentative explanation, controlled experimentation, and inducible conclusions as in the life sciences. The attitude or spirit of science as a concept, is realization that the findings of scientific effort are tentative and relative, that the validity of scientific conclusions rests on voluntary agreement among those who examine the evidence, and that unwelcome truth is better than cherished error. This is a value judgment, and gives moral significance to the whole concept of science. All of this is based on a concern, in scientific effort, for the welfare of humanity as a whole.”
Chauncey D. Leake — “Humanistic Aspects of the Unity in Science”
All of this is based on a concern, in scientific effort, for the welfare of humanity as a whole.
Let me repeat that.
All of this is based on a concern, in scientific effort, for the welfare of humanity as a whole.
I’m a member of the American Humanist Association. How about you?
Education environment: Desperation florida letters NPR
by Warren
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Year 1, Month 1, Day 12: NPR Hears From Me
Driving home today, I switched back and forth between NPR and the Thom Hartmann show on Boston’s progressive AM station (for which FSM be thanked!). NPR News ran a story on freezing weather in Florida, focusing on the damage citrus groves were taking from ice and snow, and mentioning that virtually the entire tropical fish supply of North America was jeapordized by the extreme cold (I never thought about thousands upon thousands of goldfish being raised in outdoor tanks in Florida, for sale to households across the nation, but there you are).
Naturally, the NPR announcers didn’t say a thing about the role that global climate change has in freak weather events like this. So after I finished teaching this evening, I went to the NPR ombudsperson’s page and submitted the following:
Fruit Freezes in Florida…
… and I heard the story on NPR News this evening.
While I found the story of potentially frozen citrus groves and iced tropical fish farms interesting, I was saddened (although not surprised, alas) that NPR did not do analysis of this story in light of the unfolding crisis of global climate change. A story like this one is a perfect vehicle to illuminate the fact that increased temperatures in some parts of the world can trigger freak weather (including unreasonable and unseasonable cold) in others.
Polls have shown that a significant proportion of Americans don’t believe that global warming is happening at all, or don’t believe that it is due to human agency. The current spell of extreme cold will inevitably trigger more statements along the lines of, “Global warming? Ha! Ha! Can’t you see it’s snowing outside!”
It is the responsibility of a news organization to help its audience figure out what the news means. The story of frozen fruit and fish in the American South would have been a perfect opportunity for NPR to do exactly that: teach its listeners a little bit about the difference between weather and climate, and why a warming planet can cause icicles in orange groves.
The future of the human species hangs on developing our ability to make sense of phenomena outside our accustomed scales of time and magnitude. The climate crisis is a perfect example; it is increasingly likely that our distractability and ignorance will prevent our taking meaningful action until it is too late to make a difference.
By failing to see this story for what it really is, NPR is enabling those who seek to deny the reality of our ongoing climaticide.
Warren Senders
If any of you happen to hear them reading this on the air, please let me know!