sarodguitarist

New tune in progress: Uwe-ji

2008-05-10T14:13:21Z

Uwe-ji

Based on the afternoon raga Brindavani (or Brindabani) Sarang, which my teacher (Uwe Neumann) started teaching me last fall, and which I've now resumed studying since he got back from his winter in India.

Briefly (and oversimplified):

Arohi: Sa - Re - Ma - Pa - Ni komal - Pa - Ni (shuddh) - Sa

(root, second, fourth, fifth, flat seventh, fifth, major seventh, octave)

Avarohi: Sa - Ni komal - Pa - Ma - Re - Ma - Re - Sa

(octave, flat 7th, fifth, fourth, second, fourth, second, root)

You'll note there's no third (ga) or sixth (dha) anywhere in the raag. This causes a slight illusion that the key is centered on the pa rather than the sa (which I exploit in the synth accompaniment here.) But the constant presence of the sa in the tanpura, tabla, and chikari strings keeps it anchored to the actual root key in standard practice. Here I've had to include a low pedal C sharp and a tanpura drone chord which comes in just before the guitar to assert the C sharp sa and keep it balanced.

One uses the major seventh when ascending to a sa (and I use it as a quickly passing ornament/grace note in conjunction with the second above it thus: re sa ni sa), but when descending one always plays the flat seventh.

A meen (glide) between the fourth and second is very characteristic of this raag, and is often echoed by a similar meen between the komal ni and pa and between the sa and komal ni and between the pa and ma.

TENORI-ON

2008-04-12T20:16:45Z

Last night I went to Montréal's own SAT (Société des arts technologiques) where I saw a demo of a very different kind of musical instrument. A number of local, national and international DJ/performers were on hand to demonstrate what they're learning to do with it, and the inventor and his Yamaha Corp. collaborator were there too.

Herewith my phonepic-illustrated impressions:

Out on the floor they'd placed a dozen or so TENORI-ON kiosks for people to play with - even the evening's headliner Pole stopped by one to fiddle:

Our local favorite Pheek started things out with a fairly abstract atonal/industrial groove set. He used it with his usual Ableton Live on a laptop:

Next up was either Nathan Michel or Toronto's I Am Robot & Proud, I forget which, but I snapped pics of the latter, who integrated the T-O with a regular MIDI keyboard:

The best set of the night for me was Robert Lippok's set (no laptop) with percussionist Debashis Sinha:

Before the final two DJs was inventor (and non-musician) Toshio Iwai's hour-long lecture (with a kind of über-Powerpoint presentation) on the genesis of his baby, where he mentioned his initial inspiration was Scottish-Canadian film innovator Norman MacLaren's technique of drawing not only the visuals but also the audio track directly onto film stock. So the idea of combining visual and auditory creativity into one medium began with that.

Next, Iwai mentioned that he wasn't all that comfortable with standard Western score notation, but found an appealing accessible alternative in the music box with punched paper strip, the strip being an interesting grid mechanism much more easily altered - reversed, whatever:

Another step in the evolution was his exploration of a Go- or chessboard interface where placing pebbles(?) in indentations in a grid table produced an electronic output mapped to sonic parameters.

This moved on to a similar interface of grid buttons which sent a digital output stream mapped like a piano roll matrix. This data was fed to a Yamaha Disklavier grand piano (he didn't mention that it was one, just that it was a "grand piano", but it had to be, as it's the only MIDI'fied acoustic keyboard in existence) and not only that, but its video output - as a scrolling piano roll matrix - was projected onto a clear film stretched from the input to the Disklavier keyboard and then up to the ceiling, so that the visual representation of the notes reached the keyboard just as the appropriate notes were being triggered and the keys depressed - a delightful effect!

He had then followed this project with one where Ryuichi Sakamoto played one Disklavier (instead of the button table interface) which triggered a second Disklavier (with some unspecified alteration to the data stream), with a video representation of the notes "bouncing" in an arc from one to the other.

He then moved on to a look at various stages of purely software-based, on-screen interfaces which developed the idea of drawing and gestural inputs to the grid. (I couldn't help but think of my old San Francisco neighbour and acquaintance Eric Wenger, the Parisian genius polymath - visual artist, musician, and software engineer - who developed the landscape generation app Bryce 3D, which used auditory concepts in its Deep Texture Editor, and the music drawing apps Metasynth and Artmatic, which I've used a little. [I created the opening sounds of my 2001 piece Pearl Land entirely in those two apps.] Spending time at his house was worth the copious amounts of his unfiltered Camels' second-hand smoke I inhaled...)

He showed some more slides of the prototyping process at Yamaha (that's his engineer collaborator with him on stage), which I didn't take any pix of, being more interested in the conceptual history than the coalescing into hardware form. (Although his insistence on subtle touches to the look of the device, such as using a careful process of buffing and fine-scratching the unpainted magnesium casing, which involved programming an industrial robot, has obviously paid off in its good looks. He said he was proud that the device was made in the same Yamaha factory that produces their excellent pianos and acoustic guitars.)

The two of them played a short duet and then it was on to the final two performers, Sutekh and Pole. Sutekh's set was visually interesting in that most of the dynamic patterns on the T-O were very interesting in of themselves, but I found his overall sound too abrasive. (Overall, the sound was a bit loud for what's a fairly hard-walled, reflective space. I was sitting all the way in the back with a friend during part of Pole's set, and she thought it was too loud too.)

I couldn't see what Pole was doing with his T-O (it was hard to tell if he was using one at all); his set was good, but nowhere near as compelling as the last time I saw him at Mutek.

Still, it's a new instrument to them, and I predict amazing things, just based on the amount of variation among them all which I heard over the evening.

Sutekh:

Pole:

Kai's music

2007-11-11T05:03:45Z

Non-violence

2007-10-06T01:43:19Z

October 2nd was International Non-violence Day (and the anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi's birth); though busy writing a paper due the next day (and too busy to post this in a timely way), I went to see two short films at school which were sponsored by the local Indian cultural organization which puts on many great concerts.

"'A SEASON OUTSIDE', a film by AMAR KANWAR, GOLDEN GATE AWARD, (1999), 41st San Francisco International Film Festival, 30 mins, English and 'WARRIORS OF PEACE' by David Balcon, Solstice Entertainment, Toronto, 22 minutes, English. Both films (one Indian and the other Canadian) explore different dimensions of violence within and without and bring out the relevance of Gandhian philosophy to every day life."

Two very different films, each very interesting. Occasional mentions of Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King, Jr., who are of course the most well-known 20th century practitioners of Gandhian philosophy. The Canadian film was about a Cree Chief, Ovide Mercredi (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ovide_Mercredi), who was disillusioned by the violent confrontations that younger, frustrated tribal members had initiated with the Canadian and provincial governments. He went to India to learn from some of the people there who are carrying on Gandhi's work, some of who had struggled alongside Gandhi when they were quite young.

There's an old quote of Dr. King's that expands upon Gandhi's famous saying "an eye for an eye, until the whole world is blind":

"Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can."

An author new to my must-read list...

2007-03-26T01:42:29Z

...once I've finished Neal Stephenson's Baroque trilogy, that is. (Read the first book last summer, just started the second. There are few authors as amazingly rich in detail and insight as he is. And no, I still haven't read his "Snow Crash", the one that geeks always rave about.)

This new (to me) author is A.L. Kennedy, a novelist invariably characterized as "bleak", and now a sometime stand-up comedian. Ran across an article in the Arts section of one of my must-read online news sites, the UK's Guardian.

http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/generalfiction/story/0,,2042048,00.html

Almost immediately I felt an odd sense of familiarity and empathy with Alison Louise, as she prefers not to be called. (She makes a good point about separating the art from the artist:

''Never mind the work, let's review the author,' she has written scathingly about interviewers on her website. 'Someone who sits alone for a hours at a time, typing, must be really fascinating and it beats having to think about anything, doesn't it?''

and

'The authors I first loved all had initials - JRR Tolkien, CS Lewis, E Nesbit, ee cummings - and I actively didn't want to know who they were or have them get in the way of my enjoying their story and their voice.' )

Too late for me, I guess; it's the sense of who she is or might be that's creating the initial impetus in me to read her work. We'll see if the work itself is compelling to me on its own. As I have a streak of bleak running through my own personality and my music, there's a good chance it will be.) She reminds me not only a bit of myself but also of another friend, a woman I'd lost touch with since my SF days - nearly ten years gone by - but recently reconnected with and was glad to find out was doing OK, with a good new partner. I was able to give us both some closure on some leftover unpleasantness connected with both our baggages at the time. Always nice when that's possible. Especially now when there is one case in my life where I'm pretty sure it's not.

Anyway, some more links on her:

http://living.scotsman.com/books.cfm?id=1067392006

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/article697255.ece

http://books.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1838932,00.html

My accent

2007-03-24T19:53:23Z

Quite accurate. (one parent from and grew up halfway between NYC and Philadelphia.)

What American accent do you have? Your Result: The Northeast Judging by how you talk you are probably from north Jersey, New York City, Connecticut or Rhode Island. Chances are, if you are from New York City (and not those other places) people would probably be able to tell if they actually heard you speak.
Philadelphia
The Inland North
The Midland
The South
Boston
The West
North Central
What American accent do you have? Quiz Created on GoToQuiz

Why my handle is "sarodguitarist":

2007-03-22T13:36:54Z

I study North Indian Classical music on fretless guitar, using techniques borrowed from the sarod. (Pic above. That's Ustad Amjad Ali Khan, my favorite sarodist.)

the violence of meta-narratives and the alternative of paralogy

2007-03-21T04:56:13Z

For school lately I've been reading several postmodern authors, the latest two being Jean-François Lyotard and Richard Rorty. There are some commonalities to these two that have got me thinking about the roots of mutual understanding and misunderstanding. One phrase of Lyotard's that stands out for me, and one to which I relate strongly, is that the postmodern era is characterized by "an incredulity toward meta-narratives." A disinclination to buy the big story, any big story, that explains everything.

So here's what I've been scribbling lately that hasn't fit within the confines of my homework assignments:

Lyotard and Rorty

There seems to be an inherent humility, and so also an inherent egalitarianism, to an inter-plurality discourse which abandons the desire for a "God's-eye view", which abandons "the desire for objectivity". Since there is no "meeting-place" above the various ethnocentric views, no metalanguage with a metanarrative which can be used in place of our various locally rooted languages and their narratives, there can be instead only direct, horizontal efforts at translation. As we know from the example of the impossibility of full idiomatic translation between ordinary languages (French to English, German to French, etc.), there will always be something "lost in translation", and so a consensus on "truth" can never be achieved, only aimed for. (Lyotard thinks it can't be achieved at all; Rorty seems to think there is the possibility of extensive though limited success.) If because of the at least partial incommensurability of our different narratives we cannot arrive at a common understanding of what "truth" is to the degree which a realist position would seem to require, then it is literally useless - of no use value - to speak of "truth." We have to accept that there are always going to be unknowns, the bits left over, the remainders, that cannot be translated idiomatically. This, then, is a humility of difference, a humility of plurality. And it is an egalitarianism that is founded upon difference rather than similarity, as well.

There is another sense in which humility inheres in a plural, paralogical discourse. Since there is no "higher", "objective" metalanguage of Truth, the best each of us can do instead is to aim for the best possible justified beliefs, starting from our own cultural structural basis for our own beliefs - starting from our own ethnocentrism, or to put it another way, from within our own language games, our own stories. It's true that this could lead to rigidity on its own, and there is of course the danger that one culture can simply seek to impose its discourse on another's, to replace the other's with its own. (Colonialism, e.g.)

But assuming the possibility of a metalanguage of Truth is itself a kind of violence against another culture. Such a attempt still seeks to replace or rather override the local narrative with the metanarrative. Important differences between narratives which might have the potential to spark inventiveness might therefore never get to chance to interact in a paralogical discourse. Thus, attempting to communicate via a metanarrative doesn't avoid the problem of suppression. So, if there is to be cross-cultural dialogue, it must avoid the futile attempt to communicate through a metalanguage and its metanarrative. Instead, each of us must start with the best and only tools we have for determining our own best possible justified beliefs: our own ethnocentric belief structures. We must tell our own stories as the starting point. We do it anyway; the point is to do it with an awareness of it and to cultivate a positive tentativeness to it, to avoid the rigidity and defensiveness of assuming that our story is the only vaild story, or that we can justify it in relation to a metanarrative that holds for all humanity. "Whose metanarrative?" is as pertinent a question as "Whose narrative?"

It is in the direct, horizontal crosstalk between ethnocentric discourses, on equal footing, that best possible justified beliefs can interact.

But why does this imply an inherent humility? A "best possible justified belief" differs from an "objective truth" in an important way: it lacks a sense of finality, of something being settled for once and all and being filed away in the archives, in a "Repository of Objective Truths", never to be questioned again. It is harder for it to become dogma. Humility inheres in the sense of human fallibility which itself inheres in the possibility of revision. A sense of possible revision always inheres in the notion of "best possible justifiable belief". With everyone coming to the paralogical table with their own best possible justified beliefs, and none with a claim to ownership of "objective truth", the chance for a fruitful dialogue increases.

A psychologist, Lois Shawver, in discussing Lyotard, identifies two techniques of paralogy which are manifestations of this attitude of humility:

First, people who engage in paralogy 'avoid "terror", where terror means arbitrarily removing people from the discussion, in order to prevent them from talking even when they are presenting themselves in ways not designed to shut us up.'

'Second, paralogists allow people to define their terms locally. That is, if someone says "What I mean by 'stuff' is everything that I have that isn't worth anything to anyone else," in paralogy we let that definition stand as a local and provisional definition of "stuff." Rather than challenge the definition, we try to step inside the speaker's vocabulary. This is generous listening and it promotes a reciprocal generosity when it is our turn to speak.'

As befits a psychologist, her examples seem to have in mind a more strictly personal and interpersonal scale of discourse in mind, but the concept scales up to the level of cultures as well. This attempt to "step inside the speaker's vocabulary" is analogous to accepting idiomatic differences between languages, accepting that some incommensurability of terms will exist, rather than doing violence to them with a crude total "translation".

Tired (content advisory: personal)

2007-03-18T13:11:41Z

I am so tired. And I hurt so much. In the past couple of months I have been through...

Well, it's hard to find words adequate to the experience. Cliches like "the wringer", "a learning experience", etc. hover in the wings, hopeful for their chance to be Canada's Next Top Phrase, but really all I can say at this point is that I'm in pain and I have begun to learn some things about myself, a certain woman, and a few other people in my life. Some awful things and some good things.

But the concentrated pace of it is what has been so exhausting, on top of the demands of my new academic life and the strains of adjusting to life in a new country, a new culture, a new language.

A process that for probably many people would not be so intense is concentrated and unbearably intense for me. I have gone so long in my life without engaging in the process; in recent years - no, scratch that: recent *decades* - I had withdrawn for long periods of time from the kinds of emotional engagement into which I have now put myself.

It's "because of" this woman. I put that in quotes because the causal chains in this process are far more complex than that, and they involve far more than her, and far more than just me, as well. And they are not unidirectional, either. Feedback loops, circles more vicious than virtuous, have further concentrated it.

It's more than I can take, this pace. It has me on the edge of despair. I've been losing my balance, losing the proportionate sense of relative worthiness and unworthiness which one must have to function in the world. (In short, I've lost a healthy ego - not that I'm sure I ever had one.) The balance is destabilized, and I teeter back and forth between the extremes of excessive self-regard and excessive self-loathing. Too much energy has been pumped too fast into this dynamic system called Kai, and the increasing oscillations threaten to shake it apart.

What has been lost in the demands of this process, in her demands on me, and my demands on myself in response, is a sense of the limits of my emotional strength, a sense of what I can take, how much I can take at how fast a pace. I feel carried along by a tsunami, just barely able to keep my face above the surface, in very real danger of being pulled under for good by an undercurrent.

Those currents, those vicious circles manifest in my having had almost no good night's sleep for many weeks now. The physical strain on my already weak body is the last thing I need. I have always been marginally healthy, all my life, from the time I was a premature surviving twin, through the atypically severe childhood illnesses (e.g., at age 3 scarlet fever and the high doses of antibiotics used to cure it burst my eardrums and burnt most of the enamel off my teeth), to my early adult years when even then I would tire easily. In reaction, over the years, I have been a kind of anti-hypochondriac: I have hated to think of myself as weak, and I've strained to project an image of myself - to myself - as strong and always getting stronger. I tend not to seek out doctors. But the fact is, I AM still weak. When I go for a brisk 10K walk and then come home and think, oh well I'll just lie back on the couch for a few moments before going on to do A, B, C, and D chores, but end up comatose for several hours instead, it should be a clue.

In the last several days I've begun to sleep a little better, a little longer, since I stopped all communication with her - she had already cut off most of it - but I still had an awful nightmare about her one of those nights. It will take a long time to restore anything like a basic complete sleep cycle. REM sleep has been the biggest part of the sleep cycle I've lost, and I know how much dreaming is important for psychological health. Even having a nightmare was a step in the right direction.

What has been lost most of all is compassion. The compassion she felt for me at times is now entirely eclipsed by her anger at me. It may be gone permanently. I don't know. But all I heard from her lately (until I metaphorically shut the door a couple of days ago) was more and more of the same often devastatingly accurate analysis and criticism of me (not always accurate, but often enough to sting), and more and more of her complaints of how it affected her. She just won't stop. She's on a roll, and she seems to have plenty of energy to engage in this relentless barrage. I can't keep up with her. What can I say? What can I do? Nothing seems to be fast enough, profound enough to cool her anger. In the face of it, I've been losing my ability to have any compassion for myself.

Apparently she doesn't think I deserve any compassion at this point. She seems to think I have had more than enough chances to get it together in the couple of months that this process has been going on. (A couple of months versus many years in which I didn't face the fears at the root of the problem. But all she sees is now.) And she seems so sure that her analysis is entirely correct.

I can't go back from this process; that's not the point. I have to face all that has come to light about me, and I have to keep working on it. It's just so overwhelming at this point. I had no idea it was going to be like this. No real idea.

I had feared that I had been alone for so long that whatever forms my loneliness took behaviourally, no matter how much self-restraint I could muster, would, sooner or later, result in driving away any woman who was attracted and did either approach me or respond positively to my initial approaches.

And now exactly that has happened. A foolish hope has been killed. (By whom? The CSI report hasn't been completed.) I thought someone was beginning to love me (and she was) and accept my love, but now...

She was the last thing I needed. Yes, I needed to face what I've begun to, in any relationship that I went into once I emerged from my cave of emotional hermitage, but not with this unrelenting severity I've gotten from her, this attack on my (white) male baggage for which she has such fierce enthusiasm, to the point, I think, of bringing out a mean streak in her. She'll never see it, but I'm hard enough on myself without someone else hammering on me. There's no balance to it any more.

Surely my pain does count for something? But not all at with her, it seems. So the door must remain closed. I have to continue the process with others who can muster a little sympathy, who can help remind me that I am more that just an asshole who disappointed a fairly good (if not always fair) woman. That my life is worth continuing. For there have been too many moments lately when I thought it wasn't. I just can't take it anymore. Not from her.

As a new friend of mine said to me just yesterday, "Last year i lived a tough break up, it's good after to recenter for a new *special* encounter."

Amen, sister. If the process is to come to fruition, if a new special encounter is to have a better fate than this one, I must recenter.

Winnipeg, Manitoba

2007-01-07T23:51:48Z

On my great train trip across Canada, we stopped in Winnipeg, Manitoba each way; the first time we got over an hour to walk around, but on the return trip only about 20 minutes (we were behind schedule, and we did make up the time by Toronto.)

"Winter-peg", as some call it, is an interesting little city (c. 600,000?) which has a number of architectural and other hints at urban sophistication. I would draw a rough analogy with Minneapolis in that regard. Almost all of our train crew on the Toronto-Winnipeg leg each way were from there; very nice people.

Somewhere in the city are a couple of statues of the Métis leader Louis Riel that I wish I'd had time to seek out.

I definitely want to visit there at greater length.

Here are a few shots from my all too brief sojourns there:

Coming into town on the return journey - looking west up the Assiniboine River:

Looking southeast, from the other side of the train, a minute or so earlier. This bridge's ornaments seem to have an Art Deco-ish agricultural theme (wheat sheaves?) It's over the Red River, into which the Assiniboine flows.

A bridge troll?

Union Station, a grand old station. These next few shots are from the westbound, longer layover. (Easily distinguished by the cloudyish skies. Return was bright sun and fresh snow.)

Looking down the main street (Broadway) opposite the station:

I took one of my usual serendipitous random turns down a side street past the hotels and came across this apartment building with statues ornamenting it. (Part of the Fort Garry Complex.) I later found out that one of my new friends in the family I stayed with in Victoria, BC had lived in Winnipeg for five years and not only that, but also in that building.

Continuing past the apartment building, there's a park (Bonnycastle Park) along the Assiniboine River.

Late afternoon sun over the river.

Behind the train station are various complexes including the Forks market and this striking sight ("what is THAT?"):

That sculptural mystery turned out to be the Esplanade Riel pedestrian bridge.

Across from the Forks Market is this interesting complex (apartments and a theatre complex?) reminiscent of farm buildings and grain elevators.

The pillars are a nice touch:

In front of the Forks marketplace stands this bear complete that day with a snow sleep mask.

"Oh, to live on Sugar Mountain, with the barkers and the coloured balloons..." "There is a town in North Ontario..." I quote the Neil Young lyrics not just because of this sight but also because he moved to Winnipeg at age 12 with his mom after his folks divorced, and his music career began there.

That's it for now...

A first entry test

2007-01-06T17:07:43Z

Starting a photo-enhanced blog.

I snapped this on the Bainbridge Island Ferry crossing from Seattle over Christmas. No flash so as not to disturb her beautiful playing.