Musical Summa
These past few difficult months spanning the second half of 2006, I have written some fifty quick notes pointing to music that has kept me aloft through the haze of days and nights.
In the light of Sepia Mutiny's The 2006 Macca Music Poll (go there, and check out some new music), I was reviewing these notes of mine, and following the links[1] to music to listen to some of it again. Just like the emotional withdrawals into the self that have happened, in scanning these posts, I have noticed that my musical tastes have swung, somewhat, back towards what was familar (Hindi film music and Indian classical music, for example), and somewhat away from novel sonic explorations, which had happened with great frequency in the inital years after my arrival in America; even though I did probe deeper into Persian classical music, Argentine tango, and Brazilian pop music.
Another interesting thing to note is deepening of my interest in Western classical music (I saw and heard some beautiful classical music performed in the last year), firmly anchored in my mental space by the godhead of Bach. So it is on that classical note, I would like to end this year's music posts, by turning to one of the many beautiful and poetic chants written out by the genius Hildegard of Bingen, which in English goes:
"O leafy branch, standing in your nobility as the dawn breaks forth: now rejoice and be glad and deign to set us frail ones free from evil habits and stretch forth your hand and lift us up."
[1] Mostly on YouTube; after Napster-era, I think YouTube has pretty much become the defacto resource I turn to discover and listen to new music
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Morning Music
I woke up this morning dreaming something disturbing; it must have been all that red wine, sugar and chocolate I imbibed at the dinner to which I was invited to last evening. While I didn't find myself transformed into a giant beetle, nonethless there is a heaviness in the body and the mind that I am trying to cure with Abida's singing the genius of Khusro's sufiyana*.
* Please leave a comment if you know of a decent biography of Khusro that I can read.
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Willow Song
You may have enjoyed the recent Bollywood take on Othello in "Omkara". But Othello has been making the rounds in various guises for quite sometime now. The final scene in which Desdemoda sings the airas "Willow Song" and "Ave Maria" (before Othello kills Desdemonda) is one of the more famous scenes in Verdi's take on Shakespeare's play, in his opera "Otello". Wiki's description of the scene and the aira:
"Desdemona and Emilia are preparing for bed. Desdemona asks Emilia to put out the sheets she used on her wedding night, and asks that if she dies, she be buried with them. Emilia asks her not to talk about such things. Desdemona recalls how her mother had a servant named Barbara, who fell in love with a man but went mad when he left her. She sings the Willow Song."
I am slowly working through Richard Powers's wonderful brick of a novel on music, physics of time, and racial identity: "The Time of Our Singing". And it is Powers's dazzling descriptions and reflections on classical music thickly threaded in this novel, which made me turn to opera tonight, with its possibilities for transcendence, which is beyond my ability to comprehend languages in which it is sung. Listen:
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