August 30: Music

I am humbled. I am realizing there is no way to understand all the details of another country. Tonight we had a short concert of traditional Southern Indian music with a great deal of verbal explanation as well. The music was energetic, and the percussion the kind that makes you tap your feet -- lovely to listen to. But, but, but, there were just so many things to take in. Not that any single one was so unique or incredible, but there were just so many. A few of the things I remember:

--In addition to the drum made of lizard, one musician played a clay pot.

--There was a flute in conjunction with five percussion instruments. The percussionists by and large improvised.

--The word "improvise" does not mean "do whatever you want" but "cater to an exact rhythm that might, just might, have 13 and a half beats to each bar."

--As it was, they played to a 32-beat rhythm, divided into 4 groups of eight. To count out the eight beats of each bar, you tap the palm of your hand once, the back of your hand once, then the palm, the back, and then the palm four times.

--It was very important for each player to name their guru, their teacher, as musicians have a lineage a lot like martial arts senseis.

--One of the musicians described the constant math going on in his head while playing -- "what's 57 divided by 3?" -- I am hoping he was exaggerating, but I am not sure.

I say all this, and I have not even mentioned that the music clearly is based in a specific culture from a specific spot in India, and that the music was tied to a particular mythology -- as most music and dance is here.

The point is not that the music was so radically different from what I've heard before -- it wasn't. It's just that given the small handful of points I've listed above, all of which are interesting and new, and given that they are just a small tip of the iceberg of one small form of entertainment from one area of a very large country. . . how can one ever presume to get a handle on all that makes up a different country??

I am reminded of a book my roommate in graduate school was reading for her anthropology studies in which the author referred to herself in three ways, two of which were in the third person, while studying a tribe in Africa. The book had sentences like "I am walking along the beach, while the anthropologist notes that today the children are not working. The professor wants to organize their games." Or something like that -- where everyone in the sentence was really a name for herself. This was some post-modernist phase in anthropology where one was trying to hang one's biases and perspectives out for everyone to see.

I think what I'm saying, in a fairly convoluted way, is that I'm jettisoning any pretense of The Anthropologist and The Professor. The only way to travel is just to walk on the beach and see what you can see.