A satsang of possibility

BASYA LAYE

A musical happening at the main branch of the Vancouver Public Library on Nov. 20 had the few dozen members of the audience transfixed. Music of the Whole World: Explorations of World Music Cultures by Canadian Composers is a collaboration between the library and the Vancouver Inter-cultural Orchestra, which presents free lecture-demonstrations, bringing musicians and music lovers together to better understand the multidisciplinary nature of composition and music making around the world.

This latest demonstration was part of a series of events related to a Nov. 22 world première of The Longing Sky, a double concerto for solo sarangi (a short-necked fiddle used throughout South Asia) and shakuhachi (a Japanese bamboo end-blown flute) with a 21-piece orchestra. Composed by VICO founder and co-artistic director Moshe Denburg, The Longing Sky emerged from Denburg’s studies in both India and Japan.

The purpose of the lecture-demonstration was to explore with the audience the various ways in which oral and written musical traditions converge and diverge, particularly in the context of inter-cultural musical exchange, Denburg said. Joining him for the VPL presentation was master concert sarangi soloist Dhruba Ghosh from Mumbai and Brussels, shakuhachi and flute virtuoso Harrie Starreveld from Amsterdam, and Victoria’s Niel Golden on tabla. Ghosh and Starreveld performed as Longing Sky soloists and worked with Denburg on the double concerto following a music conference all three attended in Amsterdam in 2012. The men took turns to describe their instruments and their musical traditions, and they each played a solo and then together in various combinations.

In a post-presentation interview with the Independent, Denburg described the theme of the concerto and the process he undertook to bring it to the stage.

“The Longing Sky came up as an idea that is part of a piece, a dual piece, that was called Between the Source and the Longing Sky,” he said. “I sketched out these pieces about 20 years ago. The Source was sketched out for regular orchestra and it’s still sitting on my shelf…. Over the last year, I fleshed out [The Longing Sky] and put in the orchestration.” The piece emerged from Denburg’s thoughts about “living on the earth with the possibility, since the ’60s, actually, of leaving the earth, of going into space, and what space really represents,” he said. “Not just going to Mars, and getting away, but it is a matter of that there’s this vastness, this openness, this freedom – that’s what space represents.” The sky, however, “is not just something [out] there, it’s actually always in us. So, this idea of the sky being an aspiration that’s within and our longing for that kind of vastness and freedom, that’s the meaning of the longing sky and that’s where it came from.”

In fact, it is the theme of possibility that most concerns VICO as it approaches music across cultures. “That’s what the inter-cultural orchestra does represent, in a small way – more and more possibilities, possibilities of communication. It’s a form of globalization that is real,” he said.

Earlier in the evening, Denburg spoke about the possibilities of cultural convergence. “These two traditions have not been very compatible,” he said, adding, “An oral tradition is a tradition in which the musicians learn by ear from a master, from a teacher, what the repertoire is. And it’s songs and tunes and melodies, but it is a way of taking notes and shaping them and structuring them and putting in certain kinds of improvisation within that structure to create tremendously beautiful and deep musical thought…. This is different than the written tradition, which starts with something that is on the page.”

After being introduced, Ghosh described the process of transmitting music in the Indian tradition before playing a raga and alap (a slow exposition of the raga).

“We have thousands of scales [in India] … they belong to a phenomenon called ‘raga’ … but the real life of a raga is the journey between the notes and the certain flow of movement between ideas as the journeys flow from the notes,” he explained. “These have been codified over the centuries by the different schools, different traditions, into ragas, and the way of playing the ragas is conceived of as an unfolding of the petals of a lotus. As it opens, there’s a system of how the petals open, one by one … at different stages. We learn that for years from our masters, they learn for many years from their masters, and what is taught is not just information or data: it is the very nature of energy, how it flows, to open itself and express itself. So, eventually there is a logic system, a very strong logic system. The art is how to conceive the logic in a beautiful poem. The raga eventually becomes a piece of literature, which follows all the rules of language and, if it is spoken at any of the schools in India, one school will understand what the other is speaking about, because the musical language is the same, but the styles of delivery, how you look at it, differs from school to school, and then within a school, master to master, difference in the calibre of the master, how he utilizes that feed, to express his personal thoughts in the raga. So, he’s not detached from the raga, he becomes the raga, and he reveals his own heart, his own maturity, his own calibre, his own spirituality, his own intellectual heights, his own system of logic, and the professing of various logics through the raga. That now becomes a sort of vehicle for him and, therefore, he considers the raga … as a pure form of energy. When you meet the real great masters, you find they are in a state of prayer or worship, asking the energy to grace them, to grace the concert.”

Denburg reflected on what the sarangi master described and the complexities of bringing East and West together. “When Dhruba spoke about energies, I really think that’s quite true, and that there’s something that defies writing it down…. You can transcribe it … but the experience, it’s either extremely difficult to capture in notation or it’s not possible....”

Displaying the score for The Longing Sky, Denburg continued, “A composer can write a piece of music that involves many instruments all together. It doesn’t mean that many instruments don’t play together, can do it orally, but to grasp that oral tradition and transmit orally this kind of score would take a heck of a long time. You’d have to get together with every single musician, you’d have to teach them their part and in the way you want…. Now, I have heard musicians say … like [percussionist] Glen Valez ... he said that the problem is that this interface that’s on the page gets in the way of the listening, with the getting into it. With a virtuoso in Western music, it doesn’t get in the way, it becomes second nature, but you need to develop that [ability] on a very, very high level. That is what has been developed on a very high level in the written tradition. But, in the oral tradition, what has been developed on a very high level is this listening, this incredible ability to respond in the moment, to shape a note, to find the energy of that note, to communicate with it, that is something that is a total type of immersion that doesn’t really exist so easily in the written tradition.”

Starreveld spoke about his experiences with the Western tradition of written music. “As a child, we learn first to read notes and then learn to make the sounds of the notes…. First, you work on technique and, later, you make music of it, so you do kind of the opposite. But I see also sometimes a danger, in my students as well. If they see piano [soft in volume] written, they play soft. Sometimes I say, yes, you play soft, but it doesn’t sound very good musically. They say, but it’s written. And I say, yeah, but there are many ways of playing soft. I have a colleague and, with his students, he removes all the dynamics and he asks them to try to understand the music.… It is kind of the opposite way to work.”

Bringing these traditions together is VICO’s primary goal, Denburg said. The experience of working with the soloists and then expanding his attention to the orchestral backdrop has been “challenging,” he told the JI. “It’s because the challenge is to communicate my musical idea to a virtuoso oral tradition musician. With Harrie, because he comes from a written-reading tradition … what I wrote for shakuhachi is playable and he can read and play it. With Dhruba, he can read and understand, but to actually work with the notation there’s a whole process involved. It’s been very challenging for me … you have to start at the bare bones of the melodies and, yet, it’s not enough. I need [Dhruba] to make it his own in order to make the melody shine and bring out the nuances in it. I can write all the nuances, I can write everything, but that is not the point. The point is to communicate a musical idea that I have on the page to a great oral musician and have him deliver it in the context of a double concerto with confidence and conviction.

“Things do not begin [in Dhruba’s case] with what’s on the page, but because the composition was written beforehand, I created oral aids, I created digital files, I sang it to him many times, we worked together and, still, to his process [there] is something that I don’t quite grasp. That’s why I said during my talk that if I was able to do this from the beginning I would be getting together with Dhruba to work on the lines together, that that’s the way to actually do it with a musician like him. So, the result is quite beautiful, but it’s a work in progress.

“It’s one thing when you’ve got people who are just playing what’s on the page and they’re giving it back to you, some do it nicely and some not so nicely. But Dhruba is a master musician, so to actually communicate my idea to him, he’s certainly welcoming of it, but it’s not yet a whole idea until there would be enough time to work on it and we haven’t had the time. We’re in that conversation. We’re in that process. I don’t mind talking about a work in progress because it’s a noble work in progress and the overarching concern here is how to bridge a great oral tradition with the tradition of written music. Like I said, I love both of these. I fell in love with the music of India and I’m in love with Western music and the whole idea of notation and orchestration. To put them together is not an easy matter.”

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