The Null Device Blog

I was smacked in the head once again with my own ignorance of Indian classical music theory (in this case, Carnatic and not Hindustani, but the big gaps in my understanding are wide enough that it makes no odds).

But not in a bad way.

Um, I’ll explain.

Sunday was the arangetram of Ramya Kapadia, who graciously donated her vocals to what I still consider the danciest ND track ever written. An arangetram is a solo debut recital for a bharatanatyam dancer. It’s kind of a big deal. Anyway, Wendy and I attended, as did a whole bunch of other people. And they had some serious musical horsepower on hand for the orchestra. Two singers – one was the dance company guru and she mainly did the rhythmic syllabic singing, and another one who sang the more melodic parts and, I realized halfway through the show, had a nonfunctional microphone but a startlingly powerful voice. They had a bansuri player who was excellent, an electronic percussionist who was doing some really intruiging things with a seemingly limitless bank of ghatam samples, and a mridangam player who was just so good it was sick.

The soundguy, if there was one, seemed to be having difficulty, though. Between the occasional burst of feedback, the loud 60-cycle hum, and the over-miced metallic percussion, the mix was a little off. Still, you could figure out what was going on and the raw talent of the players was evident. And Ramya could clearly hear them well because she was doing some moves that required dead-on timing sync with the musicians.

The program was detailed enough to print, in addition to the piece and eprformance notes, the various rAgam used. I think I recognized exactly one of them, and that was only the name, not the actual rAgam itself. I think I need to study up before I start trying to ask guest musicians to sit in…

Makes me want to learn more of this stuff, though.