Of songs and their names

Travel between work and home consumes about 3 hours of my life everyday. It also gives me about 3 hours everyday to listening to music actively. Active meaning, I play it to listen to it and do nothing else, only listen to that music with activities like walking or travelling on the side.  A lot of this active instrumental music has been much  fascinating me lately.  It makes me wonder, how do wordy names emerge for tunes that were created to escape from the burden of words and translation?

This piece by Tigran Hamasyan is a song that flows like a slow stream of water that smoothly begins to evaporate into nothingness. He’s done this with a faint vocal section that begins in a structured fashion but then transforms into a fading poly rhythmic form that dissolves into itself, soon enough, quite like vague memories that fade away to feel like dreams. He’s one of those artists I listen to without even looking at what each song is called, and I check out names only once in a while. I saw the name ‘A memory that became a dream’ today evening. The awareness of the name really transformed my experience of the song. There was joy in how closely I had sensed the artists’ vision, a success of his capacity to articulate an idea and my capacity to absorb (to some extent, maybe).

I heard Arjuna (the two part composition) by Tarun Balani for the first time at a small private concert in 2013. Tarun announced the name the piece and the band performed it. Then I went home and heard the song on the album again and again. And again. Upbeat music that changes gears between the two parts to charge at you more definitively; this is a great demonstration of building up focus with a change in time signature, rigorous and meditative repetition, and slowly revealing the true nature of something through its journey. To me, this song could be called nothing but Arjuna. I cannot imagine for it to have any other name now. How much would change if I would have not heard its name before listening to the song? It would still stand for focus, perhaps, but not in the context of its Mahabharata reference. Would the piece be different if Tarun had never read or heard about Arjuna or the Mahabharata?

I’m trying to resolve my feeling about the times where I have felt little connection with the artists’ intentions and found my experience of a song to be quite different from its intended meaning. This happened especially in the case of the riveting Piano Textures by Bruno Sanfillipo. The tracks are organized in an order and are called Piano Textures 1, Piano Textures 2, Piano Textures 3, Piano Textures 4, Piano Textures 5, Piano Textures 6, Piano Textures 7, Piano Textures 8. 

PS. Hunting for relevant pieces for this made me realize how live versions could often be diametrically different from studio versions. It is Jazz after all. It is all the energy in the improvisation.

PPS. Happy 2014.

Diwali Spirit

Caught up in the grey of contemporary life (my dissertation hangover), still sore from a not so great design submission that I made in the afternoon, tired from the previous night’s work and 2 hours of sleep, I was on my way back when my mom called up and told me it was Dhanteras. Diwali was here but nothing around me was festive. My body’s clock had been caught in the rut. There was no sense of place, of season. As Varun dropped me halfway to my place, both of us were talking about how sleepy we were, and how much more eventful the next month and a half was going to be, with final juries among other things. Covering the last leg of my journey, on a cycle rickshaw, I crossed a mall bathed in yellow light, a neighbourhood market spilling out with hawkers selling funky lamps, diyas, rangoli and what not, apartment blocks brimming with little and big trails of blue red and yellow bulbs, and also scores of happy faces, glowing in the spirit of the festival.  Diwali is to India what Christmas is to West. And Yellow is to Diwali what Red is to Christmas. I just realized the role festivals play in rejuvenating our lives periodically, marking the onset of seasons, and, in get our bodies and minds to connect with our surroundings again with the plethora of layers of mythology that enrich them. They appear to me as brilliantly designed mechanisms. And for Diwali, the tool is yellow, and it had never shone so bright before. Yellow. In the funky paper bag I’ve had with me since the weekend, my apartment where renovation just finished recently (right before Diwali), the new book that I have begun to read today, and the warm autumn morning sunshine that comforts a cold Delhi Metro commuter, who wonders whether the temperatures have been intentionally kept low for us to realize the value of the sunlight after the train goes subterranean.  realize is the best verb ever! It makes me happy. Happy Diwali!

Acknowledgements to the cycle rickshaw for making neighbourhood travel an enriching experience, with travel speeds being just right for one to watch, observe, sense and absorb the environment at the same time.
In case if you do doubt, all photographs by the author.