Author: macdonaldp

In India now

Here we are in India.  My dream of getting a grant to spend an extended period of time working with the great Gundecha Brothers has come true and here I am with my wife and two daughters.

We are doing pretty well, though jet lagged of course.  The first few nights we were all up by 3:00 a.m., though last night we slept over twelve hours.  We were tired!

India is India.  Intense, colorful, dynamic, inspiring, dirty, and exhausting.  The language barrier is a constant issue and I miss my autonomy back home.  We’re in a hotel now (Hotel Sarthak), where we’ll be for about a week.  We may have a house worked out by then, but more likely we’ll move over to the Gurukul (my teacher’s school/hostel) for yet another week.  Tomorrow we’re going to start looking at schools for the girls and will also try to find a good house in a secure campus near the school.  Everything should work out, but it will take a little time.  Fortunately, Akhilesh Gundecha is helping us and he is very kind and helpful.  Without him we’d be lost for sure.

The girls are okay, but I can tell they are a bit confused and scared at times.  I’m doing my best to put on a brave face and be the “strong Daddy” but the fact is that I’m confused and scared too.  Questions abound.  Should I have really dragged my family half way around the world?  Can I keep them safe?  Will they grow and learn and be happy?  I also have doubts about my own life as a musician.  Should I really put this much energy into singing Dhrupad?  Where will this take me?  Shouldn’t I just stick to what I know and try to keep improving that?  Do I really need 10 months of this?  Wouldn’t the Skype lessons have sufficed?

My mind is filled with constant doubt and worry, but I also know that the only way to grow (in anything) is to push out of one’s comfort zone and try new things.  That usually means being uncomfortable for a while.  Like in endurance sports or contemporary classical music, the trick is to be comfortable with being uncomfortable.  I’m grateful for the grant, of course, despite how unsettling it all is.  All the people I’ve talked with who have spent a year overseas with their families have all said that despite the difficulties it was one of the best times of their lives and a deep bonding experience for the family.

I suspect many of these doubts will be erased once we are settled with a house and school and I’m immersed in my lessons, but until then I’m in a very transitional state.

First race of 2013

I finished my first race of the season at Lewis Morris Park.  I’ve been wanting to get into endurance mountain bike racing (e.g., 6-hour, 12-hour, and 24-hour races), but there aren’t very many of them any more.  So I just decided to make my own race.  In the spirit of many of the self-made races and challenges happening these days (e.g., Strava, Tour Divide, etc), I decided I would carry the GPS and publish the results to prove that I did what I said I did.  Last fall I scouted out a 4.7-mile loop using the yellow trail.  It’s a moderately technical trail, with some rocks and roots, steep climbs, and twisty and sharp turns.  If I’m riding well I don’t need to dismount, but it’s technical enough to keep it interesting.

I rode this as a shorter endurance mtb race.  So the goal was to do as much mileage as possible in 3 hours.  The clock starts and 3 hours later it stops.  Simple.  I did it totally self-supported.  I didn’t allow myself any outside help in terms of food, water, or bike mechanicals.  Here are the results:

Total time: 3 hours (2:47 moving time, 13:00 stopped time)

Mileage: 18.7 miles

Moving average: 6.7 mph

Elevation: 2,362 climbing, 2,561 descending

Official results are here: (will be up soon, still figuring out Garmin!)

Not too fast.  I’m a cautious rider at all times, but the mud made things even slower.  The ascents were brutal as the mud just sucked away at the tires, holding them in or causing them to spin out.  I found myself hike-a-biking the longer, steeper ones almost every lap to conserve energy.  My heart rate was just getting too high.  It was a weird kind of mud that thankfully didn’t get into my drive train, but made the tread on my tires disappear.   I might as well have been using slicks.

I often felt like I was skiing going down the hills.  The bike was sliding every which way and I literally slid around corners.  Luckily I didn’t fall, but I came close several times . . .

I did exactly four laps.  Serendipitously I finished the fourth lap with only 5 minutes to go.  (So I just rode further for 2.5 minutes and then turned around).  It was nice to end up by the car at the end, because I wasn’t in good shape.  Around 2:15, when I was supposed to eat another one of Meredith’s awesome Arbonne bars, my stomach started getting funny.  Not funny ha ha, but more like blech.  So I kept riding until it settled down but by then I only had 15 minutes left and I didn’t want to stop and deal with eating.  So I promptly bonked.  And hard.  The last 15 minutes were brutal.  I was shaking and extremely crabby and I started getting very cold.  The last few climbs took everything I had to push through them.  My legs were screaming and my back was starting to ache.  My body said “No!” but my mind said “Dude, are you really crap out with only 15 minutes to go?”  I finished.

Thanks to the Team NRGY folks who provide a lot of inspiration when I’m out there.  When things get tough I often ask “What would Dan Murphy do?  What would Carlos do?  What would Lenore do?”  The answers are always the same: keep going.  Push.  Don’t give up.  And special thanks to Jason for the friendship and all the informal coaching and having the vision to bring us all together and make the team special.

Despite the bonk it was a great day and I’m looking forward to the next one: A 6-hour version of the same loop.  I also had a blast riding that Scalpel.  That is one fine ride . . .

Amazing trip to India

I recently got back from a transformative month in India, studying Dhrupad vocal with the renowned Gundecha Brothers (Ramakant, Umakant, and Akhilesh).  I worked with Ramakantji via Skype since last June, but this was my first time at their “Gurukul” where I received daily lessons.

For those of you who know me as a percussionists/composer you may find it strange that I’m taking vocal lessons, but I’ve been singing off and on for about 10 years, mostly Hindustani style.  Dhrupad has always been my passion and finally things opened up in my life last year in such a way that I could devote more time to really improving as a singer.  I have no delusions about becoming some great Dhrupad singer, but I’m making rapid progress and I’m already starting to use my voice with my Super Marimba project, Alarm Will Sound, and other projects.  Ramakantji has been very encouraging and thinks I’ll be able to start performing in another couple years.  I’m looking forward to that and I’m hoping there will be ample performance opportunities with all the yoga centers, Hindu temples, and universities here in the NYC area.

The Gurukul is a wonderful place and I very much enjoyed getting to know all the other students.  As with any community of people there are disagreements and bickering from time to time, but in general I found the students to be exceptionally gracious and kind.  Everyone seemed to be walking on clouds most of the time, due to the experience of singing Dhrupad and studying with the master Gundecha Brothers.  It’s a very nourishing music that gives one energy and hope and the feeling of being very grounded.  I didn’t encounter any of the cynicism and negativity that so badly pollutes the classical music community in America, especially with orchestras. I can’t wait to go back there.  It really felt like home.

 

Lessons continue, mind expanding . . .

I had another mind and soul-expanding lesson with Ramakant Gundecha last night.  We spent most of the time working on the syllables/vocables used in the alap portion of a Dhrupad vocal performance.  By the end of the lesson I understood how much poetry is latent in those phrases.  Although they don’t literally mean anything, when used correctly they can communicate a vast array of emotions and feeling (rasa).  Suddenly the singing of raga just took another leap and became even more complex and fascinating.  As my ears are opening up to the subtleties of tuning the intervals, as well as developing a more clear, free, and stable voice culture, I am now confronted with the challenge of integrating those parameters with the syllables. It will be an infinite dance that will challenge me the rest of my days on this planet.

I am finding now that when I return to my Western keyboard instruments (marimba, vibraphone, et al), they sound very different than they used to.  I find it almost funny that there is no way to slide between, say, C and C#.  As I’m learning with my vocal studies, there is an entire universe of sound in there!  I’m beginning to really understand something that I have intuited for many years, which is that Western keyboard percussion instruments are fundamentally out of tune and therefore should not be thought of as melodic instruments in the classic sense.  Not only are they in equal temperament–which is a compromised tuning to begin with–but most of the time even the equal temperament is out of tune.  This is especially true with marimba bars, which because they are wood are subject to the vagaries of weather, humidity, etc.

That doesn’t mean that they are inferior to the voice, though.  And it certainly doesn’t mean that Western music lacks melodic potential.  It’s just different.  As I practiced Robert Morris’s fabulous piece Stream Runner (a work I commissioned from him myself) yesterday I experienced melodic mastery in a different way: through the ears and pen of a composer who is thoroughly fluent in the 12-tone language (among others).  The lines in that piece just sing.  They are really gorgeous, but in a completely different way than the phrases that Ramakantji shared with me in our lesson.  But they are definitely melodic, and resonate in my mind’s ear for hours after I’ve left the practice room.

I’m busy applying for grants to spend a year in India with the Gundecha Brothers at their Gurukul.  The majority of my time there will be spent singing and taking lessons, but I’m also hoping I’ll have a chance to discuss these issues with the other students there.  It is without question the central point of my life’s work, and perhaps the central point of our time.

Musical Growth

I just wish I had three lifetimes.  Or six.  Or twenty.  There is so much great music out there that I want to explore.  If I’m lucky I’ll be on this planet for another 50 years or so, but only about 40 of those will I be strong enough to practice and perform.  That’s just not enough time!

One of my dreams for over a decade has been to study North Indian Hindustani Dhrupad vocal music with the Gundecha Brothers.  Two weeks ago that dream became a reality as I started Skype lessons with Ramakant Gundecha.  Skype isn’t ideal, but it actually works pretty well.  And I am going over to India to work with him in person later this year.  He’s a fabulous teacher.  We spent all of the first lesson just working on tone quality.  In one hour my singing improved by leaps and bounds. The second lesson we continued to work on tone, but also got into tuning for Raga Yaman, as well as exploring some alap phrases.

For those readers who know my work as a composer and percussionist it might seem a bit capricious that I’m taking singing lessons, but in fact I’ve been taking voice lessons off and on for the last twelve years, both in the Western classical style and in the Hindustani style.  (And I conducted a Methodist church choir for three years when I was in graduate school at Eastman.)  It took some years for my career to get to a point of enough stability that I could afford the time and money to pursue it with more vigor, but that time has arrived.  The only way to find enough time to sing is to cut back on some of my Western percussion practicing, but that isn’t a problem.  Musicianship is musicianship, and there’s no better way to develop it than through the voice.  My technical mastery of my percussion instruments won’t desert me, and my work as a composer will be enhanced immeasurably.  Singing raga on a daily basis is also a profoundly enriching meditation that spreads to all areas of life.

At any rate, I feel very lucky to be working with Ramakantji.  The Gundecha Brothers are two of the best singers on the planet.   I’m aware that there are tens of thousands of incredible singers all over the globe, but when it comes to a complete picture of depth of feeling, tone quality, intonation, improvisation skills, knowledge of the repertoire, and imagination, the Gundecha Brothers are some of the very best.  I just wish I had another lifetime to do nothing but study voice with them.   Finally, after all these years of listening to their recordings, I’m able to start learning how they make those incredible sounds.

Racing again

Earlier today I completed the Jersey Devil Xterra (.5 mile swim, 13 mile bike, 3.5 mile run).  I signed up on a lark.  I haven’t really been training for tris.  Most of my training has been long slow bike rides, getting ready for the Allegheny Mountains Loop bikepacking trip in a few weeks.  I’ve done some weight training, some running and swimming, but still my focus has been the long bike rides.  I have done very little aneorobic training, though I know I should do some as it’s very good for building both endurance and speed.  I figured signing up for the race would give me some motivation.

My friend Eric joined me.  It was his first triathlon and he put in an amazing performance. We went down the day before and listened to a clinic, pre-rode the bike course, had a wonderful sushi dinner, and then watched some Xterra films they were showing at the registration center.  Then we camped out.  It rained half the night and my tent got pretty wet, but I was still plenty comfortable.

I finished in one hour, fifty-four minutes, which is eight minutes faster than last year.  I guess I’m glad about that, though I’m wondering how much more triathlon racing I’m going to do.  I found that my favorite part of the race was when I was alone for a stretch during both the bike and run courses.  I’m sure I slowed down quite a bit then as I actually looked around a bit and enjoyed the woods and the feeling of moving through them quickly.  But during the sections when I was with other people and I was cranking away, trying to catch them or outrun them, I didn’t have as much fun.

The problem for me is the clock.  I don’t seem to able to do these races and not think about the clock.  I mean, they are called “races” after all.  The point is to go as fast as you can, hopefully faster than other people.  When I first started all this five years ago that was all exciting and interesting, but more and more I’m just losing interest in it.  But I’m more committed to endurance sports than ever.  I love my training and I can’t imagine my life without it, but trying to advance upwards through the age group ranks and qualify for “bigger” races just doesn’t resonate with me right now.

What I really love is adventure.  I like getting out in the woods and in different parts of the world for long periods of time and just exploring.  It’s fun to go fast.  I like being in motion and I like pushing my body physically.  But I also like stopping when I’m tired, taking pictures when I want, taking a nap when I need one, and just slowing down once in a while and enjoying the scenery.  That’s a major reason why I’ve decided to do the AML and the Tour Divide as ITTs (Individual Time Trials).  I’ll still be trying to go fast and move quickly, but I won’t be so attached to the clock as I would be if I were with a big group of people all leaving at the same time.

The bikepacking events are great, but I still do love triathlon.  The combination of swimming, biking, and running is just perfect.  But triathlons are never organized with an ITT option.  I think the solution is I’m just going to have to put together my own triathlons in the future and do them alone or with a few friends.   I’ll find some open water and just put together my own swim, bike, run combinations.  The advantage to that is that I can put together some really creative and cool events and do them when it’s convenient with my work and family schedule.

At any rate, it was a good day.  I had fun at the race, but more importantly I figured out a lot of things about triathlon and how I want to move forward with it.  The possibilities are endless, especially in the ultra realm . . .

15 years of bliss

Today Jessica and I celebrate 15 years of marriage.  I’m damn proud of that. We’re still having fun together, we still laugh a lot, cry on each other’s shoulders, and are very much in love.  She’s a remarkable woman and I’m lucky to be with her.

American culture thrives on disposibility.  Here today, gone tomorrow.  That includes junk food, junk entertainment, and of course the “hook up” culture.  I’m glad Jessica and I have stayed married.  And I’m glad I was never a part of the hook up culture.  I believe in the power of marriage as a means to personal fulfillment, but also as an anchor for a productive, healthy society.  It is relationships like ours that produce healthy kids (that grow into healthy adults), a stable economy, and intellectual and cultural innovation. 

So staying married means more to me than just a quality life on a personal level.  It’s also a powerful way for me to give a big middle finger to everything I detest about popular American culture: the greed, the disposablility, the cheap everything, the lack of commitment, the aversion to work.  And it’s a way to show that marriage can work, despite all the articles in magazines that say otherwise.  Staying married is also a way to celebrate all the things about America that I love: a strong work ethic, commitment, family values, and innovation. 

Some folks say that humans aren’t meant to be monogomous.  I’m not sure that’s true.  Maybe some humans aren’t meant to be monogomous, and maybe some cultures work better without marriage, but I find it interesting that no matter how experimental or liberal a society becomes, marriage is still viewed by the majority of the population as an important foundation for a culture.  This is true in Holland as much as it is here in America.  I’ve read numerous polls that state that although the divorce rate here is over 50%, almost 75% of people still think marriage is worth pursuing.

This all makes me sound rather Republican, but in fact my political attitudes are quite liberal.   I definitely celebrate gay marriage as much as I do straight pairings.  I don’t care about one’s religious beliefs, sexual orientation, skin color, whatever, but I do care about things like work ethic, commitment, and honesty.  A good marriage has those qualities in spades.

Having said all that, I need to qualify my statements by recognizing that I have many friends and family members who have been divorced.  I don’t hold it against them in any way.  In all cases it was for the better.  I also need to recognize that some day Jessica might get tired of my nonsense and throw me out.   Or that if I pass away early she’ll remarry and find a wonderful mate that she’s very in love with.  Indeed, I hope she does.  But none of that negates the power of a good marriage and its importance to society.  Jessica and I have been lucky in that we’re naturally compatible, but we’ve also worked hard to make this work.  I’m happy to flaunt that in public since the dominant message these days from the media seems to be that marriages don’t work and “hooking up” is the way to go.

At any rate, it’s been a great 15 years, and I’m looking forward to another 15 and more.  Jessica is a treasure.

It’s not really work

If I had a dollar for every time someone asks me this question I’d be rich:

“How do you do it all?”

I guess I do balance a few things.  Composing, performing, teaching, raising two kids, marriage, and endurance sports.  It’s a lot, especially during heavy training weeks when I’m putting in 15+ hours swimming, biking, and running.

But the thing is that I don’t really view them as all that separate.  Endurance sports have so much in common with composing and performing contemporary classical music that whether I’m on the bike or behind the marimba or at the computer it’s all kind of the same head space.  Some of those connections are obvious, such as the discipline and organization involved with preparing for a big concert (or race), but what’s more interesting is the feeling one gets when one is pushing through walls and working on the frontiers of human existence.  In short, endurance sports and contemporary music are about managing suffering.  It’s quite Buddhist in a way.  I’ll write more about that later as that’s a longer discussion.

Secondly, though, I don’t really view any of this as “work.”  For most people work is drudgery.  It’s something one does just to make money.  Work is something to get over with so that one can go have margaritas with friends on a Friday night.

But for me, having margaritas with friends on a Friday night is something to get over with so that I can get back to doing what I love most: composing, practicing, performing, and teaching creative music.  And then going for a six-hour mountain bike ride!  After all that I like to play with my kids and talk with my amazing wife.  I’m not a misanthrope.  I love people (and enjoy the occasional drink with friends), but still my main commitment in life is first to my family, second to creative music, and third to endurance sports.

In the end, it’s really not that much to balance.  I don’t watch TV.  I don’t socialize much except as it intersects with my career.  I watch a movie every few weeks and read when I can.  But mostly I stay focused on what I love to do.  And if I love to do it then it isn’t work.  And besides all that, I’m just grateful that I’m employed in such a way that I can indulge my passions.  After traveling around the world a bit and seeing how hard it is for most people, I don’t take my opportunities for granted.

Bro Date

Today I had the great pleasure of cycling with Eric.  Eric is married to Noe Venable, an extraordinary singer-songwriter I met a few years back who has had me play marimba on her last two recordings.  They are a perfect couple: smart, sensitive, and creative.  Eric is a filmmaker, writer, and musician.

At any rate, Eric is a passionate cyclist, as am I, and we headed out today for some urban riding along the West Side Highway.  We started at 34th street and went up to the George Washington Bridge where I snapped a few photos.

We spent a lot of time talking about our families and life in general, as well as bikes and the Tour Divide, a race we both hope to complete soon.  At any rate, it was the first time in a while I’ve been able to hang with another guy for a few hours and I really enjoyed myself.  Most of my companions in life are women, especially my wife and two little girls.  I’m very lucky to be surrounded by such smart, beautiful girls, but I still need some time to hang with my bros.  Eric is the ultimate bro.  He “gets it.”

I don’t need to say any more than that.  If you’re a woman you’re probably rolling your eyes.  If you’re a dude you know exactly what I’m talking about.

Right, bro?

What us composers are talking about

My good friend and mentor Stuart Saunders Smith and I coorespond via letters.  Letters!  He recently pointed out that I have been incorporating more vernacular elements into my music.  This was not a calculated choice, though—certainly not a calculated choice regarding money or fame or something like that.  If I wanted money I’d work on WallStreet.  If I wanted fame I’d try to act in Hollywood.  No, what I really love is experimental music.  Or avant garde or whatever term we choose to use.  Perhaps “personal” is the best term.  I like music that is unique and personal and struggles to make sense of the individual in the larger world, especially the modern one, which I find fascinating, inspiring, noisy, disturbing, and exhausting by turns.

But “personal” can come in a lot of shapes and sizes and in a lot of different genres I think.  When I was in school I remember feeling that my composition and theory professors were pushing a very subtle but real attitude that only music that is written down and ostensibly “complex” was worth anything.  While I could sort of agree with them intellectually my gut told me otherwise.  Sure, Webern’s music is inspiring and gorgeous, but so is John Coltrane, and so is Sharda Sahai, and so is Aphex Twin or Autechre or Meshuggah.  Over the years I’ve realized that I have an omnivorous appetite for music of all kinds and shapes and sizes. And I’ve become more comfortable pointing out the emperor with no clothes. Just because something has the sheen of seriousness and complexity (i.e., complex notation, on a classical concert series) does not make it so.  Some of the music I hear at new music concerts has depth and complexity, but much of it is simple-minded and only has the appearance of complexity.

Of course I can’t comment on my own work in this regard.  Many people love it, but I’m sure there are just as many who think it is terrible.  But that’s true for every living composer and most of the dead ones too!  I do know that when I compose I don’t make charts or graphs and I don’t think much about the structure of the piece.  I stopped reading music journals like Perspectives of New Music for that reason.  Those articles were polluting my mind, making me think I needed to have some sort of hidden  architecture so that down the road some poor Ph.D. student would write a dissertation about how marvelously complex my music is and I would then be handed the keys to the pantheon of Western classical music.  I could almost envision the bust of my head in the hallway at the Eastman School of Music!  How noble and sagacious I would look!  A pillar of Western culture!  I respect the intellectual rigor that goes into those articles and on the resulting “mind play” can certainly be enjoyable, but in terms of my creative process I found them destructive.

When I’m composing well I’m assimilating and processing in an organic fashion the world around me, and the “canon” I’ve built for myself in my ipod.  In my canon you won’t find Brahms because his music just doesn’t speak to me.  But you will find Evan Parker.  Tons of it.  You’ll also find Bach and Victoria and Machaut and Xenakis and Metallica and Aesop Rock and Stuart Saunders Smith and all sorts of other stuff.  (I suppose I am truly a product of the internet age . . .)  Sometimes that means I write 4-4 beats and sometimes the writing is more “classical.”  I don’t worry about it too much.  The only time I get worried is if I start making a chart or a graph.  There’s a big difference between a piece of music and a piece of music theory.  I hope I’m creating the former.

At any rate, this does bespeak of a type of apolitical attitude that pervades my generation.  The good thing about this is that the walls are truly down now.  No uptown, no downtown, just music making.  The vigorous dialectics of the past—which seemed to me mostly had to do with egos and competition of resources—have been mostly subdued. However, the problem is that it can be difficult to discern whether the omnivorous appetites of composers of my generation are genuine or a result of laziness.  Are we really assimilating all that’s going on and creating a true “maximalist” style?  (Sorry, Charles Wuorinen, I couldn’t resist, but it really does apply to us more than you.) Or are we just slapdashing things together?  Copying and pasting our way through each composition?  A little of this and a little of that and a whole lot of nothing?  Are we hiding our lack of technique and thorough training behind a façade of eclecticism?

I don’t know.  But again I don’t worry about it too much.  I’m not a historian or a politician and political music has never had much traction with me.  I’m interested in sound.  And if I can put together a few moments of genuine, personal, wonder-inducing sound—even if just once in my whole life—then I will rest easy that I’ve made a valuable contribution tohumanity.  The only way I see it possible for me to do that is to get up each morning and write music.  Get it played.  Get it recorded.  Then move on to the next piece.