Apr 28, 2013 Awake in Real Time: Coffee-induced Meditations and Journal Entries, Essays on Music and Musicians
Thinking about Summer at the Start of Spring
Some song-musings by Vijaya Sundaram
April 28th, 2013
Just thought it was time for Aaron Neville. I love his light handling of Summertime.
Mahalia Jackson has always moved me deeply with her voice and her feeling. The first time I heard her was after my French teacher in college recommended that I listen to her. She had heard me singing on stage for the college, seemed pleased, and gave me a cassette tape with these two songs (Summertime and Motherless Child) on it. I understood why when I heard both. Years later, when I was singing in the subway at Downtown Crossing in Boston, an African-American woman came up to me, dropped a couple of dollars, smiled at me and said, “Sister, you should be singin’ the blues.”
I was quite honored.
One of my all-time favorite singers is, of course, Billie Holiday. Here’s how she sings Summertime.
Another singer of the angelic host is Ella Fitzgerald. Here’s her version of Summertime.
I could scarcely believe my ears when I heard Janice Joplin sing Summertime. Hope you enjoy this rendition! (Definitely a departure from the beautiful, lulling tones of Ella, but compelling nonetheless!)
And finally, here’s the sublime Sam Cooke singing Summertime.
Did you guess I like the song? 🙂
I’ll be back with other favorites.
Goodnight, sweet dreams and hope this summer will not be too scorching.
Love,
Dreamer of Dreams
Tags: #Summertime, Aaron Neville, Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Janis Joplin, Mahalia Jackson, Sam Cooke
Mar 30, 2013 Awake in Real Time: Coffee-induced Meditations and Journal Entries, Essays on Music and Musicians
“Small Blue Thing” by Suzanne Vega
This song blew me away when I first heard it. I wished (and still wish) that I had written it. Her songwriting, guitar-playing, music and tone of voice are (dare I use this word?) perfect.
Suzanne Vega is probably the most elegant, concentrated, delicate and literate among songwriters, whether female or male.
I am, and will always be, a fan. And I am hard to please.
“Lullaby for an Anxious Child” by Sting
I heard this song a couple of years ago or so. It made me cry. Sting is … my absolute favorite contemporary male songwriter, musician, singer, performer. His imagination and musical taste are impeccable.
Thank you for listening!
Love,
Dreamer of Dreams
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ The End ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Tags: #Music, #Suzanne Vega, celebrities, Dreamer of Dreams, lullaby to an anxious child, Music I love, songs, Sting
Mar 28, 2013 Blogs and Bloggers, Essays on Music and Musicians
Weaving Time – Original Composition by Warren Senders, 1994. Performed by Antigravity, in Pune, India, in 1994 at Ishvani Kendra Studios
When We Wove a Tapestry — A Reminiscence
©By Vijaya Sundaram
March 28th, 2013
The beautiful composition on the mp3 attachment above is by Warren Senders (photo, center), and it is one of my all-time favorite compositions (and I love all of his music).
We had a lovely time at Ishvani Kendra, in Pune in 1994, towards the end of our year-long stay that year. Every day, we would get there in the morning, and most days, we’d be out at twilight. We’d sit there and play our hearts out, recording take after take. That was a kind of meditation in itself.
Then, after a particularly intense session or two, we would emerge into the heat of the afternoon, just to breathe air that wasn’t musky with concentration. The intensely bright haze of noon would glow gold and red in our eyes, and the beautiful flowering bougainvillea plants vied with each other to create a psychedelic feast of color.
It was truly a marriage of true minds for all of us during that week or so at Ishvani Kendra. All of us loved each other, because our language was that of music — we understood each other perfectly. We practised and recorded Warren’s compositions. We practised and recorded mine. I had been nervous, because I wasn’t sure whether the older gentlemen in the group would accept my direction after having been used to my being their colleague, not the composer/director. I should have known better. There was no question of ego. They gave their best and utmost love and attention to the music composed by Warren and to my music. It was pure and Apollonian. I had never been happier.
This was the context: Warren and I had taken a year off from our lives in the U.S. to go to India for the sole purpose of studying music, and composing / recording our original pieces. Our practice, in general, was to live carefully, save up money for two years and go to India to live for one year. We did it only twice – and the first time we went back to India for a whole year, we didn’t need to save that much, because Warren was awarded an AIIS (American Institute of Indian Studies) scholarship, which lasted us for that year.
Independent of each other, we composed several pieces that year (mine are on DAT tapes, and are not yet uploaded to this computer, so I’m putting up Warren’s compositions. I promise to do some blog posts which include mine. I hope you enjoy them).
During that year, which was pretty intense, we took Hindustani classical vocal lessons with our Guruji, the late Pt. Shreeram G. Devasthali. By afternoon, evening and night, we’d compose or practise, take walks, prepare dinner or go out to dinner, and then practise again. Most evenings, we’d hang out with our musician friends, and we were as one being. On weekends, we’d visit my grandparents and aunt, and also go for concerts.
In short, that was an idyllic year — for the most part. Like any other year, it also had its frustrations — for example, we searched high and low for a drummer, and finally, towards the end of the year, came across a gem of a player, Nikhil Sohoni, and everyone heaved a sigh of relief. There were also unaccountable periods of sadness for me for a few months, early in the year, and I revived only when I did music. I don’t dwell on those as much as on the long, long periods of beautiful music-making, which we did with our teacher, and with our friends in the group which Warren had named and founded years ago: Antigravity.
Before this Antigravity, Warren had formed the American Antigravity in the 1970s, and that group was dynamic, with Phil Scarff on saxophones, Bob Pilkington on trombone, Tom MacDonald on drums, Dee Wood on guitar and Warren on bass.
When Warren had first come to India (to study Hindustani classical vocal music) on an Indo-American Fellowship in 1985, he set about forming his Indian chapter of Antigravity. Although some of the personnel had changed over the years, the core group consisted of the following people since 1986: Ramakant Paranjape, violin; and Ajit Soman (now late), flute; Warren Senders, bass; then, along came Rajeev Devasthali, tabla, then Atul Keskar, dilruba and sitar, and finally, yours truly on guitar. Nikhil Sohoni (percussion) was new to us in the year 1994. As new to the group as him was our friend Caroline Dillon, cellist (missing from the group photograph) — she had had to fly back to the U.S. after her three-month stay in India.
Back to Ishvani Kendra and our insanely long recording sessions. We recorded and practised, ate, chatted, drank endless cups of tea and coffee, laughed, got frustrated at times, laughed again, practised with redoubled concentration, and gave our hearts to the music, which was complex, demanding, difficult and brilliant.
The result? Warren Senders’ CD: Boogie For Hanuman.
Another result? My cassette tape (we didn’t have enough capital for two CD productions that year): Magic Realism.
I look back on that year, and feel a sense of accomplishment. We came back to the U.S. at the start of 1995, and began our work lives again. We also did radio shows (WGHB, Emerson Radio, WBUR, etc.), plus performances of Indian classical vocal music together. We gave concerts with the American Antigravity which featured our own compositions as well.
As the song goes, It was a very good year.
And the time that we wove into it became a beautiful tapestry into which all our lives were woven, a tapestry in which our spirits and imaginations made intricate patterns, and through those complex patterns, love glowed in the music.
I hope you enjoy it!
Thanks for listening!
~~~~~~~~~~~~The End~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
P.S. Once I upload my own music, I’ll do similar posts for my pieces. Hope you enjoy them!
Tags: #Music, Antigravity, Indo-Jazz Synthesis, Ishvani Kendra, Original Composition by Warren Senders, Recording sessions, Reminiscences about Pune
Mar 28, 2013 Essays on Music and Musicians, Parenting/ Home-schooling / Family Music and other Notes, Teaching and Learning
What Does it Mean to Be a Teacher?
©By Vijaya Sundaram
March 28th, 2013
It means that you:
Give unstintingly of your attention to your student or students who are there to learn from you.
Not allow dislike, prejudice or frustration to mar your interactions, even if a student makes it VERY hard.
Don’t give in to despair when confronted with failure, either on the part of your students to understand, acknowledge, absorb or appreciate the beauty of what you’re offering, or what they’re learning, or on your own part for not always having been all of the things you wanted to be, from time to time — because we’re all exhausted, all human, all prone to retire from time to time, to lick our wounds and self-heal.
Find that which is pure, child-like (with a capacity for wonder, questioning and curiosity) in your student, and teach THAT person within the student.
Listen to, and learn from, your students.
Always remember you’re a conduit (through whom all of the knowledge, learning and understanding flow) not the repository of all of those things.
Love, always love your student, love your own teacher, and love the subject you’re teaching deeply and completely.
****************************************************************
I was thinking of these things after I had a long talk with my husband, teacher extraordinaire.
He had been feeling low, because a student had omitted mentioning him as his music teacher on his website (and had shamelessly mentioned more famous and well-known names in the field). My husband wasn’t expecting gratitude, just acknowledgement, because in this field, as in any great field of artistic and soulful endeavor, one MUST acknowledge one’s teachers, especially those with whom one has spent a significant amount of time.
My husband is primarily a teacher of Indian classical music (among other types of music). He had taught this student thoughtfully, devotedly and completely, over a relatively long period of time, and didn’t expect much back from him. The student was talented, but arrogant, puffed up with a spurious sense of self-importance. We had already seen signs of that while he used to come to our place nine years or so ago, but we dismissed that as the cockiness of youth.
There is no way to get around this, no matter how much one might try and dismiss it as a passing wind which we “respect not.” To find that one is consciously omitted rankles. One would have to be a sage to brush it off.
That student’s rank ingratitude and puffed-up self-importance will cause him grief one day. Every person has to face his or her Karmic duty.
What was my husband’s response to feeling low about all this, plus other worries?
This:
I have taught many people; I have always tried to give appropriately to the individual student rather than use prefabricated lessons or curricula.
No two people want or need the same thing. But everyone needs music.
The world’s parlous condition increases our need for song. I sometimes become discouraged…but singing fortifies me and reminds me that I’m just one link in a chain that reaches farther back in time than any of us can imagine.
I have had so many great teachers in my life; I’m remembering them….while thinking of my students. If I cannot give what I know to my students, my teachers’ love and labor was in vain. My teachers loved me. I love my students. That’s how it works.
This is the person I know and love as one of the two greatest teachers I’ve ever met.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~The End~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Tags: #Journal Entry, #Learning, #Teaching, Students, teachers
Mar 17, 2013 Awake in Dream Time - Journal Entries about the almost real, the surreal and the unreal, Essays on Music and Musicians
Roots Music
(Pune, India, 1994) – An Original Poem
©Vijaya Sundaram, March 17th, 2013
To get to the roots of things,
We dug deep, drenched in song.
At times, things were rich,
Saturated, awash in light.
At others, rocks shouldered through,
Got wrenched out of the way.
That was the year when
Unexplained sorrow burst
Through inexplicable joy,
Escaped, became song.
Sometimes dreams came,
Pursued by demons,
Effaced by the gods.
That was a good year,
Full of magic realism, when
Dreams came on winged backs
And bore me away, and
A three-faced Goddess
Showed me favor,
As I ran, carrying a fish in a jug.
That was the year to rise,
Untrammelled by the mundane.
Above the struggle, we leaped
Into a space of pure spirit.
That was the year we distilled
Our music-minds, mined the ether.
That was the year, when,
Lighter than air, lighter than light,
We rose, embryonic-winged
For we were ruled by spirit,
And our spirits were weightless.
~~~~~~~The End~~~~~~~~~~~~
Tags: #Music, #Original Poetry, #Vijaya Sundaram, #Warren Senders, Antigravity, India, Pune
Mar 3, 2013 Essays on Music and Musicians, Parenting/ Home-schooling / Family Music and other Notes, Reading, Writing, Thinking, Teaching and Learning
Saturday is My Day of Rest
©By Vijaya Sundaram
March 2nd 2013
It’s Saturday, March 2nd, and I am in a foggy, unspecified place in my body and mind.
Having (as usual) slept only a few hours every day of this week, while beaming out energy and enthusiasm at school in a tightly focused way every single day of this past whole week, which had come hot on the heels of a semi-lazy, semi-busy vacation week, I am now a hollow shell.
I dealt with curriculum.
Gave a test.
Assigned a complicated and (I think) interesting project based on John Steinbeck’s book The Pearl, facilitated class discussion, finished up that book (begun well before vacation week), then taught verbs, participles and perfect verb tenses, and began to teach the Holocaust unit. Assigned and began teaching Friedrich by Hans Peter Richter.
Teaching the Holocaust Unit is the hardest thing I do every year. I use the Facing History and Ourselves curriculum and ideas as some of my resources. I have read an enormous amount on this subject and immersed myself in it for over fifteen years. Yet, I cannot bring myself to remember every single detail. I have to re-read some of it. It’s too much for me. I know all the numbers, and have read the books of several of the famous writers. I know all about the different concentration camps, the infamous Nazis who conducted their horrible experiments, the leaders of the Third Reich, the euphemisms adopted by the Nazis for their terrible practices. I know all about the Nuremberg Trials, the huge disaster that was WWII and the burden of collective guilt, not only in Germany, but several other European nations. And I know about the brave souls who individually (Schindler, Irena Sendler, the Bielski brothers, Miep Gies, others) and collectively saved several thousand Jews (the village of Le Chambon in France, and an entire country — Denmark). It’s all too much to comprehend or internalize. So, I map out the unit into perpetrators, bystanders, victims, resisters, rescuers and survivors. Because we read about it, and discuss it all from this perspective, it helps me and my students deal with the enormity and mindless nature of a whole era as revealed in Friedrich and Night. I show clips of interviews with survivors and rescuers/resisters. I show non R-rated movies and several scenes from the less-horrifying but eye-opening parts from R-rated movies. We read moving excerpts from Primo Levi’s books. We read poems. We discuss weighty matters of morality and philosophy as well. We inquire into the nature of evil. We look into Hannah Arendt’s statement about “the banality of evil.”
And each teenager in my class comes away from this experience a “sadder and wiser” person, arising the “morrow morn.”
But all that hasn’t happened for the classes yet. The students are still at the beginning of the unit.
So, where was I? Ah yes, I was still dwelling on this past week of work which assailed my senses and my soul.
I facilitated a meeting with Green Team members at my school on Monday, and with the Executive Director of a local organic farm, as well as with the Recycling Co-ordinator for the town in which I teach. We discussed how we would begin composting wasted cafeteria food in our school (and transport it to the local farm for the soil and chickens). It was a good meeting, despite all the difficulties we were sure to experience when we did begin to follow through on this idea.
After the meeting, the kids, the other teacher and I did our usual, mad, panting, breathless, crazy-whirly recycling for the whole school — dragging the huge, blue recycle bins down the hallways of all five floors to the South Parking Lot, where the giant Casella recycling dumpster stood, and emptying out all those bins, for the Casella people to deal with on Wednesday.
Note: We are all of us girls (well, two women teachers and the rest of them were girls. Our one boy was absent)!
Where are the schoolboys in any worthwhile effort, like saving the planet? The girls informed me that some of the boys laugh at the school’s recycling efforts (although our bins are full!).
Makes one despair.
Mothers and Fathers: Please teach your sons (and daughters) that the planet is not for pillaging and plundering, despoiling and tossing away. There’s only one planet.
I guess it’s time for me to give another rousing speech at lunchtime over the mike. Every time I did that in the fall, I got a few more volunteers, some of them boys, but then they faded away.
What else?
Went to a Baby Shower for a friend/colleague at school on Thursday, and that was beautiful — such events are always moving, especially for those who are already mothers, but for everyone else too, because one sees a different side of all these harassed and harried school-teachers, who take the time to be together. Everyone brings something good to eat. There are all these lovely platters of (mostly) healthy, nutritious food, veggie platters, the healthier variety of chips and yummy dips, fruit, and of course the obligatory dreadfully frosted carb-heavy cakes and cookies. There are piled-up presents, streamers and pretty tassels. We clear up a space in the school library, set out the food on pretty table-cloths, put up streamers, and shower the star of the afternoon, the new mother-to-be with love. And she is always tender, radiant and full of hope and beauty. I wrote a poem, after being urged to do so by some of the teachers there. And I posted it on this blog-site on Thursday, which eased my sense of guilt with not writing something the previous day (at least, I think I didn’t write something. Perhaps I did).
On Friday, after the regular, exhausting, unending round of classes which I taught (I teach one hundred and seven students a DAY, and that’s nothing! It was one hundred and twenty-five a day last year, which nearly killed me and the other English teachers on the other two teams — math, science and history teachers don’t have it so bad, although everyone reported being exhausted last year!), I ran my Poetry Club, put out food for the kids, made hot chocolate for them, and we wrote. Well, they wrote. I usually do, but yesterday, I was busy facilitating. I didn’t have time. So, that was a wasted chance.
Then, dinner at The Punjab in Arlington with my family. That’s always very nice, and we three are VERY goofy and silly together. Then, there was music at night with daughter and husband, after which, I fell, exhausted, into a species of sleep.
All of today was spent in a strange, cocooned state. Tired beyond imagining, feeling the weight of the ages press down upon my shoulder-blades, and with feet that alternately felt numb and tingling with tiredness, I did nothing at all, not even fun things.
I didn’t write anything yesterday, and nothing much today. At least I wrote a poem on Thursday, I console myself. Yes, it made me happy, but it doesn’t satisfy me. I want the high that comes with writing stories every day, writing poems every day, having interesting and inspired thoughts.
I’ve been reading Alexander McCall Smith books. When mindlessness strikes, I turn to mental comfort food, and McCall Smith’s books and P.G. Wodehouse’s books are for good vibes and good prose. Dick Francis books, and occasionally the less grisly Robert Parker, Sue Grafton and Sara Paretsky books are for a sense of life lived in danger (compared to my tame and happy existence). Of course, there are the usual J.K. Rowling books, some grab-me sci-fi for sheer pleasure, or an Oliver Sacks book at hand for sheer pleasure or familiar, but in-depth, moving humanistic science . Mind you, I’m not talking about my other literary loves. This is the daily fare for someone who can read unfamiliar or weightier books only during school breaks, and during the summer.
Watched a TED video showcasing Amanda Fucking Palmer, which was very moving in a strange way, especially because I don’t actually like her music or her face, although it is extremely compelling. I am able to separate my personal likes and dislikes from my respect for artists (musical artists or artists who do performance art) who do what they are compelled to do. I like John Cage, for example, but am not moved in the least by his music (or lack thereof). I LOVE Yoko Ono, but her actual art does nothing for me. We need such artists. They challenge our preconceived notions and push us to think beyond our “comfort zone.”
And of course, I love, love, love Neil Gaiman (and have done so well before his rise to fame and fortune, since the early 90s, when his Sandman books came out), so if he loves Amanda Palmer, I am prepared to love her too.
So, this was my past week.
Right now, while I type all this, my husband is making fritters. I hear my daughter singing upstairs, and I need to help her with her guitar practice.
On that note, I bid you all adieu.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~The End~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Tags: #Recycling, Alexander McCall Smith, Amanda Fucking Palmer, Baby Showers, Elie Wiesel, English Teachers, Facing History and Ourselves, Green initiatives in school, John Steinbeck, Neil Gaiman, P.G. Wodehouse, Poetry Club, Primo Levi, Teaching the Holocaust, Yoko Ono
Feb 10, 2013 Essays on Music and Musicians, Parenting/ Home-schooling / Family Music and other Notes
We love to sing together. As we do so, we create a shared history of memories.
Because by The Beatles; Things We Said Today by The Beatles; Sweet Sunny South; Sunny Tennessee; Five Hundred Miles, Indian songs from the Hindustani tradition, old movie songs from Tamil and Hindi movies that I’ve sung to her since she was very little, French folks songs for children from a CD, Samba Bossa Nova songs …
So many songs, so much music in the world! It makes us happy. Keeps the darkness at bay for the two grown-ups in the room, for whom deep worry about the state of the world swirls around the edges of our conscious mind, always. It is our child, that happy spirit, that pure, unalloyed magical being who knits together those unraveled parts of our scattered, tired selves. She laughs, twirls around the room, makes foolish repetitive remarks that make us grit our teeth in mock annoyance, makes deep, wise observations about people and characters in books, herself and her learning processes, and animals … she enchants me, and makes me remember that way beyond our puny selves, there is a deep, deep place of creativity, whence we all come.
Our daughter reminds me of all that the beauty that ever was and will ever be.
And the music we make comes from that place.