The UCSB Music of India Ensemble, which surely bears a familial relation to the ever more popular Middle East Ensemble, will have its end-of-the-year concert at 7 p.m. Thursday in Karl Geiringer Hall (Music 1250) in the UCSB Music Building.
The special guests of the evening, the Kedia Brothers, will play a sitar-sarod duet with tabla accompaniment.
The first half of the evening showcases the sitar class led by Scott Marcus and the tabla class led by Rob Wallace. The second half of the concert will feature a performance by Mor Mukut Kedia (sitarist) and Manoj Kedia (sarodist), accompanied by Jyotiprakas on the tabla. (The sitar and the sarod are plucked stringed instruments; the tabla is a kind of double drum set, played something like bongos.)
Most of what is now called “World Music” is what used to be known as the folk music or popular music of non-Western countries, with some notable exceptions. The most notable exception of all is probably the music Northern India, which is neither folk nor pop but a complex “classical” music from an ancient and highly evolved civilization.
As the Greek instrument, the bouzoukee, and the musical culture that surrounds it, broke into American consciousness in 1960, on a Christmas album by the Kingston Trio, so the unique sound of the sitar reached a mass audience through the pop group, the Beatles, and especially their lead guitarist, George Harrison, who took a few lessons from Ravi Shankar while he was in India, learning Transcendental Meditation. George Played the sitar on “Norwegian Wood” and “Within You, Without You,” among others, and then Ravi Shankar played at the Monterrey Pop Festival in 1967. The Baby Boom had discovered the East.
This music is classical music, but it tends to involve a good deal more improvisation than most European-based classical music, the forms are more fluid.
Within a carefully specified framework, the typical piece weaves together a far-ranging, ever-evolving vocabulary of melodic gestures, which often refer to other gestures, and so it goes. If you can settle yourself into it, a sitar-sarod concert can be an ecstatic experience. But if you wait impatiently for some sort of sonata-allegro form to take shape, some kind of headlong goal of resolution, you will go crazy.
You can pick up a lot about a culture from its music, if you can get into it. But getting into it can be tricky. This North Indian music has so much direct sensual appeal that one immediately bonds to it, yet when the first wave of pleasure recedes, there is still the work’s secret gyroscope, whirling away, unknown and perhaps unknowable.
As Nabokov once wrote: “A thin veneer of immediate reality is spread over natural and artificial matter, and whoever wishes to remain in the now, with the now, on the now, should please not break its tension film. Otherwise the inexperienced miracle-worker will find himself no longer walking on water but descending upright among the staring fish.”
Tickets to this concert are $15 for general admission and $7 for students, and will be sold only at the door. For more information about musical events at UCSB, call 805.893.7001 or visit the Music Department online at www.music.ucsb.edu.
Gerald Carpenter covers the arts as a Noozhawk contributor.