We part ways at the intersection, heading to our respective homes. This has been a tumultuous week in the outside world; for my part I've completed a big project (podcast episode to be released on the 15th — search for "Cool Tunes For A Hot Planet" and enjoy), taught a whole lot of students, led a good class, and done my daily resistance duties.

Walking, they say, is just controlled falling forward.

See you tomorrow.

Man With Sign

end/

At 8:23 I make a video, then sing with Craige for our duet. Barring a few very minor textual hiccups, the song works well. Craige's been practicing his harmony part and I have enough bandwidth to hear (and appreciate) it. We finish and the clock is just turning 8:29, so I pack up my signs and speaker.

6/

Solving small problems along the way, I build more and more complex melodic arcs, working on distortions of the mukhda to fit in longer and shorter time-frames, on interesting fractional subdivisions (I really get into interpolated 5-against-2 melismata for a while), and on rhythmically articulated silences (not a common perspective in the Hindustani universe, but a worthwhile one).

5/

Over the course of the hour I practice developing the raga upwards into the opening of the antara. Normally this would only happen once during a vilambit exposition, so for the sake of practice I recapitulate the development multiple times, again striving to sing freely with only the necessary degree of reliance on the composition. The antara is finally "settling" — allowing more interpretive freedom.

4/

Today is the last day of practice in the Charukeshi vilambit khyal, "kaase kahoon aali," and I am spending the hour doing free improvisations — taking the composition as much for granted as possible in order to move into melodic variations. At first I focus on extemporizing while keeping the words in essentially the same relationship to the taal, but after the first ten or eleven minutes I take incrementally more liberties with each cycle.

3/

Traffic is very light and there are frequent interludes of empty road. The drivers who do acknowledge us are friendly, but most of the time they speed by, focused on the road, their work, the coming weekend. No matter; I'm leaning on the guardrail and singing, staying as present in the moment as I can.

2/

Man With Sign, September 12, 02025

I woke with the alarm and moved efficiently through my pre-vigil coffee, somehow managing to get out of the house in the chilly morning and arriving at Roosevelt Circle at 7:29. I greet Craige and set up; today's hand-held sign is the plea for temporal literacy, THINK IN EONS — ACT NOW! While it makes perfect sense to me I'm not sure about the rest of the world.

1/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vW5-pBMdBY
#ClimateChaos #GlobalWarming #HindustaniMusic #CitizenActivism

As an example of the relevance of my sign for today, I note that the US Department of Energy released a post on social media claiming that, since the sun goes down at night, solar energy is not effective or reliable. I didn't know it was possible for scientific ignorance to extend to being unaware of the existence of batteries, but this is the world we live in now.

See you tomorrow.

Man With Sign

end/

At 8:23 I make a video, then finish off a few more avartanas of improvisation before retuning and walking over to Craige for our duet. I make fewer textual glitches today, and Craige's voice is a little better, so both of us feel reasonably content with our rendition of "Get Together." And then we pack up and head our separate ways.

6/

But the composition itself comes to flow fairly smoothly and I get it memorized by 8:20. I'd begun at a stately 18 bpm to give myself room for mid-course corrections, but by the end of the hour I'm at yesterday's 23 bpm pace and able to maintain an even and unforced rendition — aided by the melodic rhyme in beats 9-11. I've spent the whole hour alternating between asthai and antara, and enjoying it.

5/

There are some tricky intervals (a descending major seventh, for example) that take preparation. And — as usual – it takes a while to understand the ebb and flow of tension within the slow ektaal setting of the words "jabse sajan pardes gayilavaa unke milan naad piyaa ki aas," in which some words "rebound" off the initial accents while others "arrive" at them.

4/

Today I have set aside to work on the antara of "kaase kahoon aali," and I begin by going over the primary melodic gestures in the lower register. Because antara sections are always built in the upper octave, the initial learning can take place an octave below, allowing the basic material to be internalized before it's placed in the correct register.

3/

Traffic is heavy and almost entirely supportive, with the exception of a guy in a trades van who (despite being, apparently, an electrician) doesn't seem to think much of science. Hey pal, it wasn't Jesus who discovered electricity. Anyway, it's him and the get-a-job guy, whose fulminations seem to have simmered down significantly over the past week. IDK why.

2/

Man With Sign, September 9, 02025

I roll out of bed with the alarm, already looking forward to the first slice of toast (I baked yesterday and it came out very well). Post pre-vigil coffee, I hit the road, arriving at Roosevelt Circle at 7:29, greeting Craige, and setting up. Today I offer the world SCIENTIFIC IGNORANCE IS A BAD FOUNDATION FOR PUBLIC POLICY.

1/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5i35TP2tcE
#ClimateChaos #GlobalWarming #HindustaniMusic #CitizenActivism