Musical machinations for the 21st Century
Photo: Shujoy Mazumdar
SOUNDS OF MUSIC Stephen Rush and Robert Newcomb combine technology with conventional training.
In well-ordered musical circles, classical music - Carnatic and Hindustani - is compartmented into a definitive mindset. Innovations and fusions are welcomed condescendingly if at all and that too, when rendered by practising masters who carry a baggage of musical recommendations to prove their point.
Thus, when Stephen Rush and Robert Newcomb of Ann Arbor University, Michigan, recently rendered a concert of fusion music combining the purist Indian classical genres with hip-hop, rock, and ambient experimental electronic installations, their audience could be clearly demarcated into sceptics and curious listeners with a few in between.
By their own appraisal, the duo, who performed at Delhi University's South Campus, confess that music of this kind has not been heard before, adding that the sum total of it is a musical experience of sonic and visual delight specially composed for those with an appetite for what's new. The duo are conversant with both the Hindustani and the Carnatic musical lineage as Rush, an Associate Professor of Music at the university, is a practising Carnatic vocalist and has been training under Sharada Kumar for more than a decade.
Musical lineage
Though Newcomb comes from an improvisational computer music background, he has been treading what he describes as a `poet's path' through Hindustani music. He was first attracted to it as a boy, when he had heard recordings of the sarod maestro Ustad Ali Akbar Khan. His own instrument is the classical guitar whereby he has been replicating different genres as part of a subliminal need to explore, and this listening process has given a deeply emotional expression to his musical creations.
The elemental sound of the classical note that he has chosen from Hindustani music is thus processed with electronic acoustics in a manner that the short syllables are stretched into expansive sound effects or contracted into staccato compressions, making the electronic context central to improvisation. So how do they ensure that their effect sounds musical and not cacophony to Indian ears? Also, how do they imbibe spontaneity and not contrived sound effects through so much mechanised collaboration?
`Contextual sounds'
"It is by exploring the sound world making sure that it is contextual sounds that are being improvised. It is the sound of birds chirping, of children's laughter, the sitar being played and even the geographical setting that is being transposed into music," claims Rush, as being the basis of their work together.
Backing the effects of this vocalist is Newcomb's input of "30 digitised sounds of timbre infinite which contain the ethos of raga and where instruments like the guitar have been amplified but where the sitar has been left unmodified and the compositional architecture has grown from a slow development stage into an accelerated and accumulative material."
SUBHRA MAZUMDAR
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