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Experience
Inside a geometry of sound
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On the banks of the Ganga, in the wake of the trails left behind by the sarangi, violin and the veena as they weave the Malkauns raga. An exclusive, edited excerpt from Geoff Dyer’sJeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, released recently.
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Seduced by evening ragas: Geoff Dyer.
One night a concert was held on the terrace of the Ganges View. It was a clear warm night, full of listening stars. The terrace was lit by candles, flickering in a breeze that was hardly there. An audience of perhaps 30 people had gathered to hear a middle-aged woman on violin, accompanied by a thin man with white hair and thick glasses on tabla. The tampura was played by a woman whose shy manner seemed perfectly adapted to her instrument. The violinist explained that they were going to play the raga Malkauns. I had heard it before, in several different versions, on my iPod, but I still did not know what made it the raga Malkauns rather than another, similar-sounding raga. The bits that I thought identified and fixed it in one performance were nowhere to be found — nowhere to be heard — on another.
Free of time
Night had fallen hours before but the violin was dusk-laden, twilit. I knew that the violinist was exploring the raga, bringing it into being, could feel myself becoming gradually immersed in a geometry of sound, but I could not identify it. But I did, at least, have an inkling of why I couldn’t. Melody depends on time. Played a little faster or slower it remains recognisably itself. Whereas here the heart of the raga, the melody in which it had its origins, had been completely taken out of time. An entire dimension of listening had been removed. I began to lose myself in the infinitude of something I could not recognise or understand.
This may have been music of the spirit, but there was no attempt to disguise the physical fact of how it was produced. In the midst of the most lyrical touches there was no fear of the rasp, the friction of the bow being drawn across the strings. It could be left behind, that rasp, at a moment’s notice, but it never was, or not for long. Even as it soared free it dug itself more deeply into the earth. The violin was as thick as the night lying over the river, indistinguishable from it. Every move forward was tugged backwards and yet, irresistibly, the music advanced and accelerated. A pulse was making itself felt. It was impossible to say when this pulse had started. I became aware of it — the return of time — only when it had been there for a while, as if it had been there, inaudibly, imperceptibly, even before it was there. The stars lay on the river. At first something had taken shape; now it was coming to life. There was a feeling of brooding accumulation and of subtle realisation: melody could be made more lovely if it was not left to be itself. By being forced to leave itself behind it would become more than itself and, eventually, more purely itself. The pulse had become stronger than anything else, so strong that it was generating a need — for rhythm — it was incapable of satisfying.
A different turn
At that moment the tabla kicked in. You could feel the sense of relief spreading through the night. A flight of birds flitted past, quick shadows of themselves. In the unaccompanied alap there was an immense yearning, a yearning, on the part of the violin, to achieve the incomparable sob of the sarangi. The fact that this was impossible had added greatly to the sense of longing but that longing had been answered by the tabla and the violin grew familiar again. For stretches now, there was a foot-stomping, shit-kicking, hillbilly quality to the music that was not at odds with the mood of meditation and transcendence. It was like discovering some universal template of music, extending from the Appalachians to the Indo-Gangetic Plain. The rasp, the squawk, grew more pronounced but so too did the glide and swoop of melody, the abandoned melody that had never been left behind. The tabla was tying the beat in knots, more and more tangled, more and more intricate — and untying them just as quickly, faster and faster, but always with time to spare. At the heart of the gallop of the tabla, was a gong, ringing out. I could not follow the rhythmic cycles, not consciously at any rate, but however far the violin and tabla strayed from each other there was always a place they could return to and, at some level, I began to know where this place was, to recognise it, to know how it sounded, to expect it even if I did so only after it had once again been left behind. The darkness flowed over the river and into it. The river was dark. The sky over the river was as dark as the river but did not move, unlike the river, which moved constantly. Darkness was hidden by darkness.
Geoff Dyer is an award-winning author with three previous novels to his credit.
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