Balloon Juice - Artists In Our Midst Archives

Artists in Our Midst – Dave Buchen

by WaterGirl| December 21, 20241:00 pm| 43 Comments

If you would like your talent featured in Authors in Our Midst or Artists in Our Midst, just send me an email message and we’ll make it happen. Don’t be shy! I have no more Artists or Authors posts in the queue, so please get in touch if you would like to be featured.

Let’s give a warm welcome to Dave Buchen!

Hello all and thanks for this opportunity to share my work. I started making books on my printing press back in 2000, hand-printing, coloring, and binding 100 books at a time. As the books I wanted to make got more complex, I moved to self-publishing in various forms.

My newest book is Why is an Apple an Apple? A Garden of Etymology. It tells the story of how our words for fruits and vegetables have evolved over the years with 50+ papercut illustrations. The story of words like rice, rhubarb, and rutabaga led me down many rabbit holes of where fruits were first grown and how they traveled the world. For example, rhubarb can be translated as “Russian Barbarian” or “Wet Barbarian.” I make children’s books, but as a father and former teacher who has read countless children’s books, I try to write them in a way that any age can read them and be neither bored or overwhelmed.

This book is a sequel to Why is a Tiger a Tiger? A Bestiary of Etymology which I published years ago. My fascination with etymology was really sparked back in Chicago when I found a great dictionary with etymologies in the garbage. It’s its own way of studying culture and language that reveals connections and meanings that one wouldn’t have otherwise deduced. I then published a Spanish version which included new animals and some other animals taken out. An interesting etymology in one language does not guarantee an equally fascinating story in the other!

In many ways, my books have evolved as my children have grown up. I made Bilingual ABC Bilingüe back when they were small, and I was faced with a dilemma. I moved to Puerto Rico in 1999, and my children were both born here and are bilingual. Finding a decent bilingual ABC was way harder than it should have been. Too many books had pages like “A is for Apple [ M es para Manzana]”! So I made my own in which the letters actually match the words in English and Spanish (Acrobat/Acróbata, Bubbles/Burbujas etc.). This was originally hand-printed, but after they sold out I resurrected it as a print-on-demand book.

I still make books by hand as well as an annual calendar. I have a Vandercook #1 press in my laundry shed. Hush Little Baby is a version that I used to sing to my kids in semi-improvised variations to get them to sleep. For a model of parent and child, I was able to turn to my nephew and his new daughter. I have also used the press to make an annual calendar since 1999. It began as the Bestiary Calendar and has evolved over the years to have such themes as the French Revolutionary Calendar, dancing, masks in the first year of covid, and people embracing in covid’s aftermath. This year’s theme was going to be birds you can see from my garden, but I broadened it to Puerto Rico in general to get some more striking birds other than the ones that visit me.

For the calendar, my daughter, now an adult, contributed three of the prints including the hummingbird.

The print-on-demand books are available at Amazon, which has a de facto monopoly on the kind of self-publishing I do, sigh.

Info about my hand-printed books and calendars can be found on my website.

Artists in Our Midst – Dave BuchenPost + Comments (43)

Artists in Our Midst – Knitting Magic

by WaterGirl| October 13, 20242:00 pm| 102 Comments

This post is in: Artists In Our Midst

If you would like your talent featured in Authors in Our Midst or Artists in Our Midst, just send me an email message and we’ll make it happen. Don’t be shy! I have no more Artists or Authors posts in the queue, so please get in touch if you would like to be featured.

After seeing the drawings of Steve that Avalue crated for for the blog’s 20th anniversary, and seeing the pie filter images she made for us, like PupCake and the Sea Lion Chow, and now seeing her knitting, I have to wonder – is there anything creative that Avalune can’t do?

Let’s give a warm welcome to Avalune!

Knitting Magic

by Avalune

I didn’t have occasion to visit my great-grandmother much outside of Thanksgiving and Christmas, when my parents, while they were still together, would do the obligatory shuffle from grandparent house to grandparent house for holiday dinners. She had a cramped little house at the end of a street in what was generally considered a bad neighborhood. The surface of every piece of wooden furniture was covered in starch-stiff crochet doilies. Every couch and recliner was festooned with colorful chevron afghans. Three framed pieces featuring nature scenes built from the most delicate spiderwebs of white cotton material hung from the walls in the dining room – these were her pride, all blue ribbon winning pieces her children squabbled over when she passed away.

I wanted to make pictures from strands of cotton like that. But I rarely had access to her and she didn’t think I was very serious about wanting to learn. I think she’d probably also more or less quit doing it by then because of the rheumatoid arthritis that made knots of her fingers.

I never stopped thinking that it was a kind of magic and one that I wanted to recreate. As it turns out, it was probably for the best that she never tried to teach me crochet. I could never take to it but circa early 2000’s, at the height of YouTube’s DIY atmosphere, I was determined to teach myself to knit.

My great-grandmother Venice was still alive and living in her cramped little two-story on a dead end street in Springfield, Ohio (yes, that one) when I finished my first knitted lace pieces and entered them into the local fair.

While most of the folks around me were knitting with needles that looked like those miniature baseball bats you’d get as souvenirs at a ball game, I preferred the toothpicks and most delicate yarns and intricate patterns – as if I were trying to recreate the things I remembered from my childhood.

I was especially infatuated with Estonian lace for a time. The gentle sway of the bubbles called Nupps (pronounced to rhyme with hoops) reminded me of the deer in the grass in the picture frame. Did you know machines cannot produce Nupps? Take that automation!

I loved the challenge of lacework but there were also so many other ways to play with shape and color. While Venice’s chevron afghans were nostalgic and colorful, I wanted a more modern and diverse take.

Solid colors with interesting textures where the design really stands out.

Or a rainbow of color.

Or a sort of knitted take on traditional quilt blocks.

By changing the order in which you worked a row of stitches, you could create twists of cables.

While it was common for a cable to run from end to end, it was also possible to close cables and create cables out of thin air to get something that looked more like Pictish art.

Clothing that is expected to fit was a little daunting – how many stories exist where someone knit a sweater or hat that was too big or too small for the recipient? But now that I’d accomplished my original intent, to honor and follow my great-grandmother, I wanted to try my hand at clothing, like this piece reminiscent of old military issue with patches and shoulder caps.

I liked solid colors, or intentional colorwork. None of that “I made this!” “Uh yeah you did…” look that too often came with hand knits. I wanted the features and details to stand out – not the wildness of my yarn choices.

But not all of my work is so traditional and restrained.

Sometimes I knit very tiny things bigly (couldn’t resist) like this little roly/potato/woodlouse.

Sometimes I knit big things very, very small.

This may be the first year in many that I do not expect to make a dozen or so 1.5in snowmen to give away at Christmastime.

Sometimes I go weird, like my faux taxidermied friend who presides over the dining room table. I fell in love with Highland Cows while visiting Scotland.

Or my rat friend, Ratty Arbuckle, who watches me work and startles everyone who comes by my office, thinking his proportions are a little too realistic.

Sometimes, I even do “knitivism” – like this angry little womb pin for women’s reproductive rights.

Though there are some exceptions, I primarily knit for close family and friends, who I know will take care of handknits which can be a little more fiddly than fast fashion. I already have a job. I emphatically resist the idea that everything needs to be a “side hustle,” in part because I knit too ~~slowly~~ meticulously and in part because too many people want handknits in quality fiber for Dollar Store prices. Keeping it close maintains the connection to my great-grandmother and the magic and charm that initially drew me to the art in the first place. It certainly isn’t the only art I practice – I’m a bit of a dabbler – but it is still one of my most favorite.

Artists in Our Midst – Knitting MagicPost + Comments (102)

Dan B – An Artist in a Different Medium!

by WaterGirl| September 22, 20242:50 pm| 17 Comments

This post is in: Artists In Our Midst, On The Road, Photo Blogging

If you would like your talent featured in Authors in Our Midst or Artists in Our Midst, just send me an email message and we’ll make it happen. Don’t be shy! I have no more Artists or Authors posts in the queue, so please get in touch if you would like to be featured.

Let’s give a warm welcome to Dan B!

Dogs to Weddings!

Sometimes I had an urge to drive off when I first visit a new client’s home. I’m glad I didn’t.

This couple’s residence was on the boundary between a sketchy high crime neighborhood and an exclusive neighborhood. There was regular car vandalism and they wanted a circular drive in their narrow front lot so they could get their cars off the street. This would have turned the entire front yard into a driveway with narrow shrub beds and having two curb cuts would have violated code.

And the back was a “critical slope” so steep it would likely fail. The front, right on the street, was their only level outdoor area but they couldn’t imagine it as a place to relax and enjoy.

The house was a classic mid century modern that had the unsurprising single arborvitae planted in front. It was obstructing the simple, but classic, lines of the house.

Dan B – An Artist in a Different Medium!Post + Comments (17)

Susan Tate – Emerging Artist, A Short Essay

by WaterGirl| May 26, 20241:00 pm| 58 Comments

This post is in: Artists In Our Midst

If you would like your talent featured in Authors in Our Midst or Artists in Our Midst, just send me an email message and we’ll make it happen. Don’t be shy! I have no more Artists or Authors posts in the queue, so please get in touch if you would like to be featured.

Let’s give a warm welcome to Susan Tait!

Emerging Artist, A Short Essay

by Susan Tait

I remember the day when I picked up a tube of ultramarine blue paint, and thought, “If I buy this, I’ll have to eat soup for a week.”

I did eat soup for a week. Didn’t regret it. I needed to paint what I saw in my head as I plowed through novels—The Word for World is Forest by LeGuin inspired me to paint a forest a night, firelit under the stars. I was ten, and art was already my Imaginary Friend, but made visible each time.

As a young adult, I thought art as a profession was for people in art school. My art was just how I dealt with the chafing of daily life.

A few decades go by. I spend COVID drawing and painting. By 2023, the stack of notebooks and canvases and photos in the garage had gotten deep enough to require floor-to-near-ceiling racks. My friend Matt said to me, “What are you doing to do with it all?”

“Um, I’ll let my son deal with it after I’m dead?”

“You’re an asshole,” he said, not unkindly.

I laughed. I couldn’t deny that if I didn’t think I was any good, no one else would ever have a say in the matter. Did I have the courage for that? Was it enough that sometimes I liked my own work? I didn’t know.

Two weeks later, the county announced its biennial Call for Entries for artwork to display in the library system.

I’d spent three years studying Abstract Expressionism in life drawing and painting. Did I dare submit nudes?

The first staff member I asked looked at me as if I’d suggested hanging porn. Her eyes dropped and she mumbled something about speaking to the exhibition manager.

I sent four landscapes and a nude, and got a qualified “we’ll let you hang one [nude].” Meanwhile, MAGA is trying to ban books and close libraries, there’s switching going on in the stacks, a guy in a MAGA hat keeps showing up to test tolerance. I decided none of us needed the aggravation. I just sent the landscapes. Just get some things in without making trouble the first time, I told myself. If they like these, and me, I’ll get another chance. Maybe.

And then I twisted an ankle and discovered a bunion. The day before the installation, my mother died.

Two other people hung the work while I zoned in and out.

White wall, from left to right: Prairie Schooner, Boat at Hagg Lake, Dogwood Hill, and TV Nature Park (looking south). Collectively known as “Hymn to Summer.” BJ stealth commenter The Lodger is standing at the far left inspecting the hang. We thank Emily Craft, of the Washington County Library System, for her help.

Introducing the Works

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Dogwood Hill, Tigard, OR.
Acrylic on canvas
8 x 10”
2015.

I changed my drive to work to watch this tree, which blooms every spring as if grafted rather than grown. Not even the climate changes to date have changed its schedule. My spirits lift when I look at it. The brushwork is as simple as the composition itself. I dumped the fan-shaped foliage brush and went with fingertip updates in foreground and midground.

TV Valley Nature Park (looking south), Tualatin Valley, OR.

Acrylic on canvas.

16 x 20”

2015

Parking lots can be great places to paint from when they open to views like this. I was starting to get tired of the “safety” of realistic colors and realistic scenes, so I began painting brighter colors and higher values into the palette; Tuscan Red is a plausible substitute for Burnt Umber, and so on. I’m leaning into the warmth and energy from the south with complementary shades of red to call out the deciduous trees, left the evergreens as they were, and let subtle dark purple set off the golden seal and other yellow-blooming and budding. I’ve overcome fear about how I scale the sky; if it’s going blue-to-cloud white, just do it. It took a few layers and adjustments. I’ve also used the foliage brush to get more erratic color dappling in the midground trees while blurring the color a little.

Detail, TV Nature Park.

Preparatory drawings are helpful. I think trees can have portraits, like people. When they’re not all the same, studying both the species and how that particular tree grew is helpful. The west wind is soft, persistent, and these trees seem to have grown with it—and with the morning sun that so often dissipates to clouds in the afternoon. Some of these drawings I enjoy in their own right, as below:

Young tree, graphite on paper preparatory drawing. I was surprised at how often professionals draw and draw a subject—it’s a routine habit, not just something they do for commissioned or complex works. Live and learn.

Boat at Hagg Lake, Scoggins Valley Park, OR.

Acrylic on canvas.

11 x 14”

2015

The Lodger and I were on a company picnic when we spotted the boat, striking a perfect salient into the water locally known for smallmouth bass and steelhead. The last of spring growth in sunlight calls the eye, while the prow leads to it. I use my camera for fast composition work.

What surprises me regularly is how differently the camera “sees.” It’s not just the color space—human eyes see more color than cameras can—but even the values shift. It’s particularly difficult to get an “accurate” blue. I stopped caring: problem solved! I used a brighter red to activate all the greens.

Moving into more visible brushwork, because the tactility of brushstrokes reinforces grasses, wood, and similar textures so well. I overdosed on Van Gogh when I was younger. It felt disorienting to copy his work, as if the brushstrokes felt like thoughts whirling through my head. I started copying happier painters and felt better.

Prairie Schooner, Rentenaar Road (Sauvie Island).

24 x 30”

2015

Van Gogh does stick, though. I liked to go on road trips, and Sauvie Island has a wildlife reserve, clothing optional beaches, an active shipping channel, and residential homes and farms. A cloudless sky isn’t interesting, so I look at activating brushstrokes to represent wind I couldn’t feel—note that the tall grasses aren’t bent—and the telephone pole housing the osprey nest that’s so clear to eye and camera just didn’t work on canvas. That’s what I thought I was painting. The real show is the evergreen copse looming behind the nest. A curious and persistent yellow jacket—I’m allergic to their venom—and I danced to the canvas and back for nearly half an hour.

Detail, Prairie Schooner.

Not all the energy recorded here was intentional, especially in the foreground. I’d hit the canvas with the brush while watching the wasp. I eventually painted in a crow, didn’t like it, and painted it out again. Paint’s very forgiving.

Incidental feedback is trickling in.

“I want to look at the big one again. Like the sky.”

“There is something wholesome and normal about them, but they also convey a feeling of loneliness to me.”

I’ve pitched an artist’s demo as the theme for a reception, if we have one, because I’d rather talk while I work to people who are curious. Children ask better questions than adults and I’m hoping for some to see what I see: art’s available for everybody, and if you do it for long enough, with some education, it can serve us well. I’ve been advised to read Your Brain On Art for the science behind that. I’m looking forward to it.

New work is all life drawing and painting, and I’ve realized that I need to keep going through notebooks for works and creating new works that reflect how I do this now; this entire trip started with the thought: “No one needs one more painting of a brown river in a green field.” And I decided that wasn’t a good way to think.

Thank you to WaterGirl and John Cole and all of Balloon Juice for being present and engaged and helping us make it through these mindbending times by sharing a little bit of the world beyond the news.

Susan Tate – Emerging Artist, A Short EssayPost + Comments (58)

PhaedrusOnBass – Murdering the Classics!

by WaterGirl| March 1, 20247:00 pm| 62 Comments

This post is in: Artists In Our Midst

If you would like your talent featured in Authors in Our Midst or Artists in Our Midst, just send me an email message and we’ll make it happen. Don’t be shy! I have no more Artists or Authors posts in the queue, so please get in touch if you would like to be featured.

Let’s give a warm welcome to PhaedrusOnBass!

Hello! This is PhaedrusOnBass (Ethan McCaffrey), inveterate lurker and occasional commenter on this wonderful site. I’ve been invited to share details on my music project’s latest release, so here they are.

Audiot Savant grew out of several bands in the Sacramento CA area in the late 1990s-early 2000s. In 2006, my vocation took me away from home often, so I had to give up the bar band thing. A couple of years later, my guitarist friend Chris Plescia and I started messing around recording songs in Chris’s garage. By 2010, we had enough material that we decided to self-publish a CD called “Work in Progress,” an all-instrumental album.

We worked through the 2010s producing more music, learning the techniques of record production and getting better at songwriting. We enlisted the help of a few friends as well to round things out. The biggest change for us was going from working together to always working apart, since I moved away from California five years ago. We now use Dropbox and Zoom to collaborate, and still create good music (at least we think so). “Murdering the Classics” is the fifth release from this project, released March 1, 2024.

Our musical influences are all over the place, and Chris and I are different enough that the music draws from both our eclectic tastes. We don’t do this for money. We just want to learn more about music production and continue to have fun exploring songwriting and playing music. We are not a “playing” band* due to our separation, but we still have a good time.

You can find our music on all major platforms worldwide. Here are a few links:

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/5QAa43IB5QqfweFFI4B2q7

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3h4qUIkfBTPBClQpDn6jxA

Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/music/player/artists/B00D3HX8II/audiot-savant

Apple Music: https://music.apple.com/us/artist/audiot-savant/655153810

Website: https://writeethan.com/music/

If you subscribe to Spotify, Amazon, or Apple, the music is included with your subscription. YouTube plays are free to all. Yes, I did say we don’t do this for money, but if you feel inclined to throw us a few shekels, you can purchase the full CDs on Amazon or Apple.

Please check us out, and we hope you like what you find!

* Well, we did play one gig…with the help of some friends…in 2017…in another friend’s backyard…

PhaedrusOnBass – Murdering the Classics!Post + Comments (62)

Warren Senders – Music and Conscience

by WaterGirl| January 6, 20245:00 pm| 77 Comments

This post is in: Artists In Our Midst

If you would like your talent featured in Authors in Our Midst or Artists in Our Midst, just send me an email message and we’ll make it happen. Don’t be shy! I have no more Artists or Authors posts in the queue, so please get in touch if you would like to be featured.

Let’s give a warm welcome to Warren Senders!

Hi, Jackals! I don’t comment here often, but I read and enjoy everything. Thank you to WaterGirl for allowing me to participate in Artists In Our Midst. ~Warren

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Allow me to start things off with a song. This is a folk melody from Dongri-speaking areas of Northwestern Pakistan, performed in May 2023.

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I’m Warren Senders, I live in Medford, Massachusetts, with my wife and daughter, and almost all of my sixty-five years on Earth have been spent in the world of music. While I’ve studied and written and performed in a lot of genres, what recognition I’ve accrued has largely come from my decades of immersion in an idiom that is probably unfamiliar to many of you. It certainly caused a lot of baffled head-scratching in my family, back in the late 1970s when I first encountered What I Wanted To Do When I Grew Up.

Specifically, I wanted to sing the elaborate Indian classical song style called “khyal” (or “khayal“) — the vocal version of what musicians like Ravi Shankar were doing on sitar. I first heard the music of khyal singers when I was 18, and the shock of recognition was immediate and profound. Remember meeting someone and knowing in that instant that they’d be your friend for life? It was like that. I immediately began seeking every possible source of information about ragas and talas, the organically complex melodic and rhythmic frameworks of Hindustani musical tradition.

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This elaborately ornamented song in the raga Tilak Kamod expresses a set of complementary feelings: spiritual and romantic devotion, overlaid and interwoven. The vocal filigree “floats” over the syncopated tabla rhythms.

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This was before the Internet was a thing (side note: my father worked at Bolt, Beranek & Newman while they were developing ARPANET, and he was an early user, connecting his home office to headquarters via modem; my first exposure to the Internet was thus in 1968), and I had to do a lot of hunting to find teachers and resources.

Thanks to the small but extraordinarily dedicated community of Indian classical tape-traders (a subculture that makes Grateful Dead completists seem like well-meaning dabblers — I mean, there were Indian maharajahs in the 1930s who bought record lathes to document private concerts in their palaces, and those recordings are still extant today!) I was able to learn about the music’s intricate rules, structure, and history.

I found my first teacher in 1977, and studied with Kalpana Mazumder for the next eight years, gradually working out the kinks in my voice and ear (all the while gigging as a jazz bassist and composer and building skills as a concert producer). In 1985 I was awarded a fellowship from the Council For International Exchange of Scholars to study khyal singing in the Indian city of Pune, with one of the form’s most famous artists, Bhimsen Joshi, who was then 63.

That didn’t work out so well, as he was a performer of genius, not a teacher, and emphatically not someone who could diagnose the musical problems of someone from an entirely different culture. I was hearing a ton of amazing music (the scene at the time was astonishingly rich; concerts routinely went on for three or four hours, and there were four or five events a week) but not learning much.

You know the saying, “when the student is ready, the teacher appears“? That’s what happened to me. After ten months of deep discouragement and frustration, I met Pandit S.G. Devasthali in 1986 and began my deep study of khyal with him. Lessons — in the old traditional style of oral transmission — lasted about four hours. Every day, no weekends, no vacations. This went on for years, interrupted by my returns to the USA. Here’s a video from 1991 which gives an idea of what the lessons were like.

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My teacher is instructing me with sargam, the Indian version of Do-Re-Mi syllables. These are used to “explain”melodies in a learning setting, but are also included in many performances, where they lend a scat-syllable feeling of rhythmic impetus to the music. The back-and-forth process is typical of Hindustani oral-tradition pedagogy.

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I made my professional debut as a khyaliya (the correct term for one who sings khyal) in New Delhi in 1990, and I’ve continued to perform and teach since then. COVID brought my teaching entirely online and curtailed my concertizing; a few years before that I decided to avoid air travel for climate reasons, so my gigging is now concentrated in New England.

I make my living as a teacher, both at New England Conservatory of Music and through my private vocal studio. (If you want to learn how to sing, I can help.)

My most recent concert was at the University of Southern Maine, in May 2023. (The complete concert can be heard here).

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This performance, from the USM concert, shows two songs in the seasonal raga Hindol, which uses primarily four pitches (C,E,F#, & A, with an occasional B). The emphasis is on rhythmic play; the vibe is celebratory. The lyrics of the first piece describe Krishna enjoying Hori, the spring festival; the second song describes a beautiful woman in elaborate finery, hurrying to meet her lover.

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Here are some commonly-asked questions about khyal songs.

Q: What’s that constant sound, and why is it there?

A: That’s an instrument called a tamboura, heard both in its original form as a stringed instrument, and in its modern-day avatar as a digital app. The constant drone provides both musicians and listeners with a fixed orientation point, allowing for precise tuning and a sense of continuity as the performance unfolds.

Q: Are you singing words?

A: Some of the time. The songs themselves have lyrics in Braj, an archaic dialect of Hindi. The texts themselves may address philosophical or religious topics, but most of the time reference archetypal romantic scenarios in a mythic pastoral setting. Improvisations may use words from the text, neutral syllables like “la” or “na”, solfège syllables (the Indian equivalents of “do, re, mi”), or open vowel sounds with no semantic content.

Q: What are the drums doing?

A: The tabla drums are responsible for outlining continually-repeating cyclic rhythms. There are many different rhythmic cycles in Hindustani repertoire, and they are performed at widely ranging speeds, from glacially slow to breakneck fast. Each cycle has its own characteristic drum strokes and potential variations. The different bass and treble sounds help me stay oriented in time, so I know where to end an improvisation or start a new refrain.

Q: What is the harmonium doing?

A: This small keyboard instrument — introduced centuries ago by European missionaries and subsequently adapted to the requirements of Indian music — duplicates the singer’s melodic lines, following, embellishing, and shadowing. Singing with a good harmonium player is like having a conversation with a thoughtful and supportive friend.

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I’ve never stopped doing other kinds of music. I recorded two CDs of “Indo-Jazz” in Pune under the name Antigravity, with a group of wonderful players that includes my wife Vijaya Sundaram on guitar. Here is my piece, “This Melody No Verb,” a nod to Douglas Hofstadter.

For about twenty years I composed for the Boston-based Jazz Composers Alliance Orchestra, writing pieces that integrated my Indian experience with my jazz leanings. Here’s a piece called “It’s Taken Me My Whole Life…” from a 2014 concert.

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In a much smaller setting, here’s a performance from 2017 of me singing Malvina Reynolds‘ beautiful “From Way Up Here,” with a string trio.

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The global perspective of Malvina’s song leads naturally to my work as an environmental activist. I’ve been part of New England climate change activism since 2009 or so, through directing a 10-year series of benefit concerts (“”Playing For The Planet: World Music Against Climate Change“), writing thousands of LTEs (one a day, every day for four years), and being arrested for civil disobedience several times.

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…the judge gave each of the 13 two minutes to explain why they had tried to stop the gas pipeline through Boston.

“I study and teach music that goes back hundreds of years,” Warren Senders said, recapping his testimony outside the courthouse. “When I teach a song that’s 400 years old, it’s with the understanding that 400 years from now someone will be singing that same song. I’m in the middle of a chain of transmission. That distribution of human wisdom across centuries that is one of the great creations of our civilization—a method for people to talk with and communicate with their ancestors and their descendents. And that’s put at risk by climate change.” Link.

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For the past eight years I’ve maintained a daily vigil every weekday morning at a heavily-trafficked intersection near my home in Medford, Massachusetts. If you drive through Roosevelt Circle between 7:30 and 8:30 AM: yes, I’m that guy. If you want to join us, let me know and I’ll bring a sign for you.

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You can follow me on FaceBook, Instagram, YouTube, and Mastodon. My website is www.warrensenders.com .

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Q: How can I get the most out of this music?

A: Appreciating Hindustani song begins with its gestural content — hearing the melodies as shapes in space, as curves, swoops, dives, and swings. There is a detailed theoretical structure, but no technical terms or categories are needed to experience the music’s beauty.

There are two fundamental principles at work in Hindustani music which are rarely if ever elucidated — because they’re taken so completely for granted.

Because it’s the 21st century and we do everything with acronyms, I offer you two abbreviations.

R.T.T.F — Return To The Familiar

Hindustani performers always build their improvisations in a particular way, presenting something new and then circling back to repeat something familiar. The alternation of new and familiar material helps to “bind” the whole performance together.

The most obvious place for a Return To The Familiar is at the end of an improvisation, where the singer re-connects with the song’s opening line, which forms a kind of “hook,” easily memorable, rhythmically distinct, catchy. The word for this phrase is “mukhda” (literally, the “face” of the song).

When you’re listening, try and hear the mukhda return at the end of each excursion into the melodic unknown, anchoring the new material by linking it to the old. This is an excellent game and requires no technical analysis beyond, “Hey, there it is again!”

E.D.I.O.T. — Event Density Increases Over Time

This principle governs the flow of activity in every performance of Hindustani music, vocal or instrumental.

“Event density” means, basically, “how much activity is happening at any given time.” A crowded intersection in the middle of rush hour has a very high Event Density; a desolate crossroads far from town at 3 AM has a low one. A musical “event” is something that strikes the ear as interesting, unusual, remarkable, singular. If very little is happening, a single tone is an important event; if there’s a lot going on, it’s just one among many.

Hindustani performances move along a path of increasing event density. It’s very common for khyals to be presented in “suites”: a slow song in a particular raga (melodic framework) followed by one or two faster items in the same raga. Each song is treated in accordance with the E.D.I.O.T. principle: simple variations first, complex variations later, culminating in a finale where the music is practically exploding with new ideas and virtuosity.

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It’s customary to end Hindustani performances with a rendition of a song or instrumental composition in the raga Bhairavi. (For music-theory nerds, it’s a chromatically-inflected Phrygian mode). This song, in the romantic thumri style, describes the haunting sound of Krishna’s flute echoing across the river Jamuna.

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Thank you for letting me share what I do and who I am!

Warren Senders – Music and ConsciencePost + Comments (77)

Featuring Dan B – A small piece of Whidbey Island in Puget Sound

by WaterGirl| December 30, 20231:00 pm| 43 Comments

This post is in: Artists In Our Midst, On The Road, Photo Blogging

Dan B sent these photos as part of On the Road, but he is so talented when it comes to landscape design that I consider him an artist. Many artists, sp many mediums.

This myopic travelogue set on Whidbey Island, a 50 mile long Island in Puget Sound, came about from a project for a home in Medina, the place across the street from Microsoft’s Chief Technology officer and around the corner from that Gates fellow.

I started that project with no clue so just drew wild scribbles on bug sheets of paper until something coherent emerged. I showed Chuck and his wife my manic slashes and wild doodles. Chuck gasped, “You’ve drawn the ley lines!” I’m not a believer but there are some things that guide designs for every site. One of them, on a different note, was the 6 inches of water on the brick of their new addition. A vernal pond and swale solved that.

Several years later Chuck made a lot of money getting paid in futures from marketing a startup tech business. He decided to pay back thus good fortune by purchasing a plot of land with three lakes on Whidbey Island. The goals were ecological restoration, spirituality, and art. It was named Earth Sanctuary. I was asked to help design it and thus began many years of restoration design and wrangling massive stones to create magical spaces – we hope.

Featuring Dan B - A small piece of Whidbey Island in Puget Sound 8

This drab spot, stripped of invasive Himalayan Blackberries, sits between a seven acre lake which has a several acre floating fen dating to the end of the last glaciation. Sundews and other fen denizens pickle the logs that support them. 150 year old conifers are less than fifteen feet tall due to lack of nutrients.

Featuring Dan B – A small piece of Whidbey Island in Puget SoundPost + Comments (43)