Artists In Our Midst

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.  

♪

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.

♪

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.

♪

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.

♪

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).

♪

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.

♪

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.

♪

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.

♪

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.

♪

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.

♪

…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.

♪

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.

♪

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

♪

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.

♪

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.

♪

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