North Indian Classical Music at Old First Concerts

Last night at the Old First Presbyterian Church, Old First Concerts presented and live-streamed a performance of North Indian Classical music. The performers were Arjun K. Verma on sitar and Nilan Chaudhuri on tabla. Those of my generation probably associate this genre with musicians such as Ali Akbar Khan and Ravi Shankar. However, Verma has been cited as presenting a traditional yet fresh approach to the sitar.

To be fair, my knowledge of this genre is painfully shallow. Nevertheless, I have no problem with returning to performances from time to time, even if I can make little (if any) sense of the theoretical infrastructure. (Furthermore, I am not much better at negotiating a Cecil Taylor improvisation that goes on for half an hour, if not longer; but I still listen to that music in the hope that, after some subsequent iteration, sense-making will finally establish itself in my brain!)

The thing about the sitar is that it has so many strings that any seriously competent performance is likely to leave the listener following a prodigious number of thematic threads, each in a different register and all emanating from the same instrument. Verma introduced his performance by explaining that much of his playing would involve improvisation, making the richness of his polyphony all the more jaw-dropping. His first selection was a moderately long solo performance, after which he was joined by Chaudhuri for a selection that was probably about twice as long in duration. (That took the listeners up to an intermission, at which time I felt I was already saturated with my listening experiences, and leaving a streamed connection is not quite as impolite as walking out early from a “physical” performance setting.)

Nevertheless, there was more than enough to engage the serious listener in Verma’s first duo performance with Chaudhuri. Most importantly, there were polyphonic qualities in Chaudhuri’s playing that may not have been as rich as those of the sitar but still served up an engaging texture of thematic threads. Furthermore, those “themes” definitely had their own foundation of pitch classes, just as is the case with the timpani. However, while timpani pitches involve individual tones whose frequencies are controlled by a pedal, playing the tabla involves the many different parts of the hand, each of which can elicit its own unique sonorities from the instrument.

Fortunately, the camera work provided an excellent view of Chaudhuri’s hands. (Indeed, the view was probably better than that from any of the audience seats in the church.) Thus, one could appreciate not only the skills of the performer but also the devices through which his tabla work intertwined with the many voices of Verma’s sitar polyphony. In retrospect, I should not have been surprised to come away from the one duo performance that I experienced with a sense of saturation and a reluctance to try to process any more input!