Communique #8: Life ain't always slow, y'know?

I'm sitting in the sunshine on my back porch which has become a very relaxing place to practice this winter. On the table beside me are my Setar, Ukulele and Frame Drum, (as well as biography of Cicero and a Latin dictionary). I have just played through North of Egypt, Temple of my familiar and Garyan (another frame drum solo song), and I have to say that I am really looking forward to classes again in term 3.

I haven't been very disciplined with drumming recently, instead finding myself forever with either a ukulele or a book in my hand, and in every other available hour I am writing. But writing has its own rhythms, and practice in one instrument is practice in all instruments, since music is the skill that is being developed. Techniques come second, musical feeling comes first. I am reminded of this continuously in the beauty of playing slowly, no, slower than that.

For example...

A) D T T D _ T _

      1 2  3 4  5 6 7

B) D T T D _ T _ T _

     1  2  3 4  5 6 7 8 9

Play them one after the other and experiment with how the tempo can be sped up and slowed down within the 7 + 9 rhythm cycle.

But life ain't always slow, y'know? There's nothing quite like running as fast as you can and then pushing harder and practice routines can be used to strengthen your endurance as well as to perfect your techniques. Sometimes a rhythm has to be brought to the boil before it has the right feeling, but it is the continual practice of slowing down and speeding up that makes for flexibility in you as a player.

Here's a little snippet of some recent practice...

So keep your hands warm and your shoulders loose and I'll see you all real soon.

PS...It warms my heart to see you drumming together while I have been away.  Thank you for keeping the fire going.

Drum Arabesque Communique # 7: Pressure, release, pressure, release (pressure....)

I've not been drumming much this week, but in all other musical regards I am constantly reminded of the beauty in simplicity, and the immeasurable importance of subtlety in feeling. All these ideas just keep dancing around in my head in a simple waltz that slows on the third beat, always letting the tempo slide into slower and slower cycles. By way of contrast, the complex books I am reading require of me a slower and more careful approach, as sentences stretch over many lines, becoming paragraphs depicting the most picturesque of ideas, becoming pages turned over and still the central arguments build with tenacity and precision and an unstoppable logic that finally when the hammer is brought down and the author deigns to speak the final words, I am left carrying the weight of a thousand years of poetry condensed into a page turned over a paragraph that all began with a single idea.

It is this combination of the simplicity of the waltz, and the complexity of ancient literary texts that brings me to today's lesson.

I've talked about it before in class, the notion of pressure and release, roughness and smoothness, open rhythms and closed rhythms, sustained and separated notes bookended by hammering boot marching, gunfire patterns of hail-storm quality. It is these competing pressures of all life that contribute to good music. Never more so than in music intended for dance, which in itself seems to be an expression of competing pressures, of intellectual conceptions and thoughtful, deliberate choices in choreography, and the utterly instinctual movements of one who is IN THE DANCE, devoid of thought or language or syntax, unaware of composition, choreography or conception.  One who feels the contrasting pressures and responds as birds do to thermal layers in the atmosphere.

So the question then is, how do you create pressure in music? Take the classic combination of a slow Chiftatelli, or even a slow Macedonian Cocek, followed by a filled Malfuf...for example.

Cocek x3                                                                  Malfuf  x2

D-kT-kTk/D-kT-kTk/D-kT-kTk/                 DkkTkkTk/DkkTkkTk

The second part, the x2 cycles of Malfuf, is played quickly, taking as much time as a single Cocek cycle. This also utilises one of my favourite patterns of making five feel like four.

That's three Cocek, and two Malfuf, for a total of five rhythm cycles, played over the time it takes to play four of the 'tonic' rhythm, the dominant, slow Cocek.

It's a good idea to record yourself playing one of these rhythms, and to practice playing the other over the top. Practice playing Malfuf at the same slow tempo as the Cocek, then practice doubling the tempo. Practice all this in your mind as well as on your drum. I said that I haven't drummed much this week, but I have practised every day on my knees and on my dog and on my steering wheel, listening to the world and playing counter-rhythms to the patterns in my head. This kind of daily drill, maintaining a circadian discipline, is, I think, the source of the deep confidence that I have in my hands. They know more than I do, they trust more than I do, because I let them guide me in my everyday practice, and as such, it is never a chore, it is only the instinctual reflex of an animal at rest.

In nature, the sun rises and sets, the moon lights the darkness, the dawn brings a chorus of birds and twilight is forever shaded blue and mysterious with the pending shadows of night.

So too it shall be with our music.

PS...One of my cats disappeared this week.  The grief my family has felt at his loss has been a powerful reminder to love those nearest to you, to enjoy their company and to revel in their kindness.  What we loose may never again return to us, so give thanks and be conscious of the goodness in your life.  I enjoy the experience of death for this very reason, it sharpens the senses and makes every moment of joy (now tinted with sadness) all the more powerful.

We look before and after

and pine for what is not

our sincerest laughter

with some pain is fraught

our sweetest songs

are those that tell

of saddest thought.

Percy Shelley, from The Nightingale

Drum Arabesque Communique #6: Clicking, clapping and cucumbers.

Drum Drum Drum,

click one

click two

click three click

click four

click five

click six click

click seven click

With your off hand, click a continuous slow, steady beat. The rhythm is in seven, but you don't have to tell your off hand that. As far as your off hand has to know, it's just a one beat rhythm, repeated. Your good hand clicks on three, six, seven.

You could clap your hands against your legs, or pat your dog with this pattern. You could tap it out on your cat with just your fingertips. As I frequently say, tap it out on the steering wheel, use the indicator as a metronome, or play your patterns in cross rhythm duets with the ticking. Play these kinds of silent drum games at any time of the day or night, surprise yourself. Suddenly stop in the hallway to drum your patterns, and stay there until you get it real smooth, letting others pass you in your momentary study. Or stand caught in drum catatonia, mid dinner preparation, a knife in one hand, the universe in the other.

Tonight I cut the cucumber into twelve pieces,

four groups of three slices shared out on dinner plates.

One one one

two two two

three three three

four one four

one two five

two three six

three one seven

four two eight

one three nine

two one ten

three two eleven

four three twelve

one one one

I've only done one Taketina class, but it sure had a deep impact on me. I felt overwhelming patterns spinning through my body, dizzying, I loose count, loose my bearings, fall in vertigo, in and out of rhythms. Cutting cucumber is drum practice, in the same way that splitting wood is meditation.

We will drum together again soon.

Drum Drum Drum

Drum Arabesque Communique #5

Bach, Flamenco, and more (and more...) gypsy rhythms.

Today I sat in the sun on my back porch and played a drum song using Kashlima, Nau Ashta and the Macedonian Cocek rhythm. Tonight I am listening to Russian classical music, then classical guitar and flamenco on vinyl as my partner and I cook curry. This morning I added to my blog about ancient Greek and Roman writers, and for a brief stretch this afternoon I edited a chapter of my novel.

Saturdays at home are always excellent. I did a bit of work in the garden, played ukulele and drank coffee. My eldest son is listening to eighties styled electronic music, the soundtrack to a computer game he has also been playing. Tonight...well, the evening is unwritten, but the pappadams are cooking and the record is spinning beside me at my writing desk in the kitchen.

The other guys in the band have been listening to, and practising Bach melodies. They keep going on about octave substitutions. Gardy the bass player has been writing modal jazz music in Locrian scale, while Stompy on Harmonica has been learning a Russian military folk song, Katyusha and teaching it the band.

So my day has been made of many different ingredients, and now in the night, I continue to learn. It is already midnight as I begin my online study, digging up some fabulous extra details to share with you all.

* * *

Cocek / kyuchek / Čupurlika

Gothenburg Gadjos - Bam Bam Cocek

The kyuchek (Cocek), is a common musical form in the Balkans (primarily Bulgaria and Macedonia), and typically a dance with a 9/8 time signature. Roma musicians living in areas of the former Yugoslavia have broadened the form to include variations in 4/4 and 7/8.

Cocek: D-kT-kTk 3 3 2 - This pattern is the one used in the youtube link above.

Čupurlika 3 2 2 ; for example (DkkTkTk, or DkkDkTk)

For 9/8 rhythms (which should be structured 2-2-2-3)

eg. DkTkTkDTT or DkDkTkTkk

(Also, Kashlima is arranged generally in 2 2 2 3, for example. DkTkDkTT-)

Remember that these odd timed rhythms can be spoken using the words Galloping Apple. 

Apple = 2 beats, Galloping = 3 beats.

So the first Cocek rhythm is:

Galloping Galloping Apple (3 3 2)

The seven beat Cupurlika is:

Galloping Apple Apple. (3 2 2)

Kashlima, which mutes the final, ninth beat, would be:

Apple Apple Apple Gallop(ping) (2 2 2 3)

The Kocek Wiki article is rather interesting. Cocek culture and dance seems to have connections to cross dressing and non-hetero sexual preferences in the Islamic world.

Cocek - Wikipedia Article

Kocek - Wikipedia Article

Katyusha

This is the song Stompy has been teaching the band.

Katyusha - video

Katyusha

Apple trees and pear trees went into blooming,

River mists began a floating flow,

She came out and went ashore, Katyusha!

On the lofty bank, on the steeply shore.

She came out and sang the song about Her young friend,

the bluish eagle from steppe

All about the one she dearly loved,

The one whose letters she treasured and kept.

Hey, a song, the song of the young girl,

Fly and go after the bright Sun,

Find a soldier on the distant borderlands

Say hello from Katyusha waiting long for him.

Let him remember the young and simple maiden,

Let him hear the song she now sings,

Let him protect his Motherland for sure,

And their love Katyusha will protect.

Drum Arabesque Communique: #4

I've been playing Cajon more than Darbuka lately, band practice with my band Iron Dwarf has been excellent, the more I relax into the music the better I get, prolonged drum rolls now flowing with much greater ease than ever before. I thought it was about confidence. Confidence is something that you build up, just like you build up skill, and so, the better one's skill, the corresponding confidence should make musicianship profoundly stable and reliable. But that's not the case is it?

Somehow, the greater the skill, the more teetering the vertigo is from atop that assumed height.

I think that somewhere there is a plateau where one's concern for the imagined outcome is no longer relevant to the music. When one's concern falls away, the real skill can stretch unburdened by thinking. Drum rolls flowing with much greater ease, nine beat gypsy limping finally feeling like skipping dancing and that tightness in my chest is gone as if it never were, and my shoulders no longer hunch up as I play faster, but rather each beat lets me sink further into a state of unconcerned attentiveness. Still passionate, still involved, still all the good things of music, but without the fear of falling. Without doubt my qualities make themselves know to me...

Igor Stravinski said Music restores order from Chaos, in particular, the relationship of man to time.

Tangled up in our ideas and feelings about time, how powerful are our expectations?

Anna Enquist, in her book Counterpoint, says this:

Music taught you strange things about time. Music transported you outside time, produced a state in you where there was not yet a question of time. Music filled you to such an extent that watches no longer ticked. Yet there was no medium that indicated the passing of time so exactly. Music synchronised the strokes of rowers, could make soldiers march in step effortlessly, let two thousand people in a concert hall breathe at the same moment. And music referred to her own silence because in every beginning an ending was announced. Despite the sorrow of the announced conclusion you longed for the unfolding of the melody, for the harmonies slipping by, even for the cursed ending. A puzzle.

I would like to share some music with you.

First, The Mexican, by Iron Dwarf. I share this one because it has some interesting timing changes that would serve as good drum practice just listening to it. It's a fast and furious instrumental piece.

Second, a snippet of my Saturday afternoon practice. I have been working on routine patterns a lot in drumming. Play a rhythm through, make a variation, return to the root, then play a second variation, then return to the root and back again. This rhythm is a heavy variant on the Nau Ashta 9/8 rhythm.

Third is a demo recording of new song I'm still developing on Ukulele. It's currently called HayAllah, for obvious reasons. When you listen to this song, keep your ears open for a melody that follows the HayAllah pattern, it will make for a good practice to drum along with this one.  Also, I think this might be the best thing I've ever done on uke.

And last but not least, a short video from your gig at the psychic fair.

So there you have it.

Also, if you don't already know about it, my new blog, Letters to Cicero (and my other dead friends) is off to a strong start. So if you're into the ancient world, or writing letters to ghosts, check it out.

Letters to Cicero (and my other dead friends)

Also Also, check out Matt Stonehouse on Facebook. He has been posting little videos for his frame drum classes in Victoria. He's one of my drum heroes.

Matt Stonehouse (Drum Teacher)

DoumDoumDoum-tekaTek-kaTek-kaTekka

Drum Arabesque: Communique #3 - Play for the Sun

Saturday. I drum in the morning, well, it is midday before I get out of bed, having spent the morning reading and writing. From my front steps I face the creek and the hillside, the grass a brilliant sandy white sea across the slope, waves lapping at a rocky shore. When my hands touch the drum I do not tell them what to do and they begin playing one of my deeply familiar rhythms, a Baladi with a variation every second cycle. So I practice my dance/drum solo patterns, interspersed with this first rhythm, then shifting to HayAllah, then Nau Ashta in 9/8, then Heavy Saiidi, then back to the Baladi variant, and round and round I go. Gradually I become aware of a resonance, like a second player with me, and I look up from my hands and hear the drum voice echoing back to me from the hillside. The landscape itself is my accompanist.

The afternoon light turns golden, pot plants in the house begin to glow against the western windows and I rush to grab my uke, heading for the back porch. Plucking and strumming, I lift my face directly into the light and let the warmth in. I let the magnificent glow of sunset in. I let the music that is inside me, out. I never play so sweetly as I do when I play for the sun.

As the light dims, broken up by trees and grasses, I get up and follow the sun across the hillside, still strumming and plucking, and I have never played so sweetly as I did standing there on the rocks.

*

I am rediscovering the pleasure of playing music for myself, and for the pleasure it gives me to play with no purpose, no outcome, no audience. I am disciplined in my practice because the pleasure of music is so lovingly bound to the discovery and development of new skills. Searching for, and finding new techniques, new melodies, new rhythm patterns is exciting. It is not daunting to think of finding something new to try, there are limitless possibilities, and inspirations that can be drawn from the most basic building blocks of life.

Two Carrots

Consonants = Doum, Vowels = Tek

T-w-o-C-a-r-r-o-t-s

D-D-T-DkTkD-D-TkD-T---

Rhythms can be sourced from any pattern. Melodies, harmonies, entire arrangements can be heard in the patterns of bird song, interspersed with traffic noise, kitchen cutlery clunking and clanging and kids jumping and shouting. A song could be built from that last sentence alone. Everything you see, hear, think, feel and do, can become an inspiration for music, and your perspective, your bias is actually the most valuable component, for music is an expression of you, as an individual, with a lifetime of baggage to help the groove along.

Your tough childhood,             Verse
your morning commute,         Verse
your aching back,                      Break
your candle-lit dinner,             Chorus

Today for me.

The Saturday sleep in,           Instrumental Intro
the breakfast in bed,              Verse
a book in my hand,                  Verse 
the kids in the lounge room,   Chorus

*     *     *

And this week, another video for you.  This one was recorded a few months ago.

Garyan by Zebulon

Communique #2: The Arcitext Orcestra



I close my eyes and the Architext Orcestra playsa-rounda-me.  Sixty paces from the car to the stairs (played in six groups of ten beat rhythms, each ten beat made up of two five beat call and response phrases).  With each of these rhythms, play each Capital as one beat.  Lower case notes are in-betweeners...


(TkTTkDT)(DkDkTTT)


Thirteen steps up from the carpark to the hospital foyer

D T T -  D T T -  D Tk D D T

The Machines in the hospital room play a non-repeating polyrhythm, one machine plays the bass notes, another the high tones


D - T D -  - D T -  D


Outside the hospital the Autumnal sunshine is literally perfect, and my walk from the hospital is filled with little significances.  In the doorway where someone sleeps, four stones and two pieces of plastic arranged like a protective charm, a symbol.

I sit at a long outdoor table at a cafe on Hindley Street, there are six others seated at the table with me, but it's not always about the numbers.  Some of them are discussing their aged care patients, the challenges of Alzheimers, the routines at dinner time and how one patient always sends his nurse away after every mouthful, only to call her back, saying we're not done yet.

We're not done yet.




The Arcitext Orcestra plays all around me.  The beeping pedestrian crossing, the ebb and flow of customers in the cafe, families, business meetings, university students.  It's not just about arranging numbers.  The call and response of youth and age and even sleep always, the limping, stepping, skipping dance....

So, homework?

The patterns are all around you, all the time.  Listen for them, play them in your mind, play them on your drum if you have the time.  Between lectures, between meal times, at meal times with the kids...these musical games can underpin every mundane activity and make a song and dance out of ordinary life.

Drum Arabesque, the New Term.

Communique #1 – Improvisation and Practice

Of all the rhythms that we have learned together, Saiidi, Chiftatelli and HayAllah are the three I play the most when I am on my own. Each of them can be played in such an infinite variety of ways that I find I am never bored, or repeating myself. So what are your three 'home' rhythms? Do you have any? It is useful to think about the way that you practice, what are your routines (though you might not think of them as routines). Do you play when the kids are asleep or when they are awake? Do you play indoors, outdoors, in the park, in the car, at the family Easter lunch? Do you have a drum in the car and a drum in your room? Do you practice at all?

In a lot of ways, practice is superseded by play. Practice is made redundant by play, since every moment of contact with the drum is practising the art of being a drummer. So think about how you practice, when, where, and consider the first rhythm that comes out when you sit down to play. I find recording even short sections of unplanned improvisations to be a very useful resource for my own study. Often rhythms come out that I have never heard before, and listening to them over is exactly like having a lesson with a teacher. You are your own teacher. You draw inspiration from my discipline and my joy, but the drumming that you do is the result of your own practice.

I think of the word practice in the way that a lawyer practices law, or a doctor, medicine. We are in the practice of drumming, we draw from the same well, and it is a bottomless inner resource.

So today I offer you the last (most recent) notation for the Temple of my familiar song, and two videos of me practising this morning.

Temple of my familiar

(Third Draft, March 2018)

1. HayAllah (x8) Slow

2. Wahiida (A B A C x2) Steady

3. Hiiwa x3 (first two Doums of Hiiwa are last two Doums of Wahiida)

4. Fezzaanii (A B / A B/ A B B B) Quick, louder towards end.

5. HayAllah (x4) Quick

6. Wahiida (A B A C) x2 Quick

Break: DT_DT_DT_DDDTTT/DDDTTT/DT_DT_DT_DDDTTT/DDDTTT/DDDTTT

8. Fezzaanii (A B / A B / A B B B) Steady, louder towards end

9. Wahiida (A B A C) x2 Quick

10. Hiiwa (x3)

Break: DT_DT_DT_DDDTTT/DDDTTT/DT_DT_DT_DDDTTT/DDDTTT/DDDTTT

11. Fezzaanii (A B / A B / A B B B) Slow & funky

               A: kD-T--kD--kDkT- FUNKY VARIANT

               B: kD-T-T-T-D-T-T-TK

12. HayAllah (x8) Slow

Note: at number 6, at the transition from Wahiida to the Break, the the final cycle is played as shown, with the following D being the first D of the Break.

A : D_tktkt_tktkt_K_

B : D_tktkt_tktkt_D_

A : D_tktkt_tktkt_K_

C : D_tktkt_tktkD_D_

It will play like this.

A : D_tktkt_tktkt_K_

B : D_tktkt_tktkt_D_

A : D_tktkt_tktkt_K_

C : D_tktkt_tktkD_D_DT_DT_DT_DT_DDD_TTT_DDD_TTT

DT_DT_DT_DT_DDD_TTT_DDD_TTT_DDD_TTT_DDD_TTT

Temple of My Familiar (morning practice video)

Improvisation Chiftatelli

https://youtu.be/C-kG8p2AT6A