Word: sitar
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...Oriental rug onstage. The audience at the University of Pennsylvania's Irvine Auditorium last week was equally exotic-a curious mingling of Indians in turbans or saris, bearded jazz musicians, leather-jacketed beatniks and college students. Racing his spidery fingers across the steel strings of his sitar, Ravi Shankar invoked a whining chorus of quavering, sensuous melodies in intricate interplay with the shifting, galloping cross-rhythms of the tablet (drums). Soaring above the metallic drone of an unfretted lute called a tamboura, Shankar finished in a furious display of virtuosity that brought a cheering ovation from the audience...
...sounds of Manhattan are far more fascinating to Schwartz than the echo of an Indian sitar. In addition to New York IQ (covering the sounds of Manhattan postal district 19, from the Plaza Hotel to the West Side docks), he has released The New York Taxi Driver (Columbia) and Sounds of My City (Folkways). On them, listeners will find strolling sidewalk instrumentalists, the raucous chatter of pneumatic drills, the wail of sirens-plus a series of rambling speeches, sometimes funny, sometimes pathetic, in the polyglot accents of the New York streets. A plumber, on music: "I mean to me when...
Clad in high-collared vests and baggy cotton trousers, the three barefoot Indian musicians sat down cross-legged on an Oriental carpet on the stage of Judson Memorial Hall at Manhattan's Washington Square. Glancing at the drummer to the right of him, Ravi Shankar cradled his sitar in his arms, and with slender, agile fingers began to coax from its steel strings a piercingly plaintive, twangy melody. Beside him the tabla (drum) thrummed and rataplanned a shifting, syncopated beat, and behind him a four-stringed, unfretted lute named the tamboura thinly droned its hypnotic accompaniment. Thus Sitarist Shankar...
...audiences were receptive but occasionally puzzled. The sitar itself is a confusing-looking instrument, shaped like an oversized guitar (up to 12 ft. long) and equipped with six playing strings, 13 "sympathetic" resonating strings, and two gourds which serve as sound box and resonator. Indian music is based on melodic forms known as ragas. Neither scales nor modes, ragas are separate, individual series of notes-there are thousands of different ragas-most of them passed orally from one musician to another. In combination with the drummer's rhythm, a raga gives the starting theme of a composition. The sitar...
...started mastering his difficult art when he was 18. He has written movie scores and ballets (including one based on Nehru's Discovery of India), is working to modernize Indian musical techniques, i.e., standardize instruments and notation. But he despairs of ever accomplishing true mastery of the sitar. "It is like driving through a mist," he says. "The more you drive, the more you realize the road is still there...