Music <Shankar Barua>

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Music sweet music ~ ah!

The composition that should normally be playing behind this page is the first piece of music I ever created on a computer. It may test one's patience just a wee tad to begin with, but leads on, I like to think, to a very nice denoument. In fact, it may be the best piece of music I've done so far, together with the "Navgraha Mantras" of course (an ancient invocation of the nine planets of ancient Indian scripture), which I was so privileged to do with the incredible Thumri singer Vidya Rao ~ of whom Arjun Sen once said with awe, after a recording-session with her in his studio, that "300 years of history flows with every note she sings".

But that song behind the page will just have to be the only song on this site, since there's no space for the much longer song with Vidya,.. or any other. (but you can now listen to some of my music on my MySpace account)

I suppose my musical education must have begun with listening to the love songs from hindi films of the time that my mum and dad used to sometimes sing together. Mum was in fact formally trained in a bit of hindustani classical, as was so often the case with young girls of the slightly more privileged and enlightened classes brought up in large villages and agrarian settlements like she was.

Didn't last very long for me though, as I was off to broading school in the hills of my hometown Shillong soon enough, where the next five years yielded a diametrically different exposure to western music all the way from the senior boys' record-collections and scratchy sessions with BBC and VOA on the dorm radio, through the various manifestations of their attempts at putting together bands like the Beatles or Rolling Stones or Elvis or Cliff Richards and the Shadows, through to a few optional evening classes I attended behind the thick velvet curtains of the super wooden stage in the school hall, where Brother McCormack would crank up his collection of western classical records for us to listen to, with whispers through the course of each masterpiece, and lectures before and after, on the subtle nuances, movements, shifts and tensions we were to catch and watch out for and what not.

For my one non-optional year of regular music class I was assigned piano, but better learned to blow a sqeuaky tune or two (and lots of disgraceful noises) out the window on the bugle that always faithfully awaited me in the cupboard right behind the piano-stool in my cubicle.

So ~ jump to the mid-1970s then, when I suddenly got quite deeply into music as a hard-rocking bass guitarist with all sorts of bands in Delhi. Also did a lot of solo blues from early-twentieth century Southern USA, which had become a significant part of my informal new music education through books borrowed out of the local USIS library.

In turn, that too fell away in time as with so many other adolescent shenanigans of the sort,... till I read an article many many years later in the mid-1990s on how someone or the other somewhere had determined that children not given music by age 13 were most likely doomed to never ever be able to go beyond a plateau far below their 'real' potential if they ever chose to pursue music later in life. Well ~ our son was about 9-10 years old about then, so the two of us trotted off for a summer vacation in the mountains near Manali and soon enough netted a reasonably good Korean classical guitar off a French freak couple who'd realized that they'd much rather have the value of it in cash, to blow on some good charas and extending their stay.

Good guitars from other parts of the world weren't easily available by other means than bidding for one already dangling on someone's shoulder even into those so-recent bad old days, and what I'd done to address my new need was not very different from what many of my musician colleagues had done 20 years earlier. In fact, most of my own professional life as a bass-guitarist in the 70s was conducted with a beautiful bass guitar I'd actually crafted myself from Red Pine and Himalayan Cedar, which was eventually borrowed for a show by a close friend and then stolen from backstage! For the record however, matters have hugely changed in the last few years, and good international guitars are now available off the shelf in Indian metropolises.

In any case, having a guitar about the house again after so many years brought music back home, especially since my wife Poonam plays too, and from then on in, things just sort of ballooned. MIDI came in soon enough via Cakewalk bundled with a computer sound-card somewhere along the line, and then I got the "Roland PMA-5" pictured at right (which I used to make the background song), and then this and that, and a Korean Strat-copy, and a pal donated a 'Westbury' Bass, and then a Korg keyboard came in, and a Yamaha digital 4-track recorder/mixer/editor,... and it's all still happening.

..... and slowly-slowly-slowly, it's all started paying for itself and music is now steadily finding back it's place in my life and soul.

So ~ gimme more!

~

Shankar Barua (april 2002)

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