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After many years of orchestral playing in the Hallė in Manchester, a period as a mature postgraduate composition student at Manchester University and a somewhat precarious existence as a freelance flautist and flute teacher, this exchange of emails in March 2008 was the last thing I was expecting:-
‘Hi, We are looking for a classical flautist to perform with our South Indian dance company for the second half of our tour this Easter. Would you be available?
Y Yadavan’
‘Dear Yadavan,
Thanks very much for contacting me. I would be very interested in working with your company. My commitments after Easter are fairly flexible but I would need to know the touring dates, venues and fees. I have worked with many ballet and theatre companies but never in the field of Indian dance.
Could you give me more information on the type of music you would expect me to play?
Best Wishes Jonathan’
‘Hi Jonathan
Thanks for your prompt response to Yadavan, my husband, who is the musical half of our company! I am the dance component, as well as the artistic director. I am pleased to know you are interested in working with us………
If we decide to go ahead on this, we would like to start to work with you immediately as the music is quite complex and needs memorising. My musicians are mobile within the choreography, so I hope you are up for that! Assuming we could start working with you immediately, these are the dates………The compositions are highly rhythmic, so would require a lot of work to learn and memorise the pieces.
Best Regards Nina R’
Although I perhaps possessed a better than average background knowledge of Indian music, I had never contemplated actually playing it - especially with Indian musicians. Soon afterwards I found myself sitting in Nina and Yadavan’s house in Rayner’s Lane watching a DVD of the contemporary South Indian ballets which I was meant to be accompanying and rather sheepishly admitting that I hadn’t been able to memorise the passages from the MP3s that I had been emailed. It also became evident from the DVDs that I would also be expected to move on-stage dressed, for one ballet, as a goalie and for the other as a business man! Yadavan and Kartik (the company violinist) then took me through a couple of the main passages in ‘Quick’ and explained that South Indian Karnatic music was characterised by great rhythmic complexity and also pointed out that much of the music I would be playing was based on irregular mirror-image rhythmic groupings as well as sudden shifts between complex duplet and triplet patterns (tishram), which, strangely enough didn’t give me much comfort. In fact, Karnatic music inspired much of the French composer, Messiean’s rhythmic language, in particular the asymmetric rhythmic groupings found in so much of his music!
Having agreed to take on the engagements offered to me, I had to set about learning the music for the two ballets in which I was appearing. Yadavan, the composer, was not familiar with western musical notation and instead gave me a sheaf of A4 pages filled with rows of large capital letters, each of which corresponded to a semiquaver pitch in western notation, commas indicating a semiquaver rest. Armed with these and the MP3s of the ballet soundtracks, I proceeded to transcribe them into ‘traditional’ European notation using the Sibelius programme on my laptop. As each newly transcribed passage emerged, I realised how complicated and sophisticated the rhythmic structure was and what a challenge I had undertaken. Although all the music was underpinned by an 8-beat rhythmic cycle, the climactic sections -‘Jutis’- exploited the aforementioned rhythmic complexities to their full potential allowing dancers and musicians to exhibit their full virtuosity, using groups of asymmetric retrograde rhythmic groups organised in pyramidal hierarchies of ascending or descending order. Even using the Sibelius notation software, some of these passages presented real problems for conversion to Western notation!
Eventually I finished my transcription of one of the ballets – ‘Quick’ – and over the Easter break started to learn the music by heart on my very modern silver flute. Although still challenging, the mathematical logic of the rhythmic structure and the adherence of the music during any given passage to one scale or ‘Rag’ did make the music easier to memorise for a classically trained musician. However, as the date of the first rehearsal with the group loomed I began to have grave doubts about my ability to cope with whole project resulting in a phone call to the company manager to say that I might have to pull out of the whole tour. However, by that time the company had no one else to take my place so I was persuaded to continue.
The first rehearsal in a dance studio at the Harrow Arts Centre commenced with meeting the dancers and then a run-through of the more difficult musical passages with Yadavan. I then rehearsed with the full company – 4 dancers and 3 other musicians – and was coached by Nina, the choreographer on my positioning and co-ordination with the dancers and other musicians. My first appearance on stage with the company was to be at the Drum theatre in Birmingham. I had learned and rehearsed the music to one ballet (‘Quick’) but it gradually became evident that I was also cast as a goalie in another ballet out of the triple bill – ‘Bend It’. However, up to that point I had not actually transcribed or memorised the music and even on the day of my debut I was still being coached by the other musicians backstage.
So, I finally stood on stage in my football kit that evening in Birmingham in front of a small and bemused audience after standing in the wings with the rest of company while they chanted a Hindu prayer. Over the next 3 weeks of touring I eventually got to grips with all the music I had to play and the rest, as they say, is history!
http://www.srishti.co.uk/touring/video_gallery.html
