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Man With Sign, January 30, 02025
The weather app tells me it's in the single digits outside, so I suit up with multiple layers and chemical heat packs. This all takes a bit of time, and I arrive at Roosevelt Circle at 7:33 to find that I'll be a soloist today; Craige's decided to stay warm instead. I set up my big sign and hold up WE MUST BE BETTER ANCESTORS.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8Dpr3kn_JI
#ClimateChaos #ClimateChange #CitizenActivism #HindustaniMusic
On cold days like these I pull inward a little, sometimes shutting my eyes against the glare and wind. Nevertheless, I interact enough with the drivers to get a positive feeling from the morning commute; I'm returning lots of waves and supportive gestures, with nary a naysayer to be seen. Which is fine; angry deniers may spice up the morning, but it's frankly a relief to have a day without them.
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Since yesterday evening I've been thinking about this morning's practice. Because I'm in a dhrupad-ang bol-bant syllable-counting state of mind this week, I thought I'd like to work on the most common fractional tempo, singing at 1 1/2 speed. Which is another way of saying quarter-note triplets, twenty-one notes in fourteen beats.
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Mindful of the cold, I spend a long time singing sotto voce in the lower register, working out syllabic distributions which don't break words or do other violence to the text. The string of triplets must end with the four syllables of the mukhda, "chalo jaaye" to arrive properly at the Sam.
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First I craft a sequence that occupies one cycle, practicing it first in a monotone, then with free melody in the lower register, and finally moving upward into the main tessitura of the song. Once this sequence ("puchhiye hari ke samachara jasoda ke angana chalo jaaye") is internalized, I sing the complete asthai and antara, then move to a two-cycle variation.
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This occupies the rest of the hour, and by the time 8:28 rolls around, I'm able to sing the passage twice for the video, with different melody each time. The tabla is at 102 bpm, and my syllabic tempo is 153 phonemes/minute, with the real beauty emerging when the words parse themselves in syntactic units rather than mechanically rhythmic ones.
6/
I finish the video, sing through the end of the hour, and pack up for the walk home. I've actually been quite comfortable during today's vigil, and my voice was cooperative. These are small things in the big picture, but all of us are small things, statistical data points in a universe grand beyond our ken.
Let us strive to be better ancestors.
See you tomorrow.
Man With Sign
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