They insisted that we come back again for a concert and we were happy to oblige. I wore my new saari just for the occasion.
On the one hand, I would have liked to have had a smartphone that could have recorded it, but on
the other hand, I was glad not to. I just enjoyed every bit of it—soaked it in,
smiled my biggest and clapped like crazy when they were done :).
The first piece was a drum piece in a 7 beat
time, accompanied by a simple repetitive melody (very much like a basso continuo or “running bass”) on the harmonium. There were three drummers playing the
tablas (a set of two drums, the dominant hand plays mainly with the fingertips
and the non-dominant hand alternates between using the fingertips and the heel
of the hand on the larger of the two drums). The three girls played both
together and then had solos built in. Incredibly intense!
 |
| Descriptions of traditional instruments that they had in the room |
The second piece was a vocal piece,
accompanied by a girl playing the tablas. She explained a bit about it (such as
the differing ascending + descending scales) but sadly I can't remember more.
At first she sang low and almost hypnotically and then her voice climbed and
danced, such vocal agility! It made the crazy passages in Handel's Messiah
(smtg like _-°-_-°-_-°-°-°) seem like child's play! Lovely.
The third performance was on the sitar
(those things are huge!). It sounded so cool! The sitar was also accompanied by
the tablas. There were sounds like the plucking of guitar strings as well as
sliding the notes up and down—also some incredibly fast passages! Wow. These
girls are impressive.
After that we went for a brief jaunt over to
the Sanskrit department because we'd met one of the instructors and she wanted
to talk to us. She seemed pleased that we knew the meanings of our names and we
talked about the connection between Germany and Sanskrit and such.
Then F gave a lecture to a Business English
class about the University in Kiel and an Introduction to Linguistics. They
were suitably impressed by the difference in scale between their main library
and Kiel's main library (3 guesses which one is bigger...). The English
Department library alone is already the same size as the main library at DEI
:-P They also all seemed to have fun feeling the different areas of
articulation of the various Hindi and English sounds.
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