Tamil Festival Music

We arrived in Munnar on December 23rd to find the hotels full.  It was the Christmas period and the Indian middle class were on holiday. We'd met a family from Assam on the train from Madurai, spending a couple of weeks touring a mix of holy and secular attractions. Arriving in the mountains we discovered that hill stations were particularly favoured by Indians for short breaks. Most were from other parts of Kerala and neighbouring Karnataka.  Had the border with Tamil Nadu not been closed because of the dam dispute, we may not have found a room at all.

I spent the night in the worst room I can remember, right off reception and with a damp, smelly en-suite and a window with a view of a brick wall less than three feet away.  The manager and the sweeper, an old smoker, slept on the floor of reception. Somehow, this being India, it felt perfectly natural and as a by-product the 10.30 curfew was rigidly enforced.  The most memorable sound was that of the sweeper coughing, hawking and spitting at regular intervals through the night.

On Christmas Eve, while our bags were moved to a better room (in fact the best in the hotel had become available), we went out on a set tour. Exhaustion had allowed the manager to talk us into taking a Jeep tour with his friend, Rajeesh.  This was very pleasant, and took in tiger and elephant hunting (with cameras).  We saw neither but the fresh elephant dung was particularly impressive.

We were well behind schedule on the return journey and Rajeesh, who had been taking a leisurely pace, sped up in response to a phone call.  So I was surprised when, two minutes from the hotel, he pulled over.
"Would you like to see this?" he asked.

'This' was a patch of waste ground and people standing around a fire.  It was cold in the Jeep - the temperature had plummeted when the sun went down - and the fire was attractive. Rajeesh killed the engine and then I heard music.  We walked closer and saw a band of three drummers and two horn players, a priest/MC, a sadhu (holy man), three men doing something with fire and a group of women dancing in a manner I associate with sub-Saharan Africa. ( They did not come across as demur Hindu women.)  And around them all was a small crowd.

We had happened on a ceremony of some kind and I quickly decided not to take our my camera.  This was partly to avoid causing offence but mostly because the sound was so amazing I wanted to record some.  In my back-pack was my handy Zoom H4 and the clip contains that audio. The way the rhythm shifts back and forth is of particular interest. (You may want to roll off the bass a little.)

Toy Piano

In Garlic Theatre's new show, There's A Monster In My Piano, there is a toy piano.  It's a wonderful little thing with a wooden body and beaters with an 'old-fashioned' plastic look.  It's French made and, without knowing the make and model off hand, I'd guess it was built in the 1950s.    The 'strings' are metal rods and there are no dampers.

I have been sampling the instrument, note by note, with varying attack and collecting various sounds for use as effects. Playing the piano softly is a challenge as too little force fails to throw the hammers against the rods. My favourite sound effect is created by tipping the piano backwards so the hammers fall against the rods in a random fashion.

To give a flavour of the instrument I recorded a snatch of Bach (I ran out of notes with which to play further) and a 12-Bar.  Perhaps I should have picked it up off the floor first; my piano playing is generally bad but seldom this awful  The battery on top of the piano in one of the pictures is AA, just to give some idea of scale.

I would have liked to have stayed longer than the 21 hours I spent in the spectacular temple city of Madurai.  A number of factors, including a dispute between the states of Kerala and Tamil Nadu over a dam, made us get on a train to Trivandrum in the small hours.

Another British cock-up, although not on the scale of Partition, is reverberating down the centuries.  In the late 19th century the British oversaw the building of a dam in the kingdom of Travancore (modern day Kerala) for the irrigation of the lands to the east of the Western Ghats (then the Madras Presidency, now Tamil Nadu).  The Mullaperiyar was bequeathed to Madras for a thousand years. In a nutshell, the Keralans think the dam is in need of repair but don't want to pay for it as it's not their dam and they don't benefit from it.  The Tamils believe the dam is in good condition and don't want to pay for unnecessary repairs.  Obviously, a burst dam would be catastrophic for the Keralans and things have become rather heated.  There have been border skirmishes and all the roads were closed.  The only way in and out was by train.


I took a picture of this intriguing machine but had no time to enquire further.  Since I've returned I found clip on Youtube (where else?) featuring a demonstration. Predictably, but wonderfully, there are a number of similar clips.

Poole Puppet Festival

You learn something new every day, as the saying goes.  On Saturday I took part in two performances of The Chalk Giants at the Lighthouse in Poole and discovered that it was the first day of Poole Puppet Festival.  It included a display of some particularly fine puppets, workshops for children and 'have-a-go' puppets too.

Two more from the natural world

Whales: Apparently their stress levels increase in line with engine noises from shipping.  It interferes with their communication with other whales.  Hardly surprising, really, but still good to have some firm evidence.  Time to revert to sail?  http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-16926005

Monkeys: The 'silent' Tarsier monkey from the Philippines is actually very talkative.  It just speaks at a frequency far above the limit of human hearing. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2098329/Philippine-Tarsier-monkey-talks-ultrasound.html It's worth clicking the link just to look at their eyes.

Insect asides

A couple of insect related items caught my ear recently, courtesy of BBC radio.  The first concerned bees and one Huw Evans, an electronic engineer turned bee-keeper.  He has been recording the sound inside his hives and analysing it in an attempt to predict swarming.  He can also monitor the health of his bees in a non-invasive manner.  Looking inside the hives to check on the bees just upsets them, unsurprisingly, and has a negative effect on honey yield.  The full article, with audio clip, is at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-16114890

The piece of news was the recreation of the sound made by crickets 165 million years ago in the Jurassic period.  The radio piece gave us a few chirps but the on-line article at http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/16878292 is silent.   The researchers recreated the sound by examining a fossilised cricket. What is particularly interesting is that they believe they can use the sounds to make further assumptions about the other sounds in the forest.  This is because the insects would have to make their sound cut through the rest of the jungle noise to reach their prospective mate.

The first lesson

When I bought my flute from Vunugoptal I tried to teach him a tune and he tried to teach one to me.  Neither of us had much success.  I had wanted to play The Lark in the Morning - a particular favourite - but could neither remember it nor conjure it out of the Keralan air.  I settled for The Maids of Mitchelstown.

I don't know what tune he tried to teach me but I distracted myself by trying to mimic the sighing quality of his playing.  I was taught to cover the holes of the flute with the pads the last phalange of each finger.  This is a very western, classical style of playing but it makes impossible the kind of glissando that Venugoptal achieved with such grace and lack of effort.  He did this by using the pads under the second phalange of the fingers on his right hand.

I was also confused by the fact that he took his root note from the middle of the instrument - the top three holes being open, the bottom three closed.  He maintained that his flute was in C while to my mind it was in G.  This caused me some problems in our next meeting, my first 'formal' lesson.

Venugoptal's teaching involved me learning and transcribing tunes.  The first one uses a scale:

D Eb F# G A Bb C# D

Just to give you a sense of my own confusion, the first note of lines 3 and 4 of the transcription should be a G, the second F# etc. Venugopal demonstrates the tune in the clip. His playing is rather stilted but he wouldn't let me record him just 'playing', only demonstrating the tunes. The accompanying pictures are completely gratuitous but I haven't found a way of posting audio without pictures. My apologies for the noise caused wind hitting the microphone - we were outside.