Seeing as how I was having some major problems with my kaval cracking (as mentioned in previous posts) I decided to buy a new one. The kaval I have been playing is from Macedonia. I decided to get a Bulgarian kaval this time. The Bulgarian, Macedonian, and Turkish kavals each have their own culturally-distinctive, traditional style of construction, but they are all musically the same instrument. That is, a Bulgarian kaval plays the same natural scale, and has the same holes and is fingered the same way as a Macedonian kaval (and as a Turkish kaval). I decided to go with a Bulgarian one this time because the wood on the Bulgarian kaval is thicker than on the Macedonian one, and I got to thinking this might make the Bulgarian instrument more resistant to the ravages of the extremes of temperatures that it might be subjected to, especially in an Ithaca winter.

So I ordered a kaval from a company in Sophia, Bulgaria about 3 weeks ago. I got an email message from the company telling me that they had shipped it to my home address but that it had been rejected back to them as undeliverable! (The Ithaca postal service is notoriously quirky and unreliable; I have had on-and-off problems with my mail service all the years I’ve lived in this town). And unfortunately, instead of them contacting me to ask me for an alternate delivery address (I probably would have asked them to ship it to my office instead) they went ahead and sent it to my old, old address on Dryden Road. I haven’t lived in that house for over 3 years. The fellow that I sold the house to has since sold it to someone else, and I haven’t been able to find out who the new owner is. I need to contact the new owner of the house and ask her/him to please contact me if they get my package from Bulgaria. I hate to just drop in on someone unannounced, especially someone I don’t know (it seems kind of rude for one thing, also I’m a shy person and I’m generally very reluctant to approach a stranger and start a conversation), but I think in this case I will have to do so since I have no other way of contacting the new owner of the house. I’m planning on stopping by the house on Dryden Road on Saturday and see if I can have a (hopefully friendly) chat with whoever lives there about my Bulgarian package problem. Hopefully the person will be amenable to helping me with this little issue….

The poetry group that I belong to (and which I’ve been a part of since 1997!) has an annual tradition of meeting for dinner and drinks around the holidays, and exchanging poetry books as gifts. And usually each poet is encouraged to bring his/her spouse, partner, lover, paramour, boyfriend, girlfriend, etc. to join in the celebration. In past years we’ve usually gone to Ragmann’s downtown, because they are very informal, they have tolerant wait staff, seem like they can easily accommodate a group, and we generally have a back corner of the place to ourselves where we can drink, carry on, talk loudly and occasionally sing silly songs without fear of being thrown out. This year we decided to try a different place, whose name I prefer not to mention. When J and I arrived and told the hostess we had a group of 10 people coming she seemed to get very flustered, and she let us know that she was irritated with us because we hadn’t called ahead. In fact she continued to have this sort of low-key freakout going the whole time we were there.

But I was pleasantly startled to see that the waitress was quite familiar, in fact it was one of my former musical colleagues, M, from the middle eastern music ensemble! M is a multi-talented young genius who used to play violin with the ensemble till she moved out of Ithaca to study anthropology at Brown. I asked her how she was doing and she said she had quit Brown and was planning to go to a different school. What a stunning surprise to see her there waitressing!

Although M did a good job as a waitress, and although the food was decent, we were sorely disappointed in how slow the food preparation was. It took way, way too long. And then the place closed up kind of early (for us) so we didn’t really have time to sit back and talk at leisure after dinner (I think we will be looking to a different venue for our holiday poets celebration next year). We hurriedly did our gift book exchange. The way this works is we place all the wrapped books in a pile on the table, then each poet picks a book. So it’s basically a random process and you never know what you will get. I got Budapest to Babel by Agnes Lahozcky, a poet I’m unfamiliar with.

First of all I should mention how my kaval crisis eventually played out. As I mentioned in a previous post, I had a major problem on the Monday evening (Nov 30) CMEMME rehearsal, where my kaval developed a big crack. I patched the crack on Tuesday with superglue, and the instrument was fine for a while. Then on Sunday afternoon while I was practicing at home for Sunday evening’s gig at the Carriage House Cafe, the kaval suddenly developed another huge crack! I patched it with more superglue and bound it tightly with string, praying that it would be okay for that evening’s performance. After the glue dried and I took the string off it seemed to be okay. I was just hoping it would get me through the evening!

As it turned out, everything went well. The upstairs part of the Carriage House is a nice, attractive, cozy place but it’s not real large, so when all our audience was in there it was QUITE crowded, with a lot of people not able to find seats and so there were quite a few people standing up in back.

At this gig we were joined by a special musical guest artist, the great Armenian oud virtuoso Richard Hagopian (father of our musical director Harold), who played on the second half of our performance. We played few songs (Bulgarian, Arabic, Greek), took a short break and then Richard Hagopian joined us on some Armenian songs. His oud playing was at times astounding, especially a fantastic solo improvisation that was the most amazing oud performance I’ve ever heard.

I played ney on most of the songs in the concert but I played kaval (my much-patched kaval!) on a few songs. I was pleased that the kaval held up and didn’t crack anymore! Toward the end of the program we played some Turkish songs.

On the last Turkish song, “Emine,” one of our singers, a young Turkish lady named Aylin who happens to be the Turkish language instructor at Cornell, was inspired to perform a belly-dance to the song! She danced very well, and one of our oud players, Adem, stood up to play the oud with her while she danced. Then our musical director Harold stood up and played a terrific solo on the violin! It was a rousing and very spirited performance. The audience loved it. We finished with another rousing song, the Sephardic song “Gulpembe.”

It was a great evening, altogether one of the best performance experiences I’ve ever had with CMEMME. I went home feeling excited and uplifted….

J and I went to a concert downtown at the State Theater on Saturday night, a benefit for Shaleshock, the group that is working to stop natural-gas drilling in New York State. It is a worthy cause, and I was glad to hear that the concert was sold out. We had seats in the middle of the front row. There were three bands lined up to play, The Horse Flies, The Sim Redmond Band, and Donna the Buffalo. We both love the music of The Horse Flies especially, so we were very glad to be so close to the band during their performance. I started to have some qualms though, as soon as I saw that some people from the audience had gotten up and were standing and dancing in the aisle near the left side of the stage, without the security staff making them sit back down. I could see what was coming! It was inevitable that when people in the audience saw that there were folks standing and dancing near the stage, then they wanted to get up and get near the stage also. Gradually more and more people got up and moved in front of the stage. Before long there was a solid wall of people in front of J and me (still sitting in our seats) and we couldn’t see the stage at all! I looked around me and all of the aisles were packed with people standing, and the area in front of the stage was also totally packed with people. I mean it was so packed that it was almost impossible to even move in that crush of people. The Horse Flies finished playing, and then the Sim Redmond Band played. I started to feel very uncomfortable in that intense crush of people all around. I started to think we should just leave, but I didn’t see any way out of the auditorium. I decided to just stay to the end of the band’s set and then try to make an escape. Which we eventually did. So we didn’t stay to hear Donna the Buffalo, but by that time it was pretty late anyway and we were tired. I also felt kind of stressed by the claustrophobic feeling of being in the middle of this crazy mob. The bands played very well and it was great to hear them, but I was disappointed in the overall experience. The State Theater staff should had done something to control the crowd instead of just passively allowing the situation to degenerate into such an insane mess. That is not the way it’s supposed to work when you have a concert in a theater.

Last night was the last rehearsal of CMEMME before our upcoming concert gig on Sunday. The rehearsal went pretty well EXCEPT for the fact that my kaval didn’t work. At all. I play most of the songs in our repertoire on the ney, but a few of the songs are in a scale that doesn’t work well on the ney, so those songs I play on the kaval, which has a more conventional natural scale, i.e. without the quarter-tones that are part of the natural scale of the ney. The ney songs at the rehearsal went well, but I was completely unable to get a sound out of the kaval! I was completely mystified. But when I got home and took the time to examine the kaval more closely I saw that it had a thin but long crack in it, not easily visible but definitely a crack that went all the way through the wall of the instrument. I was seriously bummed about this, as you can imagine. I’ve become very fond of that kaval, a very nicely-crafted instrument which I ordered from a company in Skopje, Macedonia four or five years ago.

I did some inquiries at a dealer in ethnic musical instruments, and although they said that they could send me a kaval or a shvi (supposedly very similar to the kaval), they wouldn’t be able to get it to me in time for the concert on Sunday! I thought about just going downtown to Toko Imports and buying a plain, simple wooden or bamboo flute to use as a substitute for the kaval at the concert gig. My musical friend Marty suggested that some flutes can be patched, and that I might want to try gluing the damaged instrument with superglue and binding it very tightly to see if the crack can be mended that way. I am planning to try that.

Yesterday I drove up to Rochester with my friend Tony for some shakuhachi instruction with Ronnie Nyogetsu Seldin. I thought it went mostly well. First I had my individual lesson with Ronnie, in which we started out by going over the first half of “Yugao,” which I’ve been working on at home for a while now. “Yugao” is a piece of Japanese classical music that has a rather intense and dramatic feeling to it. I thought I played it moderately OK, although I got a little tripped up rhythmically in some of the parts where Ronnie and I played contrasting melodies in parallel. Then Ronnie introduced me to the next section of the piece, which I haven’t started working on yet, and I tried playing it with him. I got confused about the rhythm of it in some places, but overall I think it is do-able. It will just take some practice for me to get used to the (to me) rather complicated rhythmic aspects of this music.

After my lesson, Tony had his lesson (he’s working on “Chi-dori”) and then after that there was a group lesson in which Ronnie taught us a honkyoku piece called “Shrinpo.” I recognized this piece because it’s on a CD of shakuhachi music (played by Ronnie Seldin) that I have. It’s an interesting piece because it seems to have a surface simplicity but it has a great sense of peacefulness and strength. I think I was able to play this piece mostly. I had a few little difficulties along the way but I think this is a piece that is within my ability, unlike some of the other honkyoku pieces I’ve attempted, which seemed to be way over my head!

I feel like I’m making slow but steady progress on the shakuhachi. Although I’m still a beginner, I certainly feel much more confident that I am on the right track than I used to be! When I first started taking lessons with Ronnie I was constantly tormented by the fear that I had taken on something that was just way too difficult for me. I feel better about it now, and I’m very glad that I had the courage to commit myself to this instrument.

In a recent journal entry, David Byrne wrote a bit about the “purpose” of creating art, if indeed there can be said to be a purpose. His point is that most people seem to imagine that the purpose of creating art is to express oneself, to provide an outlet for one’s emotions, etc. But that the real situation among artists is quite different, in that the great majority of artists create art mainly as an exploration. It is through the process of creating entirely new things that the artist is able to see or think his way into a larger world.

In the writing of poetry especially I think there is a popular misconception about what poetry is all about. Many people avoid poetry because they think it is basically just a lot of emotional outpourings by self-indulgent people. But in my own experience of reading and writing poetry, it is something quite different. It is an attempt to enlarge one’s self and one’s world through one’s own individual efforts. Perhaps to think things one has never thought before, and feel things one has never felt before.

Friday afternoon I took off from work early in order to play a brief musical gig at Ithaca High School. It was as part of some kind of “international culture day” event at the school. I understand that several different groups and performers played there that day. I arrived at the IHS library with some of my CMEMME musical colleagues a little before 3:00. We set up a little semi-circle of chairs in the library, among the bookstacks! Students came and sat around us, and we played a few songs. We only had a half-hour, so we didn’t have time to play a lot of songs, but I think we gave them an interesting variety of songs. One of the organizers of the event suggested that we also take a few minutes to say a little bit about the instruments that we played, so in between songs each of the instrumentalists briefly talked about his/her instrument. So I told them some hopefully interesting tidbits of knowledge about the ney and the kaval, a couple of instruments that I love.

It was one of the more unusual gigs that I’ve played but I thought it was a lot of fun. It was nice to be among all the youngsters, and the people seemed to really appreciate us. I hope we’ll do it again sometime.

Among many stories told about the legendary Irish hunter-warrior-hero Fionn mac Cumhaill (also known by the Romanized version of his name, Finn MacCool), is this little one:

Fionn and his soldiers were sitting around a fire in their camp at night. Some of the men were discussing the question of what is the most beautiful music in the world, with each man offering his own opinion on what was the most beautiful music, some saying flute music, some saying harp music, etc. One of the men asked their leader Fionn for his opinion. He replied, “The most beautiful music in the world is the music of what actually happens.”

Years ago, not long after I moved to Ithaca from Florida, I took a class in basic drawing at the CSMA. It was taught by David, a local artist. David was cheerful, spontaneous, and enthusiastic, and I thought his approach to art and to teaching were very interesting although I didn’t always get what he was talking about sometimes. He sometimes gave us odd assignments, like “to draw motion.” Not to draw a particular thing in motion, mind you, but to draw motion. I recall that I spent some time experimenting with that, trying different things in an effort to draw motion itself, but without any success.

Sometimes I was perplexed at David’s response to some of my drawing efforts, because he would occasionally respond with great enthusiasm and encouragement to a drawing of mine that I thought was only so-so, and he would be only lukewarm-encouraging about a drawing that I had labored long and hard over and that I thought was pretty good. He seemed to be all about “being direct.” He mentioned this thing about “being direct” quite a few times throughout the drawing course, and although I was intrigued I didn’t really feel that I knew quite what he was talking about.

This “directness” thing of David’s was something that kept returning to my thoughts over the years, and now several years later I think I understand, at least to some extent, what he was talking about. I now think that all of David’s exercises that he assigned to us in the drawing class were aimed at trying to get us to draw with a quality of directness. This directness is a quality of strength and boldness in a way, but not too much strength and boldness! It is just enough, and no more! It’s a quality of approaching your activity with full attention and full sincerity, and not filtering your activity through a lot of unnecessary thinking, planning, analysis, evaluation, etc. It’s a subtle thing actually, something of a Zen-like quality. Because at least some thinking, analysis, etc. is necessary, but how much? To pare the mind’s intellectual interference down to the minimum and to rely instead, as much as you possibly can, on your awareness, on your intuition, having faith in the inherent integrity of your effort and without fear or equivocation, this is the quality of directness that I continue to work toward in my musical practice, my writing, my drawing, and everything else that I do.