Held at Gyaan Adab on the 7th of November 2015, Expressions was a classical guitar recital that featured works by Leo Brouwer and Nikita Koshkin, both among the best-regarded modern composers for the guitar. The music was threaded with a narrative-expressive component featuring prosaic/poetic passages created by a collective of writers – Jaya Parhawk, Sohan Akolkar, Bhairavi Vaidya, Ashutosh and Anoop Kumar.

The spoken texts that were part of this concert are available both on this page and to download as an e-booklet.

Expressions:
A contemporary guitar recital.

 

An introduction by the guitarist

I. El Decameron Negro – Leo Brouwer (1980)
1. El Arpa del Guerrero
2. La Huida de los Amantes por el Valle de los Ecos
3. La Ballada de la Doncella Enamorada

II. Preludios Epigramaticos – Leo Brouwer (1981-83)

III. Sonata – Leo Brouwer (1990)
1. Fandangos y Boleros
2. Sarabanda de Scriabin
3. Toccata de Pasquini

IV. Expressions – Anoop Kumar & Jayant S (2015)
1. The sad tale of Popeye the Labrador
2. A shout out to Billy the tiger
3. Biji’s last smile

V. The Ballads: Suite for Guitar – Nikita Koshkin (1998)
1. Allegretto
2. Moderato
3. Con Moto
4. Adagio Molto
5. Moderato

 

An introduction by the guitarist

“Expressions” came out of an opportunity to present modern classical guitar music before a discerning audience in Pune with the support of the Pune Guitar Society and Gyan Adaab. While I had been thinking about performing material by Leo Brouwer and Nikita Koshkin, prominent guitar composers, for some time, I had remained apprehensive about the actual accessibility of this music, given its subtlety, abstraction and tonal freedom.

It occurred to us that there was already a strong sense of embedded metaphor and near-episodic flow in much of this music. Would it work if we invited a few interested writers to prepare narratives rooted in their own, unguided responses to the music, and then delivered these in performance, interspersed with the pieces themselves? It was highly engrossing to communicate through the process with the writers over several weeks, with exchanges about the musical features of the pieces, discovering their diverse reactions and resultant expressive output, and putting it all together with Anoop’s spoken delivery. For me as the guitar player, a new perspective was added while developing the musical interpretation of each composition, and the ways in which the writers heard and wrote from the music was very inspiring, if occasionally confounding. 

Anoop brought up the insight that there is also a curious visual link between this music and the work of the great 17th century Spanish artist Diego Velasquez, as well as the celebrated re-imaginings of some of his paintings by Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali and Francis Bacon. Perhaps, this is because of the occasionally-discernible Spanish musical roots of this music, or maybe the notion of long- term artistic influences finds analogous threads here.

These, then, are the compiled narratives for each piece in the program, preceded by my own comments.

These, then, are the compiled narratives for each piece in the program, preceded by my own comments.

– Jayant S

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I. El Decameron Negro
– Leo Brouwer (1983)

Leo Brouwer, originally from Cuba, is the single most preeminent composer for the guitar from the second half of the twentieth century.With a prolific output ranging from atonal avant-garde works to orchestral compositions and film soundtracks, he remains as active as ever.This three-part set was inspired by a collection of African folk tales by the German anthropologist Leo Frobenius, though the stories implied by the music do not actually exist in the collection. Nevertheless, Anoop chose to reconstruct the stories from the music, using the sonnet form to complement the lyrical tonal character.

Reference Recording:
Elena Papandreou: Brouwer Guitar Music, Vol 2 – Naxos Catalogue No 8.554553 

 

1. El Arpa del Guerrero
(The Harp of the Warrior)

He returned. unslept eyes, sunburnt skin;
laid his weapons at the chief’s feet
“Exiled I maybe, but your son I still am
and wish to fight and die beside my kin.
After the battle if I still stand
I will merge again into the wilderness
and if I die, let the vultures have my flesh.”
The great chief rose and held out his ageing hand.
For weeks the battle raged
and he fought and bled besides us
laying a blow for a blow
making music not with the gut of a harp
or the sound of his voice,
but with the singing string of a bloody bow.

– Anoop Kumar

 

 2. La Huida de los Amantes por el Valle de los Ecos
(The Flight of the Lovers through the Valley of Echoes)

Fear gave us wings, as we took flight
me and my own true love who
of her own volition, deserted,
the warm hearth of her family,
that chilly night to be with me now, cold and uncertain of the way
lost in a maze, knitted out of
the thicket of twisting trails kneeling occasionally on the golden ground to pray
To the spirits who spat
our words back at us
and led us in circles, tired and slow
At twilight I sang for her
a blues to a rhythm
plucked on the string of my bleeding bow

– Anoop Kumar

 

3. La Ballada de la Doncella Enamorada
(The Ballad of the Lovesick Maiden)

Was there a breeze? I felt it not on my skin
I heard not the gossip of the birds
nor saw the sky blush with the sunset.
All that I could taste was the anguish within
As night descended, like a curtain over a stage
I rifled through the emotional registers
one at a time, few hours for each
Denial and depression, bargain and rage
I thought of the man who always hoped
that when his battle was done
and it was finally time to go
he would have in his hands
the empathy of the gut stringed harp:
not the fatal coil of a bloodied bow

– Anoop Kumar

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II. Preludios Epigramaticos
– Leo Brouwer (1981-83)

This enigmatic and introspective set of six short preludes by Leo Brouwer was based on haikus by the Spanish poet Miguel Hernandez (1910-1942).The music claims a wide textural compass, but then so do the haikus. Anoop compiled the transliterations here from online sources, with some editing for coherence with the music.

Reference Recording:
Elena Papandreou: Brouwer Guitar Music, Vol 2 – Naxos Catalogue No 8.554553

1. Moderato: The dawn wishes to be itself, just as you are wholly woman.

2. Tranquillo: Sad men, if they don’t die of love

3. Lento: Enveloped in your skin, I tie and untie my own

4. Allegretto Moderato: Laugh, everything laughs, all is mother of levity

5. Pesante: You caught my heart mid-flight and today hurled it down

6. Poetique: I endure with three wounds: that of love, that of death, that of life

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2. Sarabanda de Scriabin

From old patterns emerge new insights.
The telling details,
the hidden turmoil.
For the vanity of the wise,
is grander than its reflection.

To see purple,
in the red.
The screaming and the decayed.

The layers begin to peel,
with the passage of time.
Almost confessing,
The riot within.

To see the other,
is to see the self

– Bhairavi Vaidya

 

Remember how as a child you squinted into Pleiades to conjure up more stars ?

Remember ?

This is exactly the same.

We are all here –
The proud parents in the mirror,
the blond-fident princesses,
the self-conscious servant girls,
the Zorro caped figure in the shadows at the back,
even the moon-faced midget
and the painter himself – all the way to the left.

Picasso spent a few years learning to paint
like Velasquez and the other masters
and then a lifetime to paint like a child.

It is time for you to learn to see,
for in seeing, just as in listening
and in painting;
the ‘how’ is as important as the ‘what’.

– Anoop Kumar

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IV. Expressions
– Anoop Kumar & Jayant S (2015)

Not a “composition” in the classical sense of the term, this was a collaborative attempt at providing musical support to a narrative. Some motifs are predetermined, but most of the music and texture is essentially improvised, following the spoken delivery.

 

1. The sad tale of Popeye the Labrador

Crow black, arthritic
and deafened by the years
he would limp behind us
into the practice place,
lie down between the air conditioner
and the drummer,
put his head on his paw
and sleep, as the band
raged through covers of
Nirvana and Pearl Jam,
rising up occasionally
between songs to let out a bark,
protesting the silence