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The reminders intensified as the concert approached. I love my studio and the teachers there, and I was getting concerned that the performance wasn't selling out. I made a perfunctory attempt to ask my husband if he'd go with me. I already knew that would be a no. If you were to make a Venn diagram of our musical tastes, it would look like this:
So I decided to go solo and bought myself a ticket.
The night of the concert, I put on my leggings and a mauve indian tunic covered in Sanskrit lettering. I have no idea what it says. When clothing includes Asian writing of any sort as a decorative element, I always suspect it actually says something like "Look at this Caucasian idiot." Still, that didn't stop me from buying the tunic because, well, it's pretty, and sometimes I am a Caucasian idiot.
It was stifling in the yoga studio. They normally do hot yoga and it had been a warm day. We all sat on folding chairs, or on bolsters up front. This was to be an evening of kirtan, the call and response singing of mantras. Uttal is a wonderful musician and composer. His voice was rich and soothing but slightly weary as he was under the weather that night. Uttal was accompanied by an exquisite female singer with a crystalline soprano, and an earthy yet dainty young dancer with short hair and eloquent hands. Both women were white but dressed in bright-hued saris. In addition to the Kirtan, Uttal sang some songs, in Sanskrit and in English, sneaking in a couple of secular numbers.
I was enjoying the sing along, looking around at all the mostly anglo folks swaying and chanting when I found myself wondering. Was this cultural appropriation? There is nothing Western about Hinduism with its multi-limbed deities, elephant god, and convoluted mythology. With a change of hair and clothing, the old hippy couples, comely young yoginis and ascetically thin yoga dudes dancing in the back of the room could have passed for Mormons. Was my inner East Coast cynic resurfacing? Was this a scene from a Woody Allen movie? Or was it just my restless monkey mind harshing my mellow?
I flashed back on four years ago, when I participated in a musical project called The Vak Choir of Ordinary Voices. It was the creation of yoga teacher, Ann Dyer, who had been a jazz singer in her earlier years. She had given up jazz singing and immersed herself in Indian spiritual music. A friend of hers at San Francisco's Yerba Buena Center commissioned Ann to create a performance blending her two musical influences. The piece was based the creation story of Vak, the goddess of sound and speech. Just as our mythology starts out with God declaring let there be light, Indian mythology starts out with a goddess singing let there be sound.
I learned about the difference between the Western and Indian singing styles. In the West, singing is all about projecting, making yourself heard. In the Indian tradition, you focus on how the sound vibrates internally and how different vowel sounds are felt in different parts of the body. It takes conscious breathing, concentration, and patient, internal listening. We worked on sliding notes and on singing quarter tones. You can hear them long before you can reproduce them accurately but eventually you get there.
The Vak choir practiced quite a bit in preparation for the show. Raising my voice in unison with others was almost transcendent, and I always felt refreshed and relaxed when I went home.
A month or so before the Vak performance, I attended a talk at Ann Dyer's studio. The speaker was an expert on Hildegarde Van Bingen, a 12th century German abbess, mystic, composer, and medieval renaissance woman, if there can be such a thing. (Hildegarde was also a writer of botanical and medicinal texts and is considered the founder of scientific natural history in Germany.) The presentation focused on her work as a musician, and after the talk, we sang Hildegarde. From shanti shanti to sanctus sanctus. Different scales and melodies. Very different gods. Same exact emotion. And I realized, it's not the religion, it's raising your voice with other humans that makes the experience spiritual.
It doesn't matter if you were raised in another tradition. It's OK if you've lost your Faith, or even if, like me, you're constitutionally incapable of Belief. You follow the music, it fills you, you sing, you sway. That's the beauty of Kirtan. I shushed the monkey mind and got back to chanting.
It was stifling in the yoga studio. They normally do hot yoga and it had been a warm day. We all sat on folding chairs, or on bolsters up front. This was to be an evening of kirtan, the call and response singing of mantras. Uttal is a wonderful musician and composer. His voice was rich and soothing but slightly weary as he was under the weather that night. Uttal was accompanied by an exquisite female singer with a crystalline soprano, and an earthy yet dainty young dancer with short hair and eloquent hands. Both women were white but dressed in bright-hued saris. In addition to the Kirtan, Uttal sang some songs, in Sanskrit and in English, sneaking in a couple of secular numbers.
I was enjoying the sing along, looking around at all the mostly anglo folks swaying and chanting when I found myself wondering. Was this cultural appropriation? There is nothing Western about Hinduism with its multi-limbed deities, elephant god, and convoluted mythology. With a change of hair and clothing, the old hippy couples, comely young yoginis and ascetically thin yoga dudes dancing in the back of the room could have passed for Mormons. Was my inner East Coast cynic resurfacing? Was this a scene from a Woody Allen movie? Or was it just my restless monkey mind harshing my mellow?
I flashed back on four years ago, when I participated in a musical project called The Vak Choir of Ordinary Voices. It was the creation of yoga teacher, Ann Dyer, who had been a jazz singer in her earlier years. She had given up jazz singing and immersed herself in Indian spiritual music. A friend of hers at San Francisco's Yerba Buena Center commissioned Ann to create a performance blending her two musical influences. The piece was based the creation story of Vak, the goddess of sound and speech. Just as our mythology starts out with God declaring let there be light, Indian mythology starts out with a goddess singing let there be sound.
I learned about the difference between the Western and Indian singing styles. In the West, singing is all about projecting, making yourself heard. In the Indian tradition, you focus on how the sound vibrates internally and how different vowel sounds are felt in different parts of the body. It takes conscious breathing, concentration, and patient, internal listening. We worked on sliding notes and on singing quarter tones. You can hear them long before you can reproduce them accurately but eventually you get there.
The Vak choir practiced quite a bit in preparation for the show. Raising my voice in unison with others was almost transcendent, and I always felt refreshed and relaxed when I went home.
A month or so before the Vak performance, I attended a talk at Ann Dyer's studio. The speaker was an expert on Hildegarde Van Bingen, a 12th century German abbess, mystic, composer, and medieval renaissance woman, if there can be such a thing. (Hildegarde was also a writer of botanical and medicinal texts and is considered the founder of scientific natural history in Germany.) The presentation focused on her work as a musician, and after the talk, we sang Hildegarde. From shanti shanti to sanctus sanctus. Different scales and melodies. Very different gods. Same exact emotion. And I realized, it's not the religion, it's raising your voice with other humans that makes the experience spiritual.
It doesn't matter if you were raised in another tradition. It's OK if you've lost your Faith, or even if, like me, you're constitutionally incapable of Belief. You follow the music, it fills you, you sing, you sway. That's the beauty of Kirtan. I shushed the monkey mind and got back to chanting.
