Final Term 1 Lecture! Virginia's coming!!

It’s been another eventful week. I’ve now given three lectures since returning from Madurai. More on that later. Not lots and lots of concerts right now, either. Some folks like Sanjay Subrahmanian are on tour in the US, and others are laying low with December Season looming on the horizon. There was a special event to honor legendary violinist Lalgudi Jayaraman on his 80th birthday, and A.R. Rahman gave a benefit concert that drew 70,000 fans. I wasn’t able to go to either of those, but Dr. Mathivanan gave me a good report on the felicitations for Jayaraman.

Last Saturday at the Heber Hall Festival, Octavia, I met a couple of alums from some years back. The three of us ending up judging both the acoustic and the electric rock contests, a task that ended up taking from around 10 in the morning till nearly 4 in the afternoon. A long day! Thankfully they brought us some food midway through. These contests are historically supposed to be for non-MCC bands (as opposed to the Selaiyur Hall festival contest for on-campus bands). They’ve gotten a bit lax on this in recent years, though, and have opened themselves to charges of favoritism and lack of impartiality if one of the MCC bands happens to win. The two alums were especially concerned about this, so when it came time to announce the results for the acoustic contest (which took an extra long time because we wanted to be scrupulously impartial), they pointed out the issues and encouraged the hall council to rethink this in the future (to the applause of non-MCC musicians in the crowd!).

I never cease to be amazed by the absolute dedication of MCC’s alums. This may be typical of India in general, but it is an obligation with a deeply felt sense of duty (one’s dharma) to continue to serve the faculty members who were your gurus. One of these alums from the Octavia contest (and now a new friend) is John Mathew, a very bright fellow with a veddy proper British accent who has had an international career in business and the sciences that has taken him to France, Harvard, etc., and now on to London. He was a co-founder of the MCC Scrub Society (dedicated to the preservation of the endangered native scrub jungle within the campus walls), and he continues to be active in his concern for ecological issues. When asked to give a lecture for an economics forum on campus, he of course agreed, and I got to hear his very fine talk on economic and scientific aspects of environmentalism. He was very good about checking in periodically during the week of his visit, and I look forward to seeing him again at some future date … who knows where or when?

I gave a lecture last Thursday to students of the philosophy department, my home for the fall. This time the topic was Music and Emotion, with a look at music therapy and some of the recent research showing more and more clearly that brain patterns in response to music closely match brain patterns associated with human emotions, and one can even match the musical responses to specific emotions! I think back to the oral exams for my doctorate, and I remember vividly how they mostly pooh-poohed the idea that music expressed emotions. Of course, there’s the famous line from Stravinsky that music is incapable of expressing anything at all (except itself), and I think that colored the thinking of much of that generation. Fascinating that science is now on the verge of confirming common wisdom on the subject, that music does express emotions (or at least does an impressive job of evoking emotional responses in the brain). In my conversations so far with Indian musicians ranging from amateurs to skilled performers to musicians with doctorates, no one here (so far) has done anything but affirm the idea that music expresses emotion, and that each raga evokes a different kind of emotion. I’ve had some good discussions with several philosophy students since then. This seems to be a topic of great interest!

Friday it was off to Kalakshetra, perhaps Chennai’s most famous dance (and music) academy. Jospeh and I met the director, Leela Samson, and we got to talk about plans for a January visit with students. It may be too late to make it work now, but there may also be the possibility of doing a guest lecture there! We had a lovely tour—I got to visit several classes, including a violin class and a 4th year dance class (I was very pleased to recognize the dance had something to do with Krishna when I saw the flute playing gestures!). We also dropped in on the instrument library, a hut filled with violins, tanpuras, veenas, mridangams, and two very special pianos. One dates back to 1804 and belonged to the founder of Kalakshetra (in remarkably good playing condition!), and the other is a more recent gift from the estate of M.S. Subbulakshmi, one of the most famous Carnatic classical singers of the 20th century. As a young woman in the days when actresses actually sang, she had a career in film, and as Gandhi’s favorite singer, she often performed for him. She just died a few years ago, so it’s a recent gift. Anyway, I got to touch the keys of Subbulakshmi’s piano!!

Over the weekend I got to visit one of the older British churches here, the Andrews Kirk, which appears to follow the Scottish rite in its worship. This is the place where I saw the pipe organ a month or so ago, and I finally got to hear it! Arul Siromoney, the choirmaster there is the son of one of the most respected, illustrious faculty members ever at MCC, Dr. Gift Siromoney. He was a mathematician and long-time head of the department of Statistics, but he was also a Renaissance man with interests that ranged from science to art to music to birds to archeology and beyond, and he touched the lives of many students and faculty members at MCC, all of whom still speak of him with awe. So I got to see the service, hear the choir and organ, and then stay for the rehearsal. When I visited Women’s Christian College a few weeks back, I met Arul’s wife, Dr. Anna Siromoney, head of WCC’s Physics department. When I expressed interest in visiting the Kirk, she tipped me off that the choir was preparing to sing a Haydn mass on the 18th. I told her I’d be in Kerala on the 18th, so she suggested attending the rehearsal the week before. So that’s what I did. I got to sing along for the rehearsal, which was great fun, even if it was difficult to read the tiny notes in the Haydn score. Arul asked for some feedback for the choir, which I was happy to provide. Given that the choir is tucked into a high-ceilinged alcove with the organ behind the pulpit/altar area where it’s sometimes difficult to hear even the piano accompaniment, they do a very fine job. Arul has then singing with proper Classical inflections and phrasing, and they have a very lovely soprano to do the virtuoso solo work in the Benedictus.

And then we went off for lunch! Dr. Anna was hoping to welcome me to their home, but they are in the middle of having the place painted, so things are somewhat discombobulated, and when the power went out after church, we all decided to head for a restaurant. She asked if I was homesick for American food after two months in India, and I thought for a few seconds and said, yes, that would be very nice, thank you! So it was off to Sparky’s an American diner run by an American who has spent time in Madison, Rockford, and Chicago’s western suburbs! “Never trust a skinny chef” is the place’s motto, seen on the sign out front, the placemats, and elsewhere. The walls are covered with state license plates, American kitsch, and the kind of signage you would see at Famous Dave’s (mmmm!) back home. And the menu had four pages chock full of the foods you might see at a diner back home! This is the closest I’ve seen to real American food in all my time in India—hamburgers, Philly beef, lasagna, etc., etc. Yes, you can get a hamburger with chicken or with a veggie pattie, but here you can also get real beef! I usually feel uncomfortable eating beef in India, but after two months here it sounded really good, so I ordered the Philly beef with onions, green peppers, and extra cheese. Yum! Just a little sweet, as if there was a bit of teriyaki sauce, but otherwise very good! Joining us were the soprano soloist and her friend, Arthur, the philosophy student Gabriel asked to accompany me into the city, and Arul’s mother! She is also something of a legend at MCC, and I remembered enough of my MCC history to know which department she was in and that she had written an article mathematical relationships in kolam patterns (the rice chalk drawings you see on sidewalks and roads just outside of many front doors, especially elaborate and colorful for holidays like Pongal.) She was very pleased that I knew something about her and her work, and we eventually discovered that I had also spent time in the house they once lived in on campus—when I had been invited to Merlin Isaac’s house for dinner early in my stay. What fun!

The last few days have been back to the grind! Monday, I gave a lecture on Music and Numbers for the MCC Math Association—probably 200 faculty and students in attendance in Anderson Hall, the college’s biggest lecture hall, used for conferences, special lectures, and the like. And today I gave a lecture that had nothing to do with music! My good friend Joseph Sathiaraj asked for a lecture on U.S. Gender Equality (or the lack thereof!) for students in the college’s values education program. And now that I’ve finished it, I think that will be my last MCC lecture for Term 1, which ends soon enough anyway. (Term 2 begins the last week of November, and even is later than scheduled due to the college closing for 2 weeks in August over swine flu concerns.) But better than finishing off the semester or lectures or anything else … Virginia arrives late tomorrow night!!! It’s been a long seven weeks since I last saw her (Skype conversations, even twice-daily, still don’t count as seeing her!), and I can hardly wait. I’ll have time tomorrow to pick up around the room and get ready. Her flight comes in at 11:05 p.m., but it’ll probably be midnight before she can leave the terminal. It’s going to be a looooong wait at the gate! We get a few days on campus, lunch with Sathiaraj and a get-together with Suri, and then it’s off to Kerala and Ooty for a week—some real vacation, and cooler temperatures, especially in Ooty. Kerala is on the lush side of India, the place where the monsoon first hits in May or June. Beautiful beaches, vegetation, and mountains (the Western Ghats). The call it God’s Own Country! Since I grew up in God’s Country (LaCrosse, Wisconsin), we’ll just have to see about that! We’ll be on a houseboat for a couple of nights on Kerala’s lovely, serene backwaters. Ooty is at about 7,500 feet elevation, and they’ve been getting warmer than usual October weather this week … all the way up to 70 degrees Fahrenheit! Sounds really good about now!