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Daily Blogging is Difficult! I was away overnight and my roommate was finishing moving out, so I missed one!  I did music activities while I was away.  Read 0n...

Being a citizen of the Western world we - particularly being from the USA - we have a vocabulary of popular classical music.  I was visiting one former roommate and his wife from Friday evening to Saturday evening. They live near the beach so we assumed we would go when the setting up the visit.  It rained nearly all of the time.

What did we do?  We ate Indian food twice - yum - this is the couple I went to Delhi, India for - to attend their wedding and many festivities around it.  We went to see Inglorious Basterds. We ate out at their favorite buffet.  I knew that it might rain, so I had my computer with a MIDI input computer to do with Sibelius. We did this.

When we started I was reminded of the solfege syllables of Indian music: Sa, Ri or Re, Ga, Ma, Pa, Dha, Ni, and  Sa.  My former roommate, Pradeep, knew them.  He had some music education in his general education.  His wife, Shweta, has had no music education at all.

When I was in India at the wedding everyone was perplexed about me being a musician - I believe I wrote about this - another problem with blogging is that I will have to eventually read all of it to see what I wrote!  The women of the family asked me to sing something so I sang "I Love The Flowers".  This is a round or canon and the women followed and sang along.  One of the Aunts was particularly interested and she and a couple of other women told me they had heard of this type of singing before. One or two may have done this.

Shweta did some playing of the Sa Ri Ga..... scale.  We did a couple of compositions.  Then, Pradeep took a turn.  He played pentatonic tones on the black keys.  In his over 22 months of living with me he had spoken of wanting to learn the piano.  I believe I gave him one 10 or 15 minute lesson.  He remembered this idea.  Shweta played again using the pentatonic tones.  This reminds me, I told them I would send both a PDF and a MIDI file of their Sibelius compositions.

After this I asked Shweta if she knew any classical music and I realized she know absolutely none of the music "everyone" seems to know.  Pradeep recognized the pieces - "Ode to Joy", Allegro from "Eine Kleine Nachtmusik", and "Fur Elise".  He said he knew them in India, but he also moved to the US at age 16 to attend college and has lived her for nearly 12 years now.

I realized how much there is to know about music.  I started reading about Indian music and decided to copy and paste the following:

In Indian music the seven main notes (swaras) of a (raga) scale (beside the microtones) are named shadja, rishabh, gandhar, madhyam, pancham, dhaivat and nishad, usually shortened to Sa, Ri (Carnatic) or Re (Hindustani), Ga, Ma, Pa, Dha, and Ni and written S, R, G, M, P, D, N. Collectively these notes are known as the sargam (the word is an acronym of the consonants of the first four swaras). Sargam is the Indian equivalent to solfege, a technique for the teaching of sight-singing. Sargam is practiced against a drone. The tone Sa is not associated with any particular pitch. As in Western moveable-Do solfege, Sa refers to the tonic of a piece or scale rather than to any particular pitch.

The font changed again!  It is bigger and I do not know how to make it small again.

I am thinking more and more about how different music is between cultures.  I have been learning more about other culture's music, particularly the Japanese pentatonic scales.  I somehow never touched on these scales before.  I am very happy learning so many new things by being more open and active and working with adults, even if just in a social setting.

Still interviewing roommates.  Two days until Sept. 1st so I may have a week or two break.  That is fine with me - it gives me a chance to breathe and clean between roommates.