Expanding

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In the three days since I last wrote my project has multiplied and expanded at least three-fold. Getting started was the hard part; now I’m just going with the flow and seeing where it takes me.

Already I’ve had three madal lessons with my teacher, and he has made it very clear on more than one occasion that he is willing to help me out with anything I need, above and beyond just madal lessons. I’ve met his family—his wife, mother, father, little boy, and nieces and nephews—and they’ve invited me to participate in picnics, outings, and festival celebrations with them. The little boy is learning to call me ‘uncle.’

My madal technique is improving; I can consistently make the ‘tang’, ‘tok’, ‘dhing’, ‘kha’, and ‘dhang’ sounds, and I’m practicing rhythms that incorporate each of these sounds. Each rhythm I learn comes from a specific Nepali ethnic tradition and is the base rhythm for a folk song. So far I’ve learned two Newari rhythms and two Tamang rhythms. Sometimes as I play the teacher will start humming the accompanying melodies. The lessons are structured with 15-30 minutes of review—straight repetition of the rhythms I’ve already learned, then a tea break when we talk about music teaching and other things, then I learn some new rhythms and we practice those for a while. At the end of the lesson we talk about the things we’ll do in the future, and then I leave.

Some of the things he’s offered to do in the future are take me to his schools to observe his music classes, take me to music competitions between schools, teach me more Nepali instruments and full Nepali songs, give me a chance to instruct his school students (when my spoken Nepali gets better), and invite some of his buddies over for jam sessions. This guy is turning out to be the perfect consultant for at least two big parts of my project: learning madal/Nepali music, and learning about grade-school music education.

Another part of my project that has started and is coming along nicely now involves me playing my clarinet and getting into the performing scene in Kathmandu. On my walk home on Friday I heard some English behind me, turned around, and met a guy carrying a guitar. After quick introductions he told me that he was playing a gig at the Lazimpat café later that night, and that I should join him on clarinet for some jamming. This whole exchange took about 2 minutes. Obviously I showed up, played, made a good name for myself, met a bunch of people—Nepalis and expats—and was invited to another gig this coming Saturday. Completely unexpectedly I ran into the guitar player again last night at a quiz event at a local pizza place, and we solidified the Saturday gig and talked about perhaps dinner and a practice session before then. He’s lived in Kathmandu for years now, he teaches English, and he has a Nepali wife, so he has a ton of connections with local popular musicians and venues. I’m excited to see where this takes me.

Yesterday was a Hindu women’s holiday called Teej; all of the married women wore red saris and went to the temples to dance and sing for their husbands, and the non-married women wore other colors and went to the temples to dance and sing for future husbands. It was great fun—I went to the outside of one of the major temples and watched some of the festivities. I didn’t understand a lot of it, and I wasn’t allowed in to the main areas, but the enormous bustling crowds of festival celebrants flooding the streets in every direction in the rain was a great sight to see! While there I met a German couple of travelers, and we went out for lunch afterward. There are monkeys in Kathmandu, and the majority of them live around the big temples, unrestrained. It’s still strange to see monkeys going about their business in a city, coexisting with humans, neither imposing too much on the other.

I came down with the traveler’s stomach bug really bad on Friday night after the gig, and I’m only beginning to recover some kind of normalcy in my inner workings. I drank only liquids for two days, and suffered through the heat and humidity and long walking of everyday life, and had a really bad time of it. I’m at the stage now where I’m fine during the day, but in the evenings, nights, and mornings I get unpleasantly nauseated. I’m looking forward for this to pass.

I’ve taken a few pictures on my wanderings, and I can display them with this post. I generally hate whipping out my camera and taking pictures like a western tourist, especially since I’m not a tourist, and tourists are to be looked down upon by anthropologists, but I do want you to be able to see some of the things that I see. I’ll try to post more and more as time goes on and I become more comfortable as a Kathmandu citizen.

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Comments

[Tom Offit]

Saludos
Robert, Sounds like you are off to an amazing start. Thanks for the detailed posts. I love them Regards, Tom