Ryan Meehan, studying northern Indian music at a raga school in Japan:
Through a doorway on the garden deck, we enter a sunlit living room brimming with musical instruments and speaker equipment, where a handful of students are already seated around our instructor Sara Miyamoto.
Before she teaches raga, Miyamoto walks her students through a set of preparatory exercises — eyes closed, attention brought first to the body, then to sound, then to one’s place inside it:
Miyamoto’s prompts (as translated into my ear by Hiro) are not unlike those of an especially attuned yoga class, only instead of the repetitions of bodily poses, we begin cycling through clusters of notes at the foundations of kirana singing. Her voice is crystalline, gliding between pitches with precision, polishing the rough edges I hear in my own. A lesson like this requires a curious mixture of discipline and relaxation: one maintains concentration and control over one’s own tone, while at the same time giving oneself over to the larger sonority of the group.
Worth studying, this relationship between intentional focus on oneself and the act of blending with, ceding oneself to, the company of others.