Uday Krishnakumar: On Hiding

The piece, On Hiding, is a template for a series of works that revolve around a fictitious music theatre tradition in North India, specifically Awadh. Music has always been in movement, also geographically. Instruments, forms of listening and presentation, even finger-picking patterns have crossed great distances and have been adapted to very remote contexts. On the other hand, musical genres are used as much to draw boundaries between social groups, ethnicities, languages as they are to create shared experience. In this piece, many aspects specific to the sensibility of each tradi- tion- ensemble coordination, tuning, phrasing- are held at an equal level of abstraction. Large areas of certain musical parameters, such as pitch position, are occluded and despecified, such that the little clearly defined material is in turn made to suggest an imaginary extension, impossibly containing incommensurable approaches. Both central European and hindustani classical music have over time absorbed extremely varied and contradictory musical cultures, reconciled within an often mythical theoretical continuity. By suppressing many norms of composition and performance practice, some of these attributes rise back to the surface with the possibility of meeting on foreign ground.

(Uday Krishnakumar)