Date: February 3, 2012Venue: Asia Society (NY)
I sat down to a concert by two Iranian classical masters – tar and setarist Hossein Alizadeh and frame-drum player Pejman Hadadi – with few preconceptions but many questions: Firstly, isn’t it spelled sitar? Secondly, what in the hell is a frame drum? Will my experiences listening to George Harrison prove enough to prepare me for the experience? Will they actually play “Tomorrow Never Knows”? How many times?
Sitting cross-legged on his mat, like a bodhisattva privately meditating, Alizadeh began a slithering improvisation on his lowest strings that grew more and more complex and labyrinthine until Hadadi entered and they settled into an emotional rhythm together. Alizadeh’s music is that of a true master. It arrives straight from the soul without physical impediment, the instrument an amplifier, not an obstacle, for the blood of his veins and the air of his lungs. His concentration was superhuman. Although he played without breaks for hour-long stretches, each note was a bursting seed from which great flowering vines of music limbed and leafed.
As far as I could tell, the performance alternated Alizadeh’s free improvisations with set pieces in which Hadadi joined him. Hadadi was clearly a virtuoso, coaxing speech from his frame drum by tickling, teasing, tapping, palming, plucking, strumming, slapping, chopping, knuckling, and touching his drum in every conceivable way. The variety of timbres he achieved from playing a single drum was astounding, and the quickness with which his fingers whipped across the drum’s head and scurried over its rim was staggering.
Two sets of uninterrupted music lasted roughly an hour each, with a brief intermission in between. The music was, objectively, boring, drawing on a single mode with little contrast in dynamic or tempo, but its lack of variety focused the listener’s ears towards the beauty of sound inscribed upon silence, rather than the work’s complexity or the performer’s virtuosity. It showcased the wonder of a plucked string and a struck drum, celebrating how captivating physical vibration is with minimal ornamentation. And, although there were times when my Western Mind did become bored, the music was so inexplicably wonderful that I dreaded its inevitable cessation as one might dread turning off a hot shower on a cold winter’s night. Regardless of its ability to hold my intellectual interest, the music was undeniably preferable to silence, almost urgently and frighteningly so.
The music was egoless, uninhibited, meditative, and spiritual. My experience proved so fulfilling that it left me wondering why the West has failed to celebrate music-making as a spiritual exercise in the same way as Eastern traditions. Western music is flash formality, and competition, capitalism.
This night was a prayer, all spirit, no body.
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