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The sounds emanating from Sandip Burman's instruments
may have offered a sustained tone of familiarity to
those who have heard "Within You, Without You" from the
Beatles' "Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band"
album.
But, as about 100 Eden Prairie High School music
students learned April 25, classical music in India
entails tonal patterns, rhythms and teaching methods
that contrast with those of Western or European music.
Burman is a virtuoso on several instruments, including
those that he and two of his pupils, Matt Berger and
Nick Kokonas, demonstrated at EPHS - tabla, a
multi-tonal goatskin drum, and sitar, a 20-string
instrument that Beatle George Harrison introduced to the
Western ear in songs such as "Norwegian Wood."
Kokonas said it's taken him six months of practicing two
to three hours per day on the tabla to achieve the
skills he utilized to play at EPHS with Burman.
It started, he said, when he answered a classified ad to
learn the tabla. He soon learned that the instrument was
far more precise than he had realized - and that
learning to play it required not just sight-reading
notes on a staff, but also connecting with the oral
tradition that has been the means of conveying Indian
music through almost 4,000 years.
EPHS students got a taste of how that happened.
It began with clapping and counting as Burman played.
"Don't drag, don't drag - because I am improvising over
you," he said.
The basics of Indian music, Burman said, come down to
the rhythmic pattern, or tala, and the melodic mode, or
raga.
For the EPHS students, participation entailed handclaps
finger-snaps and repetition of tone, plus some direction
assistance from EPHS Band Director Rich Berggren.
The playing of the instruments was left to Burman and
his pupils.
Kokonas said the tabla emits distinct sounds, depending
on where it is struck on the goatskin head, and how.
"I practiced [methods of hand-striking the drum] four
months with a towel over the drum head," he said,
"before I even got a sound out of the instrument."
The sitar's strings - made with unwound wire, which is
one reason for their long-sustained sound - must be
precisely tuned, Burman said.
When an EPHS student asked how long Burman had played
his music, he replied, "Definitely not from yesterday."
He said he began learning at age 6, despite his family's
poverty and his parents' ambitions for him that didn't
include music. (His mother wanted him to be a doctor.)
Burman said he came to the
United States in 1988,
and made his living working in motels, while introducing
himself and his music at universities.
"Without having connections in your Rolodex," he told
the students, "you can make it happen. If I can make it
happen coming from a village where I learned by
candlelight, you can do it, too."
But even people who do not aspire to be professional
musicians can gain much from learning about music from
throughout the world, Burman said.
"No matter what you do," he said, "it makes you more
humble, more experienced,
more aware of what is going on."
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