WFHB Bloomington Community Radio
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 59:00 — 81.0MB)
Our opening song is the opening track off of Metaraga, the 2020 release by the Purna Loka Ensemble for Origin Records. This is “Syzygy.”
In case you’d never heard that word (like me) I’ll offer the definition: A syzygy is the nearly straight-line configuration of three celestial bodies (such as the sun, moon, and earth during a solar or lunar eclipse) in a gravitational system; it can also be applied to any two things, alike or not, that are yoked together in relation to one another.
And according to today’s guest, Purna Bangere, this composition conveys the full force of metaraga.
Metaraga is a systematic musical framework deeply inspired by ideas and concepts in Algebraic Geometry introduced by Alexander Grothendieck. The journey may start from any of the known genres, traverse into other musical worlds, and ultimately arrive in a “no man’s land,” i.e., music with no East or West.
This framework combines the full range of Indian microtones and oscillations, such as meend and gamak in Hindustani music, and kampitam and sphuritam in Carnatic music, with Western-style key changes, or modulation, and polyphony, which is music containing two or more simultaneous lines of independent melody. Moreover, in the framework, blues-style melodies evocatively emerge as the best technical and aesthetic bridges between the Indian and Western genres.
Most of Bangere’s current compositional work is in collaboration with multi-Grammy-winning director of Turtle Island String Quartet, David Balakrishnan. Joining them to complete the Purna Loka Ensemble are bass virtuoso Jeff Harshbarger from Kansas City, and the talented Amit Kavthekar from Boston on Tabla.
Balakrishnan has said that Bangere “is finding a way to enter polyphony through the mathematics-based system and to change keys in a great, subtle way, without himself learning the Western system…He’s adding gamakas (oscillations) to known Western chord progressions, and nobody has done that to that level that I have heard.”
If you will recall from our show “The Raga Role,” on Carnatic music, or Indian Classical Music, Viren Murthy told us that raga was notoriously difficult to define. Today Bangere takes up the challenge on the way to describing how his system, the metaraga, expands the formal capacity of the raga.
Our show takes us from Mysore, India to Lawrence, Kansas, by way of Boston, Massachusetts along the arc of the musical education of Purna Bangere.
GUEST
Purna Bangere is a professor of mathematics at the University of Kansas, a trained Carnatic violinist, and the leader of the Purna Loka Ensemble.
RELATED
The Raga Role: On Caste and Carnatic Music (Interchange)
Indian American Math Professor Purnaprajna Bangere is Building Bridges Between Music and Math
MUSIC by the Purna Loka Ensemble
“Syzygy”
“Triality I”
“Triality II”
“Alabama”
“Fibration”
“Triality III”
“Abhogi Varnum” (ID underbed)
We also play a bit of Aretha Franklin’s 1972 “Amazing Grace.”
CREDITS
Producer & Host: Doug Storm
Executive Producer: Kade Young
