The Rite of Spring Eastern style

The Rite of Spring is celebrated today in another culture. March 22, 2008 is the start of the Hindu spring festival of Holi (Phagwa in Bhojpuri). My photo was taken last week at the gorgeous JAS Musicals shop in London which make the sitars seen in the photo.

Now playing - Tarun Bhattacharya santoor with Shiv Shankar Ray tabla on The Art of the Indian Santoor on the wide-ranging ARC label. The santoor is a hammered dulcimer (photo below) related to the Hungarian cimbalon and Chinese yang qin and is used for Hindustani raga, four of which are heard on the CD. Now read about the perils of Eastern tuning.


Header photo (c) On An Overgrown Path 2008. Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

Festival of light marks collapse of communism

Today, November 9, is the Hindu festival of Diwali. This is the "Festival of Light," when lamps are used to signify the victory of good over evil. At midnight on November 9 1989 good was victorious over evil in Europe, and East Germany's communist rulers opened the gates along the Berlin Wall after hundreds of people converged on crossing points.

The header photo was taken by me outside the Nicolai Church in Leipzig. It was here that a candle-lit vigil on October 9 1989 precipitated Die Wende. This was the peaceful revolution that brought down the East German communist regime, breached the Berlin Wall and redrew the political map of Europe. The Nicolai Church was also the venue for another great triumph of good over evil, the first performance of Bach's St John Passion in 1723.

Now playing - Olivier Messiaen's Turangalîla Symphony (Chailly, Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Decca 4366262). Light was important to Messiaen (left), and he described his Catholic faith as a 'theological rainbow'. His music was influenced by Hindu rhythms, and the title of the epic, and erotic, Turangalîla Symphony is a compound of two Sanskrit words. These can be broadly translated as 'rhythms of life and love'. Elsewhere David Derrick has written 'conscious musical syntheses of East and West tend to fail'. But Turangalîla certainly doesn't fail, and that's because Messiaen truly defined the over-used word genius.

More on Wende and Nicolai Church here, and a world exclusive picture of the Berlin Wall here. See post-Wende Berlin here.
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