SPIC MACAY Does Mmmkay

Classical Indian music is wildly spiritual but intensely technical. It is melodic but atonal, complexly metered but sometimes rhythmless, structured but freeform. And for the four musicians – two masters, two protégés — who played the Carnatic music that encompasses all these qualities, Monday night at Barnes hall was both performance and lesson.
The auditorium upstairs in Barnes Hall, the red brick building directly opposite Willard Straight and alongside the Cornell Store, is really the ideal live music venue on campus. The room, which seats maybe 150 or 200, creates an incredibly soothing aura — old red bricks frame a few stained-glasses windows that can only be opened or closed with long poles, and a solid wood stage rises naturally above three sections of seating surrounding it. A strange combination of slanted ceilings and their points of intersection turns the challenge of live music acoustic into a breeze — this spot was made for music.
Everyone from Cornell student groups like the klezmer and percussion ensembles to big stars in jazz like Toshiko Akiyoshi and Lew Tabecken have performed there. Later this week, two shows at 8 p.m. on Friday and Saturday will be performed.This past Monday, however, was the once a semester concert presented by SPIC MACAY, a student group dedicated to preserving classical Indian music.
This semester the group decided to showcase the music of Southern India and bring in Chitravina Ravikiran, a child prodigy of the instrument that shares his name who at age two had already mastered 325 ragas (melodic scales) and 175 talas (rhythmic cycles). Chitravina introduced his instrument by explaining that anybody could play it merely by picking and fretting to right notes and strumming 11 rhythm notes. A little bit like a steel-pedal or lap guitar, Ravikiran revealed that he used a very ancient material, “Teflon” to damper the strings, cracked another joke about the instrument’s ability to mimic a singing woman’s voice, and the group was off.
The music that followed, two hours in two sets, ignited a feeling in the audience that might be called drowsy enlightenment. Ravikiran and his protégé, the 16-year old violinist Suhas Rao doubled up on a melodic riff. When his master diverged from the notated raga, Rao calmly followed, both accompanying and soloing throughout the pieces. All the while Trichy Sankaran, a master of the mirdangam, a two-headed drum, filled in simple 4/4 phrases with an infinite array of rhythmic alignment.
While these three players dominated the sound, the drummer’s protégé Ganesh Ramanarayanan, actually a Cornell grad student, sat serenely in the background with an instrument in one hand that went mostly unplayed. The second set, dominated by an easily 45-minute conversation between the two drummers, changed all that. Beginning with long interpretative solos, the two were eventually matching rhythm, dynamic, and even pitch every other measure.
A lesson for everyone on stage, the performance was also a lesson in communication. Before beginning, each musician looked at one another in the eye and loosely bobbed their head to demonstrate their readiness. During the heat of improvisation, they turned to one another and just by opening the eyes a little bit gave a warning about their improvisatory plans. Most of them frequently looked at the audience, gauging our own expressions and emotions and designing their music around it. Together, we all created something beautiful.