Peace to You - Peace Pieces

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Liner notes below. Look for the album by name in 7digital, Amazon Music, AMI, anghami, Apple iTunes, Audible Magic, AWA, Boomplay, Deezer, Facebook, Hungama, iHeartRadio, iMusica, InProduction, KDigital, KKBox, Kuack, Lissen, NetEase Cloud Music, Nuuday, Pandora, Peloton, Qobuz, Saavn, Slacker Radio, SoundExchange, Spotify, Synchtank, Tencent Music Entertainment, Tidal, TikTok, TouchTunes, Trebel, Tuned Global, and YouTube. Enjoy!

Peace Pieces

Reminder: let these bits of music relax you, their purpose is not to challenge or disturb your calm. Let the music flow around you and let it go by: you're not obligated to engage, interpret, nor evaluate it in any way.

My intention in this album aims to include international (world) sources as inspiration for the calming piano music that I intend to play. Classical Indian music uses entirely different scales, and many of them, which which I borrow, without pretending to play within those styles. The microtones (steps between conventional western ideas of adjacent notes) and bending (as with sitar and tabla) are beyond the reach of a fixed pitch instrument like the piano anyway.

Some forms of music have scales and notes that do not align with western ideas of intervals, such as the Thai or Balinese 7 (equally spaced) scale.

Apologies in Advance

Many thousands of years of evolution and progression in different cultures have developed a number of highly sophisticated musical forms all over the world. It is not my intention to make a mess of those traditions. My intention is to draw on some available elements of those global traditions and interpret them in my own limited way. Naming the pieces is not meant to recreate the original; rather, referring to those names only wishes to credit the sources and encourage others to expand their playlists.

Bhairav

In Hindustani and Carnatic (north and south India) a Bhairav raga is played mostly in the morning. It uses a scale that is evocative of the location of its origin among south Asian cultures, and is also closely tied to middle eastern music. The specific scale (starting with C) is sometimes rendered as C Db E F G Ab B (which returns to C to close the cycle). Staying mostly on those notes, an improvisational journey can travel up and down as much as three octaves.

It is a big stretch to call this a Bhairav - authentically playing one would involve specific sequences in the rising scale and a second set in the descending scale. Some of the expected forms are presented in the "Additional Resources" below, and point out that making the music correctly, I should use microtonal sounds that are not possible on a conventional piano. I make departures from the conventions and play my own improvisational thread.

The scale is close to what it should be, even though the melodic line is improvised.

Sostenuto Pedal

Other than vocalizations and drums (as in hand drums like the tabla), instruments seem to play single notes over a drone. So before starting, I push down hard on the C major chord notes with both hands, hold with the sostenuto (the middle pedal) and let the C, E, and G strings resonate when sympathetic keys are played. Of course I do cheat and use the damper pedal to sustain the echo and resonance - particularly noticeable on the Ab when repeated, it's definitely using the damper pedal.

Additional Resources

(How it should be done.) https://www.indianclassicalmusic.com/bhairav with western notation of scale and phrasing, starting with D as Sa: https://www.indianclassicalmusic.com/s/Bhairav-Full-Score.pdf

Microtones and the form https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gKRQBDruDqQ starting in Bb.

Other Ragas

Some ragas are intended to be played at specific times of day; others during a season such as Spring, and others in rainy weather such as the monsoon. To play one at an inappropriate time is as wrong as Christmas music before Thanksgiving, or a funeral dirge at a wedding event.

2. Todi

Todi is a morning melody. Its scale is C Db Eb F#G Ab B (and back to C). The rising skips the G on the way up, the descending scale plays all the notes. Here also, the objective is not so much to recreate or present the Todi, but rather use some of the elements; for example, the scale, and use it in the style of what I do.

Sostenuto Pedal

I use the Sostenuto pedal in the same way as the Bhairav to allow a semblance of a drone sound - the C major chord resonates on C and G keys.

Additional resources

Todi raga. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Todi_(raga)

Forms and phrasing of elements of Todi: https://www.indianclassicalmusic.com/todi

3. Great Big World

Following the four chords D E7 G and A.

4. Dusk

A quiet flowing piece, six and half minutes of a sun's glow. A familiar relaxing feel to the Em, C, G, B(7).

5. For Dirck

This is an improvisation on the base of one of Dirck's favorite songs, up one full note to key of A. Hum along, or sing it out loud if you find it.

6. Little Blue for Greg

The minor blues scale C – E♭ – F – G♭ – G – B♭ might sound familiar.

7. Maqam Hijaz Kar

The scale of this maqam turns out to be, upon examination, the same approximate notes that are in the Bhairav Raga. https://www.maqamworld.com/en/maqam/hijazkar.php documents the steps in between the individual notes in their stepping from the root to and beyond the octave. Here I co-opt the scale (again) and play with the root being D. It only seems natural that the scale carries over between Indian and Arabic music, since both are on the Silk Road going east and west through all the territories, carrying not only materials for trade, but music to be enjoyed.

8. Cloud in the Sky

Watching the cloud(s) tumbling through the blue. Variations on Cm Ab Eb Bb alternating? with Cm Ab Fm Bb, or mixing it up with Cm Ab Eb Fm Bb.

9. Daydreaming

I hope you find this pleasant.

Improvisation and AI - a Speculation

I wonder if an important part of the human competition with AI to produce what we call music, has as a key differentiator this distinction: AI is backward-looking and extracts what it can from a corpus, or body of work from which it analyzes, picks out patterns and rehashes musical elements that already have been written down. Improvisation is always brand new, and while its foundation is a well established set of traditions and practices, the very nature of improvisation is that it is not based on past performance and is constantly seeking something new.

Improvisation as an art and musical practice needs more than ever to be part of musical education to differentiate human generated music from machine generated music. One might even argue that Indian classical music has had thousands of years to evolve, and the outcome of all this evolution is a strong emphasis on improvisation. To that point, music with improvisation can be viewed as more advanced than fixed notes (dare we say dead music, locked in concrete?), no matter how complex and sophisticated those notes are assembled, orchestrated, and syncopated.

In the movie about Mozart (Amadeus), the young Mozart is composing and changing, and yes, improvising on the fly, all the time. "What if we did this? Or that?" It's really too bad that Mozart and much of "classical" music have been locked into an immutable "right way" of playing that music. Without the flexibility and freedom of improvisation, we become easy targets of analysis by AI.

Jazz in western music can also be seen as a late evolution and an advanced form of music. That could also be explored in another conversation.

A natural part of classical Indian music seems to be, that because it contains so much improvisational content, that it is hard to write down. It is exactly the unwritten part of the music that will continue to resist pattern matching and analysis by AI robots. AI is great at copying material out of a library of existing material, but if it's not written or recorded in some way, what's there to copy?

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