brettworks

“Riyaaz is the most secret part of yourself – the time you share with no one. You’re listening to yourself: you’re imperfect, as works-in-progress are. You’re self-absorbed, like a bird, and, like a bird, vulnerable to the danger of being discovered. Being interrupted is akin to a bird’s aloneness being shattered by movement. I’ve experienced this myself, and saw it in a woman practising for a performance of The Pirates of Penzance at Wolfson College in Oxford. The performance was to take place in the open air. She was warming up under a tree outside a room I was staying in for a few days. I kept very still, but moved slightly to hear her better. She didn’t see me, but stopped abruptly and then, like a frightened animal, darted away and vanished. Riyaaz, unlike performance, needn’t be creative. It is self-imposed. But it shares with aesthetic production a kind of selflessness of investment. You do it to survive as an artist, independent of the appreciation you may or may not get. I saw this in my mother: the matter of regular practice even when few cared for her music. She continued her vocal exercises, her honing of interpretation, into her eighties, as long as she was physically able.”

“Riyaaz comprises a continuity in the creative self. Unlike our professional and conscious personas, which have an integrity, an identifiability, our creative selves are broken and self-estranging. You write a story or novel or poem; soon, you feel no attachment to it, and don’t even know if it’s any good. It’s become inaccessible – as if the person who wrote it is a stranger. Of course, you act as if you still own the work, though the air of ownership is a pretence. Riyaaz is an intervention in the artist’s feeling of discontinuity; it’s what you must do every day, or every other day.”

“Anyone partaking of the arts must partake of riyaaz. Art is an acquired taste: our first experience of it is foreign, our approach to it sceptical. Over time, we may begin to take pleasure in it. This process – of outgrowing resistance and beginning to savour – is a kind of riyaaz.”

“He knew the ragas and talas. He acted as if he had time on his hands.”

“What does listening involve? For one, it has congruences with looking. The eye is an opening in the body through which the consciousness receives images, and through which it also repeatedly steps out. The eye might passively register a monument or traffic light. But when you stand on a balcony, or enter a lane by mistake, your eye lets the self leak out and be possessed by the lane’s life, and, through desire, become part of its existence, forgetting your own. Similarly, you look again, from the balcony, at a house you’ve never visited, and you’re seized by a reverie. Looking, at this point, isn’t taking in. It’s losing yourself.”

“The ear, too, is an opening. To listen might mean to passively take in: an instruction, or a communication. Or the ear may be enveloped, as when you’re listening to music. Or listening could involve desire, on hearing, for instance, a sound from a neighbouring house. You don’t know the source of the sound. Involuntarily, you depart yourself and and travel towards it. You’re gripped by a yearning for – and, through yearning, a slipping into – the unseen.”

“The improviser invents a problem in order to offer a solution – that’s one way of looking at layakari. Its foundations are mathematical.”

“Rhythm in modern Western music is largely the contribution of Africans and Latin Americans. The 4/4 in rock or funk elicits a mild but vigorous nod, and a rhythmic abutment of the chin or recurrent head-butt. The body, in its ennui, moves backwards and forwards. The ecstasy of layakari produces stillness. There’s no metronomic head movement because the improviser has moved far away from the composition’s tempo. Instead, the listener, if they’re educated in laya, and if they’re brave, may adhere to the original tempo with claps.”