rounds

i have 3 music teachers here at the moment,,,,i am playing on an "onkelon" which is a bamboo chime that comes in all different scales for all different occasions, with the gardener and with his son the security guard here *who happens to have a dragon tattoo that goes all the way around his back and chest...as long as we are talking about "rounds". I am also learning with the gardeners uncle who is head of the womens gamelon orchestra for the temple...and that is on a gamelon made of metal that rings very loud and is played with a little wooden hammer.

every day i hang out by the sea with my onkelon, every now and then trying to learn one of the songs they have taught me, or just trying to figure out western tunes on it, or just clanging around with it. whenever the gardener or the guard are in the area, they pick up the bamboo sticks and suddenly play a little tune. I immediately grab my camera and make a little video of it so i can later try and learn it by listening to it about 100 times and copying it slowly slowly slowly until i think i've got it!

the music is hypnotic....it is like eating cookies, each time saying; this is the last one! and then taking one more...so each time they or i finish playing the rhythm, there is something there that just begs to do it again, because it is a "round"...it just starts all over again and goes on forever and ever.

and today after i had practiced a long time repeating again and again the rhythm and trying to "get it right"! i decided to take a break, and i picked up my hoola hoop and started to hoop on the beach....and it made me laugh...because it is all the same....everything i do goes around and around and around...and i realized that it really kind of sums up bali, this "round" music, and the cyclic way of life and ritual ( and what comes to mind is also the jewish wedding ceremony, and rings and simchat torah, and israeli dancing hora ) and i just kind of felt that there is something very feminine here in bali....this roundness to life, as compared to a linear western world....

and often when i am working so hard trying to decipher what the rhythm is, and i think "whats the big deal? If someone was playing Tchaikovsky it would also be difficult learning each hand and the speed of the fingers and each hand doing something different...what are you so in awe about their music?!" and there is just a feeling that it nourishes an entirely different place in the body because of its' cyclical nature....the soothingness of a "round" when we sing rounds....and the only actual changes are just the speed or the loudness of it, as this balinese music repeats very complicated rhythms that make one whole going round and round and just slowing it down or doing it quietly or the opposite.

so i feel that there is that same magic that the potters wheel had for me going round and round and making round vessels, and then turning myself round round round inside the hoop and making these round hoops and putting the colored tapes around and around and around so it matches up to where i started it, and then making bouquets of flowers based on a spiral going round and round and round with repetitive groupings of flowers which in the end make a round bouquet, it is now the gamelon, and repeating these interesting melodies that go round and round and have a little "twist" to them just before they begin again...

another interesting thing that i experienced was how the gardener always plays something that is way over my head....and it is such a challenge, and makes absolutely no sense whatsoever when i hear it....just a million notes all resembling each other in a million rhythms that it is impossible to figure out what the count of it is....and to even differentiate what the notes were! but it forces me to go beyond my limits more and more and after listening 30 times or more, i start to recognize something, a note here, or there, and play along, and then another note is added, and i try not to figure it out with my mind, but just allow myself to be led through it...and after a few hours i have succeeded in recognizing a few of the parts of it...and don't believe it! that from that incomprehensible slew of notes it begins to make some sense, and by the next day...i am playing along with it exactly and then letting go of the recording i have made and begin to play it solo....without thinking or looking at what i am doing...just letting what my body discovered, come rolling out...and it helps me believe in rav laitman when we read the zohar every morning, and he says to just listen and see the letters and don't try and understand anything and just make an effort to unite with the group and through the desire to unite a vessel will be created in which the light can fill it and the zohar will be revealed, not by your minds, but by the desire to unite into one vessel with the others....and just seeing how impossible it is to understand the music, and just by listening again and again without thinking ,but with a desire for it to reveal itself, suddenly what was hidden is revealed....