In traditional Hindu practice, the Navaratri festival spans nine nights and ten days at the beginning of October, filling a week and a half with worship and dance. On campus, Navaratri started Wednesday and will continue through this Sunday, with program offerings including dance workshops, several concerts, a feast and a closing worship on Sunday morning.
To kick-off Wesleyan’s Navaratri observance, Professor Emeritus of Music Theory Lewis Rowell spoke on the music of Muthuswami Dikshitar, an esteemed early-19th-century South Indian composer. Rowell focused on Dikshitar’s nine-part composition Navagraha Krithis, in which each part represents one of the nine planets.
According to Rowell, the first seven sets in the Navagraha were written for a sick student to cure his affliction.
“The first seven will do you good and the other two have to be included, I suppose, because of the fearful consequences if you ignore them,” he explained.
Navigating an audience comprised of fellow professors, ethnomusicology graduate students and a few undergraduates, Rowell was able to make his discussion of Dikshitar and his Navagraha Krithis relevant to both the staid music scholar and the curious, unknowledgeable attendee. Rowell is profoundly in love with Dikshitar, his story, his music and the ways in which his music has come into being. As it was not written down in Western notation until 70 or 80 years after it was composed, it had to be recorded with novel techniques.
Sharing his intense love of Dikshitar, Rowell played several recordings of performances of Navagraha. The recordings displayed a highly inflected, angular use of language that ran against a counter rhythm which travelled with the speed and weight of what I would expect my feet to do, if I were to dance to the recording. As the music played, the room, half-filled with graduate students, transformed itself into a live accompaniment performed by 30 musicians. Staff distributed handouts to help the audience follow the performance. After he played the recording, Rowell mentioned that some portions of it were improvised.
As it sets up a framework for the rest of the Navaratri festivities on campus, Rowell’s colloquium catered to both an audience of dedicated musicians and to people who “just love South Indian music,” as he put it. While I wouldn’t describe myself in quite that way, there are still two-and-a half more days of Navaratri. Ask me how I feel in a week.
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