It’s story writing season again!

It sure has something to do with this time of the year. Somehow winter and the approaching festivities always seem to trigger the dormant story writing instincts in me! Ideas and scratches I had been thinking of months back just demand to be put into words! So here goes my latest stab at it. Yet to think of a name though….suggestions?

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Fifth night in a row of no inspiration. Of scores of scratch recordings deleted minutes after being created. Of tunes abandoned midway out of sheer despair and discontentment.  And a strange feeling of disconnect with her own creations. This prolonged, all pervasive creative block baffled Sowmya, for only a year back she was brimming with ideas for what was to be her dream concert, the grandest so far in her musical journey. More ideas than she could keep a track of. This was when she had started to collaborate with some very innovative musicians from different parts of the globe. In her quest to find out what the conglomeration of such varied musical styles could evolve into. She had envisioned this grand concert that would let her music interplay with that of some of her admired musicians, creating the kind of universal sound that only perfect blend of diversity could create. The concert, her first true cross national venture was finally about to happen in a matter of two months in LA.
Was this the time for such an unfathomable creative void to submerge her?

She stepped out into the patio of her California apartment that had been her home for the last few months leading to the concert, and stared into the stoic stillness of her backyard and the stretch beyond. Her mind wandered around all that had had gone by in the past one year. And before. Things were different a year back. Her music, that had been an extension of her mind, thoughts and all those sensations that could not be articulated in any other way, had struck a deep chord with followers of the art and had started to reach out to distant shores. Giving her a sense of connectedness, of belonging.
Ever since Sowmya had begun to take her singing lessons as a child, playing with tunes and rhythm was her favorite pastime. She would sing or play on the piano a piece she had just learned, tweak a few notes here and there, alter a few patterns, insert a few pauses between the notes and marvel at how dramatic the impact could be. It was as if the whole tune got a new identity altogether. She would often be so engrossed in this pursuit that she would have to be pulled away from her chair and dragged into the the real, mundane world for life to go on. When she started attending college, she found two friends who turned out to be the perfect companions for her to dwell further in her madness! Harini, a budding violinist and Karthik, an aspiring keyboardist and sound engineer.  They, along with some other transient members, formed their own troupe here. Giving Sowmya the platform to permute notes and patterns and churn out music to her heart’s content.

Her musical umbrella began to widen. When she worked with Karthik she realized what magic intricate layering of sound could create. The visual sound-forms on the computer screen intrigued her. A different kind of experimentation now caught her fancy. Of recording and superimposing musical tracks in different ways. Of placing  bits and pieces of music beneath layers and playing a hide-and-seek game with the listeners.

With Harini’s accompaniment her music gained a new dimension. Music that was hitherto a solitary endeavor now started to evolve into a dialogue between the voice and the violin, a  game of inter-spacing and juxtaposing.

It was during these days that Sowmya’s music  had started to take a definite form. A form that  got very intimately tied to her very essence, to the person that she was. It had a definite pattern, a definite sound that you could tell from afar. Her own training in Indian classical music lent it the complex interweaving of notes, the interplay of ragas that formed the backbone of most of her compositions. Her quest to experiment with varied sounds and instruments, added the richness and the aroma to it, lavish and yet subtle. Interleaved in a way that you wouldn’t notice the presence of so many layers unless you listened with keen attention. But if you took away any one of them like she tried to do much later for her improvised shows, they would feel incomplete. She loved to experiment, to imbibe other genres into her work, but without letting go of her own form and identity.

Soon their music began to resonate with people and they created a niche of their own. There were these little milestones on the way, each worth cherishing for its own reasons. It started with an audio blog that caught the attention of one of the nation’s prominent music producers. Enough to offer them their first album. There wasn’t much of looking back since then. More albums, concerts in various parts of India and the US, immense popularity, critical acclaim and some of the most coveted awards in the Indian fusion music category all happened in due course of time. Most importantly, Sowmya and her team were credited with bringing a fresh perspective to new age music, for being subtle yet bold, for laden intricacies beneath apparent simplicity. In the recent years, traces of their musical influence could be found in the compositions of younger musicians. A loop here, a beat there. As they say, there’s no form of flattery truer than that!

“We seem to have struck a formula.” One of her associates once said. “We know exactly the kind of music that would work with the audience”.

This seemed to worry Sowmya a little. The notion of coming to a standstill, of halting, of having discovered it all bothered her. To her, music was a constantly evolving journey. With no specific destination and with no predefined route.

It was this same month last year  when at a world music festival in San Jose, she met some very talented musicians from different continents. There was a percussionist from Central Africa, a New York Philharmonic composer and a flautist from India. At the end of a Friday night jamming session, they just decided to take this combined venture further. And that is how the idea of the LA concert was born. It was unlike anything Sowmya had been a part of her so far. In terms of scale, grandeur, sheer musical breadth and diversity. For weeks to come, this was all that she could think of, she had lost track of space and time thinking of one concept after another for a theme track that would tie the show together.

And then around this time, something happened that stirred her and her close associates from their blissful trance. It started with their most recent album, featuring some of their finest work,  fading into oblivion, completely overshadowed by the debut musical venture of a new artist who went by the name of GD. His more flamboyant and vivid style, with instantly catchy tunes soon became a rage. while most other successful musicians around that time bore at least tinges of semblance with what was by now known as the “Sowmya sound”, GD seemed to revolt against all of that!

And for all those who raised the age old “one album wonder” cry, his next album allayed all doubts. He went on to win most of the awards that year that had for the past few years been Sowmya and her team’s prerogative.

By herself Sowmya would not have been irked. She had never dreamed of monopolizing the Indian music world. In fact, being the person she was, she might have contemplated collaborating with GD as well, out of sheer curiosity as to what such seemingly opposing styles could merge into. What actually perplexed her were some elusive remarks from within her own camp.

“You don’t get it, you’re too naive Sowmya” said Harini. “What his popularity is causing is a permanent shift in people’s sensibilities.” “Once they get accustomed to a staple of such loud and on-your-face music, they will never have the patience to go treasure-hunting with our kind of stuff..or listen repeatedly to let them grow.”

“Really? People’s taste is as homogeneous as that?” was Sowmya’s spontaenous reaction.

“Well, I guess we will have to do some thinking….we might have to adapt ourselves to the  changing times.”

This very seemingly reasonable idea seemed to startle Sowmya. “And how do you do that? Not that I have any resentment against any other style, but how do you compose the kind of music, that is just not you? That you cannot connect to?”

“Will you forever be so…so removed from the real world?”

Something inside Sowmya rebelled. Asking her to be something she was not never went down well with her. One part of her wanted to hold to her own and be more like herself, different from the rest of the world just to refuse to give in. The other part secretly feared that Harini and her other friends must just be right. Their music might just begin to lose touch with the audience if it did not evolve in some externally dictated ways.

One of their live performances soon to follow reinforced Sowmya’s silent fears. Perhaps it was a bit of a preconceived notion, but the disconnect with the audience was palpable! That’s the power of performing live, you cannot escape noticing how exactly people react to your music. The captivated silence, the near hypnotized atmosphere was missing. And she could tell that Karthik and Harini felt it too. You can just sense that sort of a thing when you have been performing as a team for years.

They did not talk about that show thereafter. But Sowmya could sense the passion for creation waning within her team. It had started to feel more like a task, a chore rather than a spontaneous act that it once used to be. Does art thrive only on appreciation? It did not feel so back those days when they spent days and nights in their studio jamming and creating pieces just for the fun of creation.

A journal article she caught glimpse of proclaimed  GD’s music as having “the same freshness as the Sowmya from three years back”. He just might turn out to be the new Sowmya in the world of Indian music, it claimed! Gosh, three years is pretty soon to be talked of like a has been! Then there were these plethora of comparative critiques, shredding apart elements of their styles and pitting them against each other to say which is better. Does it really matter so much? She wondered.

Something struck her as odd about herself. For someone who would keenly listen to all the new releases of her contemporaries with a childlike excitement, she had given both GD’s supremely successful albums a miss. It was a “That is not me, that is not MY kind of music, I don’t want to have anything to with it” kind of indifference. Was she subconsciously reacting this way to the repeated urges to change her style and to adopt some of GD-like broad strokes in her compositions?

She decided to keep aside the music journals and get her focus back on composing the theme track for her LA concert. She was who she was, and there was no reason for her to be moved by what others had been doing. What could be a better way to dispel these nagging thoughts than to create something honest and beautiful that resonated with her own being? She knew this one had to be extra special, an epitome of all that she was and all that her music stood for. She strove to perfect every note, every chord. Every pause in between. To fill each second of the piece with richness, with embellishments, with a wide gamut of moods and expressions. Something like a mega epic rolled into a ten minute track. But somehow it all fell short. It was like looking for something elusive- a mirage like experience! Five consecutive nights of emptiness worried her. She not being able to connect to her own music was a problem far more profound than the lukewarm audience response she had sensed a month back. And this was something she had never experienced before!

At the break of dawn, she decided to head out of her residence to a local coffee shop nearby. She ordered a Cappuccino and lounged on one of the couches facing the glass wall. Bleary eyed and with a numb mind. People began to trickle in soon after, beginning yet another day, yet another routine.  A constant humdrum began to fill the space that bore complete silence a while back.

How does it feel to be just like one of the many people around, she thought. To drift through each moment and each day with a blank canvas, to go with the tide and not have a parallel universe running constantly inside one’s mind? Now that she was at least temporarily bereft of her creative spark, a passive state of mind was not a bad thing to try.
And on the same line, what is it like to not choose the kind of music one listened to so consciously? Just sit back and let the radio play whatever it pleased like so many people do? For someone who had never thought she would want a break from composing, Sowmya was gradually getting into  what is commonly known as a vacation mode. She took out her phone, pulled up Pandora and created a very generic station. One song after another, some familiar, others not so much. She consciously tried not to get too engrossed, not to think too deeply of them but just bask in the moment. In the warm Californian morning sunshine, a cup of coffee and a laid-back morning. All the exhaustion from the relentless thinking and sleeplessness of the past few days now descended upon her and she caught a wink or two.

When she vaguely noticed GD as the artist name for the next song on her phone, it brought a smile to her face. At the irony of the whole situation. She listened on.

Surprisingly, there was something about the song that made her want to go back to it. Nothing particularly striking at first, just something about that refrain and the beat that seemed to lure her back. Even though she found the patterns to be predictable, there was something appealing about the simplicity. Could something that plain really be that enticing? She played it again. And then one more time. Without quite realizing what it was that drew her to it. She had often told herself that this was not her kind of music, what was this connection she felt with it then? The kind of connection that she been longing to feel with her own music of late! In terms of structure it was much simpler than her own music, but what addictive power that simplicity had! Was there really such a thing as “her kind of music” and “not her kind of music” then? Or was all good music universal in appeal? How strange was it that she should begin to identify with a kind of music that was considered to be antithetic to all that she represented?

It took a while for the moment to sink in. Here she was, sitting in a coffee shop, held captive by the work of someone who however indirectly was part of the reason for her current state of void. How could something so beautiful be the background cause for so much resentment and despair? And how could she have judged it without giving it a fair amount of her mental space?

As she listened on, suddenly, like a moment of epiphany, it started to rouse her imagination. It gave her a whole new direction of thought for her new composition. For example, what if she toned down the embellishments in her new theme and tried simpler patterns instead? What if instead of altering the patterns so frequently, she repeated them in loops to give them a chance to grow on the listeners? Did she really need to pack so much into that one track? Maybe it could convey more with a lot less. She needn’t have the answers. As long as the had a new set of questions to explore, she knew it would be a wholesome experience getting back into her studio. She started to visualize the entire sound-scape in her mind. The kind of imagery that she could picture whenever she was one with her music!

When Sowmya finished the first draft of her concert theme, she knew she had rediscovered herself. The piece still carried her signature style and melodic qualities, but stood out significantly from anything she had done so far. It was more vibrant, more spontaneous and simpler in structure, and had more repeated patterns that made it instantly catching on.
One of those milestone moments, when you know your music has moved to a different phase!
True, inspirations do come when you least expect them. And there wouldn’t be much to art if not for these serendipitous discoveries. With a new-found tranquility and a  heart that felt light after a long time, she called up Harini and Karthik to come over and listen to her latest venture!

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