Ca Trù performance

Musicians performing Ca Trù
16" x 12"
oil on wood, 2010

Yay, vacation! Finally time to watch the World Cup, but there ain't many games left: Holland is in the final, yay! After two games last weekend and a lot of sleeping I started right back into those paintings again, and music too. It took a while but the twentieth top 10 for the music year 2010 is written down. This particular top 10 reflects my inclination towards collecting field recordings from all over the world. The first place I look at in a record store is the used vinyl world music section. Last Sunday I ended up buying three used CDs and an LP from Jamaica/UK, Papua New Guinea, Peru, and India. Slowly this part of my collection is becoming interesting and bulky. I organize these geographically.

I promised to forward herein every tenth top 10, so here's the twentieth:

1. Mohanlal Rayani – Rãg Mãdh, Tãl Kharwa
   
2. Ca Trù performance (anon.), North Vietnam
3. Michael Hurley - Girl on the Billboard
   
4. Coralie Clément – Avec Ou Sans Moi
5. Massar Egbari featuring Donia Massoud – Wailing song
6. Melchior Bances y Pastoras – Pastoras de Mórrope
7. Gania and Famu – Funerary song weep
8. Pierre Henry – Psyché Rock
9. David Allen Coe - The Perfect Country and Western Song
10. Geechie Wiley – Last Kind Words Blues

The Melchior Bances tune comes from Traditional Music of Peru 4: Lambayeque. I wrote in one of the commentaries to last years Top 100 that I would buy every year one volume of the series, this is keeping my word (seven more years to go). The Geechie Wiley, #1 in the Top 100 1999, appeared in a dream. Gania and Famu come from a three CD set dedicated to the music of the Bosavi rain forest in Papua New Guinea, it belongs to my mini collection of weep singing. Coralie Clément I heard on NPR. My stepson Emil played David Allen Coe for me. The Michael Hurley is from a wonderful zine called PRISM index, compiled by a friend (Jeffrey Bowers, check it out: PRISMindex.com). Rayani is from the LP Hindustani: A Panorama of North indian Music. Yay, vacation is going to be great!

Sung Poetry of North Vietnam

Performer in Unesco documentary on Ca Trú
10" x 7.5"
pencil on paper, 2010

Top 100 updates: Spring and Summer remain slow. Soundtrack this past month are vuvuzelas, the most annoying instrument on earth. My least favorites instruments used to be Scottish pipes and Peruvian pan flutes but both I've grown to like and have been represented in past Top 100s. I don't think the vuvuzela will ever make it but the Dutch perform well in the World Cup so far and I continue to listen to this annoying instrument. I know people that really love the sounds (of traffic and such) of the big city, and according to the performer the Lord Buckley, the spinning wheel was Mahatma Gandhi's favorite instrument of all India.

I didn't paint for two weeks but today, a nice hot and quiet Sunday, I worked with this image of a Vietnamese performer of Ca Trú, a traditional form of sung poetry. The image comes from a video documentary on the subject published by Unesco. First I tried ink, then I used markers, and on this third one I only used a pencil. I intend to make a painting and the drawing above is a sketch for it. Usually I don't make a separate sketch for a painting but the image, I think, demands it this time. The traditional sung poetry of North Vietnam is a very strict art form. The performance is subject to many regulations. So many that the performances are completely devoid of emotion, sexuality, and spontaneity. The resulting sound (as well as the visual presence of the performers) is delicate, airy, eerie, frail, and contains a strange sense of beauty. The tradition is 900 years old, threatened with extinction, but protected by the cultural authorities, and well recorded. I felt that while drawing the female singer, who also plays a simple percussion instrument, I needed to take very good care of depicting the subtleties of expression and pose. Like the music in which beauty is derived from strict regulations the painting to be also should be executed with the utmost technical preparations. "When singing her mouth should not be opened so widely" is one of the restrictions imposed on the singer. I'm going to paint an image of Ca Trú and I won't open my mouth.

One of the most interesting anecdotes from the world of ethnomusicology I've come across, comes from the great Alan Lomax, who observed that more restricted social mores and behaviors of a society result in a more nasal style of singing. I'm going to paint this image of Ca Trú in falsetto, in a minor key. Where is the pain in painting?