Warren Senders

Man With Sign, March 30, 02026

Monday and I first wake an hour ahead of the alarm, then return to sleep until I'm jolted into awareness. I take care of my pre-vigil coffee and toast, hit the road, arrive at Roosevelt Circle at 7:30, once again a soloist. As with every Monday in the past year, it's ALL-BLACK SIGNAGE until whenever our sanity returns (or I just give up, whichever comes first).

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKxNJemmR1Y
#ClimateChaos #GlobalWarming #HindustaniMusic #CitizenActivism

Man With Sign, March 30, 02026

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Mar 30 at 1:12pmWeb
Show threadWarren SendersMar 30

Traffic is relatively light and I don't get much at all in the way of reactions — a few waves and smiles but otherwise hardly anything. Which is also fine; I let my body and voice and mind gradually wake up and arrive in the day, leaning on the guardrail, singing low-key at first and then finally getting a little more into it.

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Show threadWarren SendersMar 30

Lacking any deep plan for my practice, I pick a pentatonic raga, Bhairav-thaat Vibhas. At first I just sing scales and a few paltas interspersed with free alapi motion, but then shift to a composition ("aaj tuma bhora" in rupak) and begin working over the material with the tabla set at 100, which is slower than when I learned this piece in the late 1980s.

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Show threadWarren SendersMar 30

Over the hour I mostly work on fairly straightforward improvisations, with time allocated for condensed and expanded versions of the mukhda (the canonical version of which begins on beat 4 of the 7-beat cycle). As I gain muscular flexibility and integration, my variations move further and further afield, but rarely last more than a cycle or two.

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Show threadWarren SendersMar 30

Sixteenth-notes at this tempo take some warming up before I can sing them in melisma. Syllabifying with sargams yields results faster, but at the expense of nuance and fluidity. As my muscles relearn their various pathways I start to feel it more deeply and it's only then that the spirit of the raga itself begins to move me.

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Show threadWarren SendersMar 30

Those moments are what we live for — just as in any music, it's the point when the sensual surface of the sound locks into the deep structure, and suddenly anything is possible. I check the clock: it's 8:16. A police car goes by, siren blaring. I fit some paltas into the cycle, then try variations in dotted quarters, two notes for every three beats, eventually resolving to the mukhda.

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Show threadWarren SendersMar 30

At 8:26 I make a video, then complete the hour, packing up and heading homeward at 8:30. I have a busy day today, with a batch of students, a meeting, an interview, another meeting, and the usual stack of resistance chores and household exigencies. I haven't looked at the news yet, because why would I want to do that? Reality will make itself felt soon enough.

See you tomorrow.

Man With Sign

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