Traffic is heavy but only intermittently engaged, with a few friendly wavers, a bicyclist who greets us en passsant, but not much more. Mercifully, no MAGA chumps feel like yelling at us today, which is good; my tolerance for intolerant bullshit is pretty low today. I read the news before setting out this morning, which was probably a mistake.

2/

I've decided to continue working on the 3:4:5:6:7:8 polymetric scale, but inside a different composition (the idea being that this will foster skill transfer across ragas/talas/bandishes/text resources). So I begin with a warmup in the astringent pentatonic raga Gunkali, and then start one of my favorite songs, the medium teentaal composition, "balama mose karo na chhed ber ber."

3/

With the tabla at 110 bpm, I go over the first line a few times and begin by locating the 5:4 polymetric from the first beat of each vibhaag. This is easy to convert into bol-bant as the first two words of the song, "balama mose" offer five semantically coherent syllables, and there are other such groupings readily available in the text. Once I get this "straight" 5:4 internalized...

4/

...I move to shift it to start at beat four, so that 16 beats later I can rejoin the composition at the correct beat. This requires a change in "taal modality," in which I can hear the flow of beats as "4-1-2-3," or "dha dha dhin dhin." At first I have difficulty sustaining this and have to train myself to hear that first "dha" stroke as definitional.

5/

Once I get this tempo level relatively accurate I find some other text strings that work with less obvious word boundaries, then move to 6:4 (quarter-note triplets). This tempo level fits twenty-four syllables inside sixteen beats, and I simply repeat the 8-syllable group "balama mose karo na" three times to make this work. The triplets shift the location of the words with each iteration.

6/

The triplets are sung from different locations in the taal, as before, starting on the primary downbeat, then moving to the fourth modality as noted above. This is an easier tempo to sustain; fives and sevens are tricky to keep even. I practice moving back and forth between the 5:4 and 6:4 levels, always with a cycle's worth of composed material in between.

7/

Now I'm ready for the 7:4 group. At first I just stipulate a synthetic 7-syllable group, "balama mose mose," in order to fix the speed of utterance, and I sing this three times followed by "karo na chheda bera" for the concluding septuplet. As noted, it's very easy to attempt a septuplet and get a quadruplet followed by a triplet instead; an absolutely even syllabic flow is difficult.

8/

As I get it internalized I take the polymetric scale in one sequence, covering three cycles with a gradually accelerating string of bol-bant. This is what I'm really interested in. I practice this confection multiple times, both from beat 1 and beat 4, working to adjust my perceptions appropriately. Last week's riyaaz definitely improved my execution and the skill has transferred.

9/

At 8:24 I make a video, including several renditions of the bol-bant exercise, which still sounds relatively mechanical; I'm not really singing melody so much as I am just going up and down the scale without much thought. This completed, I walk back to Craige, and we sing a careful rendition of "Get Together" with attention paid to intonation and balance.

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