Symphony of the Solo String
Musician, ethnologist and traveler Robert Bassara brings his instruments and music to Santa Fe Complex this Saturday night, September 27 at 7:00 pm for an extemporaneous Symphony of the Solo String to explore the songs inherent in the instruments he brings from his global travels.
“This music is about singing and talking with and through musical instruments,” he says. “This necessitates a certain comportment, demeanor and respect for the instruments.”
“Mastery is not necessarily the objective,” Bassara continues. “The objective is partly to ignore the bias and restrictions that define animate and inanimate: the dogma of division. Musical instruments are not inanimate. The subtlety of merging with an instrument, a kind of communicative tactility, defies logical thinking for what occurs is a reciprocal recognition. To establish this threshold is the primary objective. This aim heightens the senses and mental images and contributes extensively in developing an awareness and openness which allows this reciprocal element to happen in repetitive instances.”
Bassara has traveled through North Africa, Central Asia and South East Asia to collect and study the numerous traditional uses of tribal instruments. He also seeks to define the origins and practices of construction of some of the simplest and most ancient instruments in the world, especially the bronze prayer chimes of Burma, the Kyi-Tzi; bamboo and metal Jews Harps from numerous cultures; and the frame drums of North Africa and central Asia. As a result of these interactions with both traditional craftsmen and musicians, Bassara has designed and crafted a variety of unique instruments that he will include in his performance. They include:
- The Bird Flutes: tiny bamboo and wooden whistles used to communicate with birds.
- Breath Flutes: fabricated from long lengths of bamboo and consisting of one hole, the breath aperture, used for practicing breathing techniques utilizing sound.
- Winged Thing: which are whirled overhead to produce unearthly sounds.
- Additional traditional instruments such as the Birembau of Brazil and the Ecktar of India, which he has modified structurally and developed new techniques for playing.
Bassara will be joined by Peter Halter, Steven Harkless, Paul Elwood, Will Tarble and Ben Wright in his attempt to meld these instruments and others into the Symphony of the Solo String.
Robert Bassara on the Solo String
Equally important is to travel to various countries to not only collect instruments but to observe how the originators of these instruments play them and in what context/enviornment. But an even more interesting possibility is to attempt to play with these musicians. Occasionally through this latter type of engagement, it is possible to establish that they understand that you understand something they understand. This understanding by its very nature is beyond language. For who you are is how you play, who you touch the instrument.
Naturally vocalization/singing in all probability superseded the fabrication of musical instruments. Many early instruments were used to primarily accompany and/or mimic singing. In classical Indian music, a solo stringed instrument serves to maintain the tonal rhythmic underpinning for soloist whether they be instrumental or vocal. There exists a direct correlation between simplicity of design and the relative ancient ancestry of an instrument. Certainly Neanderthals did not have saxophones but this does not preclude their ability to create complex patterns, rhythmically or otherwise, with their voices and extremely simple instruments such as a blade of grass or a leaf. Naturally there are limitations — simple instruments obviously do not have the range of more developed instruments. Once in Cambodia, I was able to record a young man playing a leaf with his mouth and the resulting sounds were fused with a strong sense of melancholy beyond what I thought possible .
