i have blogged about the gitanjali some time in the dim and distant past, but picked up my copy for once in a long, long while yesterday. for those not in the know, this is a collection of poems penned by nobel laureate rabindranath tagore, and it is absolute.raw.beauty.

the one below a little more than the others, because i sing.

and i think, like yeats, i will start carrying this little volume around with me, “reading it in railway trains, or on the top of omnibuses and in restaurants.”

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When thou commandest me to sing it seems that my heart
would break with pride; and I look to thy face, and tears
come to my eyes.

All that is harsh and dissonant in my life melts into one
sweet harmony – and my adoration spreads wings like a glad
bird on its flight across the sea.

I know thou takest pleasure in my singing. I know that only
as a singer I come before thy presence.

I touch by the edge of the far spreading wing of my song
thy feet which i could never aspire to reach.

Drunk with the joy of singing I forget myself and call thee
friend who art my lord.

i think i should just stop blogging and direct you over to dr. boli’s. i love randomness, and he is really just about the most random person i know whom i don’t (did you get that?) but i think you have to be tarred, at least slightly, with some randomness too, if you want to laugh at his little irreverent pieces.

and here’s his take on socks.

it is dark and gloomy and wet this morning, and will continue to be for the next three days. i would usually spend such days in my pjs, lounging around on the bed, attempting to get some work done. but a friend from home is in tokyo, and we will be tackling the optician this morning. i have never had glasses made in japan before; did you know that it is possible to get a pair of glasses made in half an hour? why do they make you wait for days back home??

i have known this friend for a long time, but never actually spoken to him one-on-one for a good, long time before; i wish i had. he is intelligent, funny, and full of such sincere good thoughts about the choral scene back home. i miss talking to people about such things, in a language i can handle. i haven’t felt like singing lately, and rather shocked him when i told him that i didn’t quite care about my voice anymore, and decided that i wanted to drink.  but talking to him brought back all the myriad emotions that i have for singing and music, and stirred me; and now i want to sing again.

i can relate to people like him – they have ideals but a firm sense of realism; earnest, sincere, hopeful yet jaded at the same time. at times, i become frustrated when speaking to young japanese; they seem to be either entirely indifferent, or naively idealistic (in a miss-universe-world-peace way). but then again, young singaporeans sometimes seem to be entirely indifferent and overly-pragmatic. both are the result of living in sheltered societies – isn’t that ironic, and interesting?

i found a shortcut to shibuya on my daily walk today, and felt rather embarrassed that instead of taking a direct, straight road there, i had previously always tried to follow the railway tracks laboriously, roving round and round the shinsen area somewhat uncertainly because the tracks disappear underground there. it is a reflection of how i live my life – circumventing the obvious but comforting myself with the thought that i had, perhaps, taken the longer scenic route.

not meaning to actually emerge in shibuya, i wandered around rather aimlessly for a while, feeling a little naked because despite being this close to home, shibuya is town, and town is not a place you stroll down to in your geek-spectacles and a face clean of make-up (or at least, not my kind of face).

and so, i found myself in a karaoke box before long, for the first time in a long while. flipping listlessly through the books, i knew i didn’t want to sing, yet started to key in every single ABBA song on the list out of force of habit. and perhaps it was ABBA magic, or the sleazy colored lights in the room that start to go on and off automatically when you sing, or the flourescent designs on the wall that show up in the darkness (highly innovative, i must say)… i sang. i danced. i had a good time.

and the memories. what a flood of memories.

i remember spending a lot of time in karaoke boxes when i couldn’t afford to sing in a choir. i remember going through the songlist in alphabetical order, and loving that ABBA always comes first. there is nothing like ABBA to put you in a jovial karoke mood. i remember the twelve-hour karaoke marathons with a like-minded friend. i remember learning to sing amusing japanese pop tunes. i remember the one guy who was tone-deaf and knew it, and who always spent every session doing nothing but raps. nobody could rap like him, although we had to fill in the tuneful bits. i remember singing the titanic theme for a crush, yet feeling rather mortified that he actually liked the song. i remember dragging s to a karaoke box and stunning him because he never really believed i could sing.

then there are some other memories. of being the vocalist in a jazz group back in my undergrad days. of being strangely un-self-conscious back in those days, doing gigs at school and in town. of hearing my voice played back at me during a radio show at school (and becoming thoroughly sick of singing fly me to the moon). of my first major solo in life back in junior college, performing the boy in new york city complete with dance steps. oh, and that embarrassing duet in the talent competition, singing a love song in an orange dress… oh the height of seventeen year-old folly!

i miss that kind of easy confidence i used to carry onto the stage with me; the unabashed enjoyment i felt in performing, in having my voice heard; the ability to let a poor performance go and blithely bounce back again. how… how…? is youth really such an elixir?

here’s a nugget that i heard at a choral workshop i was attending today. the clinician (japanese composer and conductor, ko matsushita) applied an interesting analogy to explain the importance of the tonic (doh) and the dominant (soh). the tonic, he said, is the father of the family – stable, head of the household, and the most important member of the family. the dominant then, (oh so aptly named!) is the wife. despite being secondary to the tonic, she is actually the dominant one.

oh, i know, not hahaha funny (and a little geeky), but rather clever still, and such a good way to help those who had no prior knowledge of music remember these relationships!

and then he went on to say that we feel most comfortable when a piece of music ends with the tonic – it is like father returning home at the end of the day. all other notes (members of the family) need the tonic to function- their place exists in relation to the tonic. but what happens when there is too much doh in a piece of music? my favourite bit comes in here (because i was reminded of the ‘tonic’ we have at home) – a piece of music with too much doh, he said, is like daddy being off from work too often, lying around the house, and getting in everybody’s way and on everybody’s nerves. i had such a good laugh at that.

we spent most of the day working through a couple of pieces in solfege, learning about moveable and fixed doh, relationships between intervals… things like that. i had heard most of it before, but was very much interested in observing how the japanese responded in such workshop settings, the types of illustrations and analogies they identified with, how they reacted to singing with people they didn’t know. these were participants from school choirs, okaa-san (mummy) choirs, male choirs, female choirs… what an assortment! and while it was clear that many of the ideas were very new to them, it was exciting to hear evidence of these ideas in the way they sang, even before the workshop was half over. i am always inspired by earnest hard work – how could you not love someone who tries, and tries, and tries?

i think i would very much like to be a music educator in my next life. if music still existed then, of course. (but how could it not?) for this life, i am simply grateful to be able to sing. i am rather sorry i whined about being in a strange, new choir. i am blessed, blessed, blessed… it went to my head, i suppose. now, humbled again, i will sing.

because singing makes me happy in a way that nothing else in the world can.