Gurmat Sangeet Outreach Retreat and Camp: The New Arrivals

The next day we received the incoming students. They really couldn’t be more diverse in terms of age and experience with music.  There were complete families who wanted to expose their children to the traditional Sikh instruments as well as young adults very stern in asserting their Sikh heritage. I couldn’t help but marvel over Raj Academy’s ability to pull this week off, as an instructor, I tried to imagine getting my students’ families to commit to something like this. I somehow doubt that would have ever happened.

I was paired with both a young man who had recently been to India and purchased a dilruba, and later with an eight-year-old girl whose parents asked me to lend a hand. Everyone seemed hyper-devoted to learning as much as they could in a short period of time, and I thought about how much concentrated practice benefits students. Over the course of the next three days, most people attending were able to achieve rudimentary ability in their instrument of choice.

With the new students; new compositions were introduced that were fairly simple, but nonetheless beautiful.  I was asked by my tutor to go off and practice alone instead of staying with the group – so I found a small room off the main hallway connecting the chambers. I was working on my Shabad-s diligently when I could hear the entire room singing. I scrambled to get my handheld recorder and rush in the room to get a recording but I was too late (not to mention the strange looks I got from bursting in on their practice).  It was a lovely sound though, there must have been a couple hundred instruments all together; sarangi, sarinda, dilruba, rabab, taus and jori all playing together underneath the chorus of voices. It is a sound I have taken with me, even for lack of a recording.

During these final few days of the retreat, the members of the Gurdawa were honoring a man who had recently passed. They were taking turns reading from the Sri Guru Granth Sahib* in a very continual-chant-like tone, very different than I heard from Professor Singh. It was a beautiful sound, but of course to me it was just sound. I felt somehow cheated that I didn’t understand the poetry.

*Guru Granth Sahib or Adi Sri Granth Sahib Ji (also called the Adi Granth or Adi Guru Darbar) is more than just a scripture of the Sikhs, for the Sikhs treat this Granth (holy book) as their living Guru. The holy text spans 1430 pages and contains the actual words spoken by the founders of the Sikh religion (the Ten Gurus of Sikhism) and the words of various other Saints from other religions including Hinduism and Islam. 
(From Sikh Wiki http://www.sikhiwiki.org/index.php/Guru_Granth_Sahib)