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00:00:01
Christopher Guerin and Ravi Shankar
2 Playsin 14 hours
Joe and Mark are joined by Christopher Guerin, poet and music aficionado, who is on the podcast to champion the work of classical Indian musician Ravi Shankar.
Christopher spent twenty-six years in the symphony orchestra business, including twenty as President of the Fort Wayne Philharmonic. After that he went on to work for Sweetwater ("the world's leading music technology and instrument retailer") as a VP.
Since retiring, he's been putting his English degrees to work as a writer. He started out writing short stories and has become a poet, focused on ekphrastic sonnets. (In his case, poems that describe, or are influenced by, specific images.)
The trio take a deep dive into the history and current state of poetry before discussing the music of Ravi Shankar.
Shankar's sitar music was in the background as Christopher wrote his sonnet sequence, My Human Disguise.
"Ravi Shankar's music is so overwhelmingly complex and free that when I have it in the background I can concentrate on the poems and rhymes in a way that I can't with any other music," Christopher explains.
He's also a huge fan of Shankar's daughter, Anoushka, in particular a piece called Jannah. [clip below]
"You can hear the same piece over and over again and you'll think it's brand new because of the complexity of the music," he says.
Christopher makes a great case for authors to listen to raga while they write.
For more information, check out the show notes for this episode.
Re-Creative is produced by Donovan Street Press Inc. in association with MonkeyJoy Press.
Contact us at [email protected]
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Transcript
00:00:09
Speaker
Mr. Mark Reiner. Joe Mahoney, how are you doing? Oh, i you're resorting to your native Irish accent. My native Irish accent, which probably most Irish people are enraged by at this point. Well, I certainly am. And just being of Irish descent. Yeah. Well, I have a question. It's of a musical nature, which seems appropriate. So I don't actually know what instruments to play. I know you play the piano. Right. Play another instrument.
00:00:35
Speaker
Yes, I play, ah and now I haven't played in some time, but a I played trombone um okay in a high school band. And I also played ah baritone, and which are kind of related. Baritone, like singing?
00:00:53
Speaker
No, that it's called a baritone. Oh, okay. I don't know what that is. I believe another name for it is a euphonium. They believe I have that correct. It's ah like a small tuba. And and i don't i still I have a trombone because I purchased one of my daughters. My daughters wound up both playing trombone as well.
00:01:11
Speaker
And so I purchased one of their trombones so that I have, and I got the keyboard behind me and I also have a mandolin there, but I don't know how to play it yet. Well, that was actually my my my question was not you what musical instrument you play, but if the music fairies came down and blessed you at this moment, what instrument would you like to be able to play that you can't currently play?
00:01:34
Speaker
Well, I'd have to say guitar because I do like to um record my own music. You know, you're hearing some, some simple stuff on this podcast that I've, you know, all the music in this podcast is music that I've done basically on various keyboards, but I would like to incorporate other instruments. And, you know, the most obvious instrument is, is guitar. And well, and I have, ti why don't you call me? well Not very well, but I play.
00:02:02
Speaker
Yeah. Well, I, okay. Yeah. You know what? We'll get you to track some stuff for the, uh, for the various themes and things for the podcast. Yeah. And I believe, um, our guests actually, it sounds like in the past, you could really have helped us because you happened to work for a large musical instrument dealer, right? Christopher Garen. I did. Yes. Welcome to our podcast. Welcome. Yeah. Welcome, Christopher. Nice to meet you. Thank you. It's a pleasure. Yeah. I sort of ended my career.
00:02:31
Speaker
at Sweetwater, which is centered in Fort Wayne, Indiana, which is where I am, and is the largest online retailer of music instruments and audio gear. So you may have some of either one that you might have bought online from from Sweetwater. And I worked there from 2006 to when I retired in 2018.
00:03:00
Speaker
And what did you do there? So I was the vice president of communications and, uh, it was just on the cusp when I got there of social media and video becoming an absolutely necessary part of marketing online. So I, in addition to handling all of their PR and all of their donations, uh, the company gave away a lot of money every year.
00:03:29
Speaker
I created their video programs and I created their first Facebook page. Oh, okay. and Those are still going strong to this day. I ran those for about 10 years, did a lot of posting myself, did a lot of directing the video. I don't know how to even turn a video camera on, but I know how to wreck shoot different skill sets. Yeah. Yeah. I can tell other people how to, yeah. Yeah. Right.
00:03:58
Speaker
tell people what to say and what to do and don't say that again and, um, that kind of thing. So, okay. So I'm going to ask the same question to you, Christopher, if you could play an instrument, first of all, what instruments you play and and, or if any, and what would you love to be able to learn how to play if you couldn't? Well, I probably need to back up just a little bit. The larger portion of my career was in the symphony orchestra business and I started as the operations and marketing director of the Colorado Springs Symphony in 1979 and then moved here in 1985 as the president of the Fort Wayne Philharmonic. And I ran the orchestra. I was the CEO and president until I yeah
00:04:47
Speaker
um decided 26 years in any business was enough. And I i left, I resigned, and I yeah went to work for Sweetwater. But in answer to your question, I am very, I was very rare in the symphony orchestra business as being a president who didn't play it in a musical instrument and did not read music. And to this day, I still can't. I can sing in chorus, I have a good blending voice. And if you sit me next to somebody who really knows what they're doing, I'm a parrot, right? I i remember things very quickly. okay And I've sung some major classical works with orchestra. and But i I am not, I mean, that's I suppose you could call that being a musician, a vocalist maybe. But it out so if you heard my solo voice, you'd scream and run from the room.
00:05:44
Speaker
Well, why don't we give that a try? Yeah. So let's see a little area right now. shall yeah and not fall guys All the instruments are at play then. So if you could play an instrument, what would it be? It would be guitar too. I just, I have a really beautiful Yamaha Dreadnought.
00:06:04
Speaker
that I bought 20 years ago and I can strum a few chords. I tried taking lessons and I was simply hopeless. ah My daughters to this day keep beating me up that I don't play music and I tell them, well, I'm a writer instead. Isn't that okay? No, watch it, I'll play music. So I have to ask then, how did you get mixed up in the symphony business?
00:06:26
Speaker
Well, you know, serendipity, really. I um attended some concerts at Ravenia with my soon-to-be wife, Ruth, and I just loved everything that I heard.
00:06:39
Speaker
And I'd actually, you know, probably my introduction to classical music was the movie 2001, A Space Odyssey, and I had to go out and buy that soundtrack. So I heard about Strauss and other of the great classical composers. So over the next few years, all the way up to 1979, I sort of abandoned popular music, still a fan, but I abandoned it and sort of self-educated myself on all of the orchestral repertoire, which means I bought a heck of a lot of vinyl that's sitting in my garage to this day.
00:07:19
Speaker
And when my wife and I, after two years of living in Chicago, we decided to move to Colorado Springs for the beauty of the place. And she's a goldsmith and we had gone out there on vacation and she ah got a job. And we thought, well, one job is enough to move on. And so we did, but we didn't have a job for me. And two or three months later, I'm beginning to worry because there doesn't seem to be anything for someone who has two degrees in English literature and a couple of years as a PR assistant for a machine tool company, which is how I started my career. I answered a newspaper listing for a job writing a total of $500 writing a newspaper supplement for the coming season of the Colorado Springs Symphony. And I went in for the interview
00:08:15
Speaker
But a day before, I had seen that they had a free concert outside in the city park. And I went to it and I thought, my goodness, this is incredible. I've been to classical music concerts before, but to see it open, out in the open, free on a beautiful sunny day, I thought, boy, I'd love to be a part of this.
00:08:34
Speaker
So in the middle of my interview, you know, for a two-week job, the the manager says, well, what do you want to be doing in five years? Which came out of the blue, right? I mean, it's not the kind of question you would expect. But I looked her in the eye and said, I want to be working right here. And she took me into another room where the music director was working and he started to interview me. And all he wanted to know was what repertoire did I like?
00:09:04
Speaker
And so i I said some of the normal things, you know, Mahler, Beethoven and Brahms. And then thinking that it might be wise to be a little out there, I said, and I really like Jessica and Dupre. And man, that lit his flame. Dupre is Renaissance composer that is very obscure. I think I found one recording of his, but he knew the name.
00:09:32
Speaker
And he turned to the boss and said, hire him. I think they'd had people working in marketing and other things that didn't know the you know repertoire or the symphony orchestra at all. And so that's how I got into the symphony orchestra business. And i I loved it until I didn't. And I was glad to leave when I did. And Sweetwater was a great experience for me, too. And now I write all the time.
00:10:02
Speaker
Yeah. So tell us about that because you're ah you've got collections of of short stories, correct? I've got four books, actually. I mentioned the fact that I didn't have a musical background. I have two degrees in English literature from Northern Illinois University. And during all those years I wrote, I started out ah mostly writing short stories and then I focused more on poetry.
00:10:31
Speaker
Um, you had a fellow by the name of Michael Antman on your show a few months ago. He and I together wrote a screenplay. And we also wrote a book that is composed of, uh, my sonnets and his photography. The screenplay never went anywhere. So forget about that.
00:10:52
Speaker
But the the the book of photography and poems was we was published. And I have two collections of short stories. One is called The Story of the Universe. That's the story of my universe and other stories. And that one is sort of a grab bag of different stories. Some of them take place in the symphony orchestra world. And the second one is called Loverless Love.
00:11:19
Speaker
which is about the sexual mores of this country over the last 50 years. um Quite a bit longer book. So both of those were published by Amica Press, which is a small independent press. And they're all available at at Amazon. There's a fourth book that I referred to, which is really the thing most dear to my heart and the least likely to ever get published. And it's called my human disguise and I know we're supposed to talk about Ravi Shankar and I'll get there. That's okay. Yeah, but um my human disguise is 625 sonnets written one a week over a 12 year period starting in 2011.
00:12:11
Speaker
The link with Robbie Shankar is that I wrote those all on Saturday mornings while I was listening to Robbie Shankar, and we'll get back to that in a minute. Yeah, okay. Yeah, that's great. um The sonnets are all, they're all rhymed, but the rhyme is all over the place. They are formal sonnets, and they are also what they call ecrastic sonnets, E-K-P-H-R-A-S-T-I-C.
00:12:39
Speaker
And yeah that's a Greek word that refers to describing is probably the quickest way to to to define ichphrastic. In my case, every sonnet was influenced by an image. Most of them are paintings. Many are drawings. Many are photographs. Some of it is art that my family did. Some of it is photography that I took, but each Sonnet is paired with an image. And there's actually a history, ah quite sophisticated history of doing this with people like William Carlos Williams and um W.H. Auden.
00:13:23
Speaker
having written ekphrastic poetry themselves, which was somewhat went into my thinking when I started doing this. But ah you won't usually see the the image with the poem. So i the first 200 I self-published in a very nice volume that has the image on the left-hand side and the poem on the right-hand side.
00:13:50
Speaker
And it's somewhat of ah an immersive experience to have it that way. Usually, ekphrastic poetry describes the image, right? It almost reproduces the image in words. Certainly, W.H. Auden's poem, Musee de Beaux-Arts, does that. It describes a Bruegel painting.
00:14:14
Speaker
Sometimes I do that, but more often the painting or the photo or the sculpture, whatever, is just a stepping off point for thoughts, feelings, ideas, sometimes more directly related to the image, sometimes only tangentially related to the image. But I think in pretty much all the cases, you do see some connection between the two of them.
00:14:41
Speaker
And as I said, it creates an immersive experience. And frankly, it you know, poetry is not the first thing on most people's reading list. It makes the poetry yeah the poetry more engaging and people are more likely to delve into it um when they've got the image to see what influenced the poem. Yeah, that's really cool. Can you actually, can you read us one?
00:15:08
Speaker
I can. So I pulled up my blog, which has all 625 of my sonnets and all of their accompanying images. It's the site is called zealotry of Garen. And if you Google zealotry of Garen, you'll find literally everything there, plus other things that are not ichphrastic in nature. I'll read this one. One of my favorite artists is Paul Klee. And I saw a show of his at the ah retrospective at the Modern in New York um years ago and bought the book
00:15:52
Speaker
And I just find him just a gold mine for for thought. um He was also incredibly prolific. I don't think anybody did as many paintings as Picasso did, but Paul Klee did more than 10,000 paintings. And so here's one. It's called The Gate of the Night. It's sonnet number 568.
00:16:19
Speaker
the vagaries of thought less what is than is not impossible windows into out no wind blows and no light pierces lights but open gates of nights where like a crystal jar spins only one bright star placing all in its place in emptiness of space In parents, I am a metal arc. I don't sing in the dark. We're all in good order outside my own border. And the image is a bunch of frames, rather abstract, but still very clearly frames or gates. Hmm. And what's this painting called for the pairs? The painting is called the gate of the night. Okay.
00:17:09
Speaker
OK, so going back to basics, what makes something a sonnet? Oh, great, great question. um It's it's changed over time. 14 lines, 14 lines. And do you have the iambic pentameter? Is that necessary? That's a Shakespearean sonnet. I use trimeter.
00:17:33
Speaker
all the way up to hexameter. It depends upon the poem. Shakespeare is all iambic pentameter with a fixed rhyme scheme. And, uh, so um I am much more free about it, but I have a few rules. I don't let any rhyme get more than two lines away from the other rhyme. So, you know, ABBA. Yeah.
00:17:57
Speaker
And the other rule, and this one I think is one of the main reasons why formal poetry has lost its cachet with a lot of people. There's a wonderful poet by the name of Rita Dove, who refers to formal poetry as a bejeweled casket, which is a fabulous phrase. Great phrase. Yeah.
00:18:23
Speaker
Yeah, not it very encouraging though, is it? It's not particularly complimentary. Yeah. But one of the problems with formal poetry as it was written over the last, you know, 400 or 500 years is that a poet never hesitated to back into a rhyme. And so he would or she would distort syntax to find the rhyme. Yeah.
00:18:50
Speaker
And I would never do that. That is the one rule I will never break. And it has to flow like normal conversational English and not feel like it's all about the rhyme. And one thing I discovered in doing that is that rhymes generate ideas in a way that when I started this project, I didn't quite understand, but I did soon enough.
00:19:17
Speaker
But the more you rhyme and the more your brain has to go through, well, you found the one word that you want, now what rhymes with it? And you have to go through the whole alphabet in your head until you find it. But in the meantime, you will probably, or I tend to come up with ideas that I hadn't started out with. So rhyming is, ah for me, a very central part of what I do. This is why Shakespeare's sonnets are so great, right? Because they they almost don't rhyme if you read them properly.
00:19:46
Speaker
Yeah, and and he is actually not one of those who commits that you know back into it crime, but many of the other romantics and and the others did it all the time. Yeah. was it when When was peak poetry?
00:20:02
Speaker
Was there ever a time when poetry was all the rage? Oh, I remember in my first year English class, my professor, he described the sonnet. This is a cool game that was going on in the late Renaissance. It started in Italy, the Petrarchian sonnet, and everyone was playing it. And it was like, it was a game, basically, everyone was playing. It's like Wordle. It was like the Renaissance ages of Wordle.
00:20:26
Speaker
Well, that's about as reductionist as you can get. Yeah. Yeah. Well, cause I, yeah. Cause I want to know like, how true is that? Like was it, was it that common or was it still kind of amongst the more, the elite really? Oh, probably. Yeah. It have to be people who are at first literate to be writing these things. Cause you'd have to write it down. Believe it or not. And I actually just came across this little factoid recently.
00:20:54
Speaker
Poetry in the second half of the 19th century was the most popular form of literature. More than the novel, or at least you know not journalism or not essay work, but of the more imaginative forms of writing, it was the most popular. But over time, especially as we got into the 20th century and poetry became much more difficult,
00:21:24
Speaker
to read, you know, people love The Wasteland by T.S. Eliot, but, you know, there's probably five people in this world who could really explain what it means, and I'm not one of them. And if you think about it, I mean, poetry is our legacy in some ways. Like Homer, that's poetry. That's not that's not a novel. that's That's a recited, it's recited from memory. It's not recited from a document, but um that's poetry.
00:21:53
Speaker
yeah Should poetry be more popular? Is it a shame that it isn't more popular? Will it ever we will we ever see a another renaissance of of poetry? Yeah, i what a great question. um I would love to see it, but I have to tell you that I don't like much of the poetry that I see being published these days. It's not because it doesn't rhyme or because it's not an iambic pentameter. I just don't find the language, the language is so plain
00:22:29
Speaker
as to be almost unnecessary. I mean, why bother saying that, which is the same thing anybody else who looked at a tree to be absurd about it, but to look at a tree would say within two minutes. Again, my friend Michael Antman has written a really wonderful essay that's on his website called, ah The Greatest Thing in the World.
00:22:53
Speaker
And he was referring to poetry, but he was referring to poetry that was before the last 50 or 60 years when formal poetry went away. And, and now it's not even free verse. It's, you know, y'all come do whatever you want. And I, I'll just point out that, uh, Michael Lintman, um, who, as you mentioned, was the guest in this podcast and he's written two books, one of which I've read. I need to read the other one.
00:23:20
Speaker
The one I read was Cherry Whip, and that was a beautifully written book. So this is a man who knows his way around words. ah He's one of my favorite writers.
00:23:31
Speaker
but that's a pretty yeah But yeah, so he he and I both agree that the quality of poetry being published to today, let alone what's being written, is very low. Now, is that a ah matter of taste? Or is it a... and the The question being, as Neil of Rush said, there's a difference between taste and quality. I think it's...
00:24:01
Speaker
the people don't have any real taste as you and I might describe it for what is quality or what isn't. Rita Dub's bejeweled casket, I mean, that those two words speak very revealingly about how people view um formal poetry. they They think it's simply dead. It may be pretty, the bejeweled part, but it's simply dead.
00:24:27
Speaker
And there's been a lot of nonsense. You may have heard of a poem that won an NEA artist grant, and it's one word misspelled. And the the author's name is Saroyan. I think it's Aram Saroyan, and it's spelled L-I-G-H-G-H-T. That was the entire poem, the title, the poem, everything.
00:24:55
Speaker
And it's actually pretty clever when you think about it, because until light hits something, it did it is invisible. So the GH in light, especially a double GH, is all rather invisible. So it's it's kind of clever. I think it's worthy. but And that is a poem. That is a poem and that probably has done more damage to the idea of poetry Um, it was written, I think in the sixties and won this grant and became a national scandal that money was given to this writer for, for such a thing. Well, I mean, you could say the same thing of, of visual, the visual arts, like people getting upset about paintings of squares of light on a canvas, oh yeah you know, but I think that that speaks to a whole period of time.
00:25:48
Speaker
when I think what was going on in the arts was reflective of what was happening in culture, which is a rejection of the past. So and that's it might going on back it might come back. And we always have poetry in music, like lyrics are poetry, I'm sorry, but I think one of our Canada's greatest poets lived recently, Leonard Cohen. He's a fabulous poet.
00:26:16
Speaker
I totally agree. Yeah. I thought you were going to say Gordoni. Well, okay. Sure. Why not? But, uh, I'm letters my guy, letters my man. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Mark, do you have a favorite poem? Well, I like Sonnet 29 because I had, I was forced to learn it. No, I have to, I would have to look it up to recite it to you, but it's the one that starts when in disgrace and men's eyes.
00:26:45
Speaker
I had to learn that in acting class and I actually, it was my key into understanding Shakespeare because when you look at the text, it looks like, oh, it's a it's eyes, cries, state, fate, hope, scope, but that's not how you read it. You don't read it that way. You read it, went in disgrace with fortune in men's eyes. I all alone beweep my outcast state.
00:27:10
Speaker
and troubled deaf heaven with my bootless cries, and look at us upon myself and curse my fate, wishing me like to one more rich in hope featured like him like him with friends possessed. like What's great about that poetry is that it's It's not really about the rhyming scheme. It still has the rhyming scheme. So there's that kind of rhythm and familiarity that people have with it. But then there's another level to it, which is all about like the emotion that comes in. That's, that's probably one of my, off the top of my head of when it comes to sonnets anyway, that's the one that I would mention. Okay. And what about you, Christopher? Do you, do you have a favorite?
00:27:50
Speaker
um it's Well, first of all, I have a terrible memory for reciting poetry, even my own. And I'm a great fan of Wallace Stevens. And he was not a strictly formal poet, but he did often throw in a rhyme where it seemed to make sense. And he wrote a poem that's in three or four sections called Peter Quince at the Clavier.
00:28:18
Speaker
And it's partly the story of Susanna and the elders, rather scaringly depicted, but it's ultimately a poem about beauty. And um if you'd like, I can recite one short um three lines. Beauty is momentary in the mind, the fitful tracing of a portal, but in the flesh it is immortal.
00:28:48
Speaker
And you have to really think about that before it makes sense. And it wasn't until a one of my professors in college ah sort of stripped that down into what it really pointed towards that I realized that he was also writing about death and how we hope to live beyond death. But we also hope that what we create, at least some of what we create, lives beyond death. And that would be, you know, great poems, great short stories, great novels, all of that.
00:29:24
Speaker
Now, you had mentioned that when you wrote these sonnets, you wrote them to the music of Ravi Shankar. Yep. Tell us about about that. Yeah, I yeah I go way back with Ravi Shankar. People think that he sort of was introduced to this country by George Harrison, ah the Beatle. And in part, he was he was certainly the sitar was popularized by George Harrison and their friendship was publicized. But Ravi Shankar was playing at Carnegie Hall in the 50s. And my introduction to him was, besides the Beatles, was a Columbia Records sampler that had a 25 minute raga on one side. And this was like 1968.
00:30:19
Speaker
I played that over and over and over and over again. And 1968, wait a minute. yeah You don't look that much older than me and Mark. Well, thank you. Hey, speak for yourself, Joe. um I have bright red hair.
00:30:37
Speaker
yeah yeah um i'm wearing There's a reason why I'm wearing a cap. No, there's not really. um so So that was my first exposure to Ravi Shankar. And then I didn't you know listen to him all that much until he came to Fort Wayne and played a recital at a small hall here. And in my time in the symphony orchestra business, I heard mostly live all of the great instrumental soloists, Isaac Stern, Perlman,
00:31:15
Speaker
Yo mama, you name it. I mean, i i saw I booked all of them. I met all of them. I befriended some of them. And I'm sitting there listening to Ravi Shankar, and I'm thinking, I have never heard a greater musician in my life than what this guy is doing right now.
00:31:34
Speaker
OK, I want to stop you right there. And I want to ask you, see, you have you've heard all of those great people and you heard him. That's what you thought at the time. Do you still think that is that? I still do. The and why is that? Well, there is the the closest would be Yo-Yo Ma. And I've presented him three times and he never leaves anything in the case. I mean, he is always all in.
00:32:02
Speaker
And some of these other artists, you know, a they're just their names so big that they feel they can phone it in. and But even at their best, I don't think they're as great as Ravi Shankar. Now, classical Indian music,
00:32:18
Speaker
is not something that everybody likes or gets. I'm not sure I and certainly don't understand it the way someone from India understands it, but it moves me and it excites my mind in a way that no other music does. And he can play more notes in you know one minute than all those others put together.
00:32:45
Speaker
which is part of the magic of it. There's hardly a melody sometimes. There's just incredible rhythms and you know a melody might turn up again 10 minutes later if it's really a melody or might just be an echo of something that was played before. But the best word I have for it is that it's freeing.
00:33:09
Speaker
it literally frees up your mind rather than what a lot of classical music does is exactly the opposite. It sort of clamps down your attention yeah on what what it's doing, the the the rhythms. I was listening to Mahler today um because the orchestra in town played him last night.
00:33:29
Speaker
And as gorgeous as he is and as profound as he is, he just grips you by the throat and doesn't let you go for 70 minutes, you know? Robbie Shankard does not do that. I'll tell you a little story about when I was in college, my my writing professor, I ah gave him, I offered to give him a recording that I had that I wasn't very fond of.
00:33:55
Speaker
of Mozart's Don Giovanni. And I happened to mention the fact that I listened to music when I was writing. And he said, oh, you should never do that. I would never do that. How can you stand the distraction? And I said, well, for me, it occupies a part of my mind that frees up the other part of my mind to actually create.
00:34:20
Speaker
And the two go totally together. And he said, you know, like I can see that. it That wouldn't work for me, but I can see that. Well, Ravi Shankar is that in, you know, squared or cubed. its It is so overwhelmingly complex and free that when I have it in the background, I can concentrate on the poems and the rhymes in a way that I can't with any other music in the background, at least for sonnets. And so like I said, I've been doing that for, it took me 12 years to write all 625 of these sonnets. I should also mention that I've seen him twice. I saw him the second time a year before he died when he played in Chicago with his daughter, Anushka. And it was as memorable as
00:35:17
Speaker
the first time I heard them and and in a way even more memorable because Anushka was every bit as great as her father was. That's saying a lot considering what you said about him and you see you really mean that. Yeah, exactly. That's amazing. I'll get to the punchline. Okay. With the help of Sweetwater, I was able, this was after Ravi Shankar passed away, I was able to get her book to perform on campus here.
00:35:46
Speaker
with her group. And she played a number of things. One of them was a piece called Jana, J-A-N-N-A-H, which is actually available now. It wasn't then. I met her after the concert.
00:36:05
Speaker
and told her my daughter really liked that piece that she played. And she ended up sending an as yet unpublished copy of it. And we used it for her wedding. Oh, wow. wow That's great. And so talented and generous. And nice yeah she was a ah delight to me. But I asked her and I felt I was being very bold in doing this. I asked her to sign a copy of an album that she did. And this is the punchline part.
00:36:34
Speaker
In my view, the the greatest of all Ravi Shankar's works is something called Raga Jogashwari. And don't ask me to spell that off the top of my head. ah okay So she had the courage to make her own recording of that piece, which is fiendishly difficult. i I think it's available on iTunes. you Your listeners should definitely check it out.
00:37:03
Speaker
And so I handed her this enlarged copy of her CD and I said, you know, I've always considered that raga to be your father's greatest accomplishment.
00:37:15
Speaker
And this recording not only is as great, but you make it your own. And she really liked that. yeah I bet. She was happy to sign it. And ah so I should say I didn't always listen to Ravi Shankar because I often listen to Anushka as well, because she's put out probably a dozen albums over the years. So you'd recommend it as a writing music?
00:37:44
Speaker
well for you anyway yeah it absolutely i mean that that piece in particular but i've i've gone through the you know i have dozens and dozens of his recordings and i've gone through all of them many times and another strange thing about them is you never can memorize them You can hear the same piece as long as you don't play it every single day in a row for two weeks. You can hear the same piece over and over and over again over the space of several years. And you'll think it's brand new every time you hear it because you can't do the variation. The variations are so complex that you simply can't ah memorize or you your brain just doesn't
00:38:28
Speaker
So this is not music that you get tired of. You can maybe correct me if I'm wrong on this because my I don't know much about this, but Indian music is more improvisational than Western music. Is that true? it It is probably even more so than jazz. I mean, I love jazz too. Yeah. It's interesting to me. Yeah. You know, jazz almost always starts with a melody, and then they riff off of that for however long yeah and turn it around from instruments to instrument. Very often ragas um are improvisational from the first moment. And within a single piece, there's usually only improvisation coming from the sitarist.
00:39:18
Speaker
There's the the usual compliment is the tabla, which is the drums. And sometimes the drum will improvise a bit. There's the timbura, which is sort of a lute. No, I'm sorry. The sera is the lute. The timbura is a drone instrument. It looks like a sitar, but you simply strum it and it makes a droning sound in the background. So none of those usually have improvisation. So when you saw Ravi Shankar,
00:39:48
Speaker
you would see him improvise for two hours with a 15-minute break. Wow. i I listen to some music when I write and it's interesting because I like jazz. That's one of my preferred forms of music to listen to while I'm writing because not lyrical jazz, not songs with lyrics because I can't listen to lyrics while I'm writing because I just glomp. I c glomp onto them as like, ah, I must know what's going on in this story.
00:40:15
Speaker
And I like classical too, but it sounds to me like maybe Raga is a thing that I should explore as a as a music I can play while I'm writing. I'm definitely going to check it out. Yeah. Like I said, try that one and you'll fall in love with it. All right. OK, so George Harrison introduced ah now you said he didn't really because Ravi Shankar played a cardigan hall years before George Harrison introduced him to the. Are you a fan of George Harrison as well?
00:40:43
Speaker
ah he He is my favorite beetle, and I actually wrote a ah long essay about him that's posted at a popular website called Pop Matters.
00:40:57
Speaker
And the essay is called, My Friend, George Harrison, Reflections on the Cool Beetle. ah Wait a minute. My friend. Did you know George Harrison? I know. I sort of took a liberty by titling it that. But it's such a personal relationship that I have with this music that I, you know, I went a step further. and But I make it very clear, very early, that I've never met the guy.
00:41:22
Speaker
Okay, yeah. But yeah, he is his music. I still to this day, you know, Paul isn't is such a genius, but George was every bit the genius. And those two, I think, had the greatest post Beatles careers. um John Lennon, bless you. But I wish you'd lived longer.
00:41:45
Speaker
But those two made wonderful, wonderful albums and Paul continues to. Yeah. Anything else you care to share about your sonnets, um your short story writing, Ravi Shankar? I guess I'd like to plug the two short story books. You know, it's so hard to market when you're not plugged in, right? If you're not from a writing program or you don't live in New York,
00:42:10
Speaker
um It is really hard. And I've done everything that you can normally do, but it's just it's just hard. Everybody who has read them, writers don't like writing blurbs. And i I have several friends who are names you might recognize, like Nicholson Baker and George Saunders. And I've asked them about blurbing, and they say, sorry, nope, don't do that. You, not for Philip Roth.
00:42:39
Speaker
when he was alive. So it's really tough. But where I have had reviews and response from my own readers, ah friends and the like, people like them a great deal. And Michael Antman is one of my first readers. He's really my the first reader. He also has been my editor for all these 12 years with all these sonnets.
00:43:03
Speaker
And so the pattern is I'd write us on it. I'd immediately ship it off to Michael and he would come back with two or three suggestions or none. Sometimes he'd just say, Hey, great. And then we'd haggle over some of them. And more often than not, he'd be right. He's got a good year. He does. Yeah.
00:43:24
Speaker
Okay, then I have to ask you, you've written all these sonnets, you've written the short stories, and I'm hearing a little bit of what, I think, you know, Mark and I, I can't speak for you, Mark, but I will anyway, what we feel a little bit, what many other writers feel, it would be great to get our work out there and and and recognize. But let me ask you, how important is it really?
00:43:47
Speaker
Well, it's never kept me from writing. And unlike some like many writers that I know, Rejections never bothered me. I had a professor who got, who if he got one little rejection slip, he would go into an alcoholic funk for a week. but And and i I'm not exaggerating. I mean, he basically killed himself that way. And i just I just don't worry about rejection. And I have published in small magazines, both short stories and poems over the years,
00:44:24
Speaker
um But when I retired, you know since I retired, I've written three books of short stories and two novels, and I've only gotten the two short story collections published. So it doesn't keep me from writing. I keep hoping that...
00:44:40
Speaker
you know Lightning will strike, but it's almost going to take that because everything one writes ends up in a slush pile, whether it's with an agent and their assistant or a magazine. Publishers don't take unsolicited manuscripts, as you know. It's just really tough if you're not plugged in or wired into the system. And I was off running symphony orchestras and making videos and not spending much time trying to build a network of fellow writers. And so I don't have an agent. I don't know why you can't go out and buy an agent. Why is that? Why can't I just give somebody $10,000 and say, you'll get 50% of the residuals if you can get me a top 10 publisher, but you can't. You know, and I mean, I'll tell you one way that I look at it. Like I I've had, ah you know, a pretty good career in broadcasting. And I think, you know, Mark is doing well at at Western. And you've obviously had an amazing career as well, working with symphony orchestras and and Sweetwater. How much good fortune do we need to have? Really? Oh, hey, I'm not complaining. I'm not. Yeah. Like I said, if I was really upset by it, I wouldn't write.
00:45:59
Speaker
but the writing's a thing. It's a joy to sit down at this desk every single day and push a story just that much further or a novel. Yeah, and I think you'll find once this podcast airs, your fame is just gonna, well, it's not gonna skyrocket, but two or three more people will become familiar with you. At least six people will now know who you are. I'm there. All right. Mark, any final thoughts from your quarter?
00:46:29
Speaker
No, I just love this conversation. i love I actually had the topic of listening to music while you write, I think is one that we haven't plumbed very deeply. So that's one that I'm interested in because its i just I'm interested to see what other writers do because I find it's impossible to listen to lyrics when I'm writing. So Mark, what what's your favorite jazz musician. I love ah Miles Davis, like, yeah, ah that's that for me is I don't know why I like that so much. But I just I can have that in the background, playing, and I move by it. But I don't get intellectually connected to it while I'm listening to it. I just feel it. And that kind of music works for me. But out that said, I mean, I listen to Mozart all the time, too, like I, there's some classical stuff I listen to as well. And you're right, like,
00:47:24
Speaker
some classical will pull you out. I find you guys are so sophisticated. I'll just go back to my Danny Harrison and I'm going to listen to some raga. I'm actually excited to try that because I, uh, and we've got two artists so we can try, I get, I can try. I'm excited about that.
00:47:43
Speaker
can i Can I make one last point about music? Absolutely. So much of this has been about that. Again, unlike all of my colleagues in the symphony orchestra business, I believe that all music, other than music with song, like you're talking about, that all music is abstract.
00:48:06
Speaker
I don't care if Beethoven wants to call the sixth symphony Pastoral and Disney turns it into, you know, beautiful horses, you know, running through a forest. It's not in the music. And if you never saw the Alpine Symphony called the Alpine Symphony, when you heard it, you would not think that the beginning is the dawn on a huge mountain.
00:48:34
Speaker
And that applies for all forms of music, jazz as much as classical music, but also for Ravi Shankar. Most of what he plays are called morning ragas or evening ragas or afternoon ragas, but he never ties them to any specific image or you know part of nature or anything like that. So again, i I love the fact that I can step away from a piece like the Alpine Symphony and listen to it in a way that has absolutely nothing to do with a place I've never been to anyway. yeah And and it in fact, for me, it deepens the music. I talked about classical music, you know, clamping down on you. I think part of the way it does that is by titling the works. And when you jettison the titles and just listen to the piece of music as an abstract creation, it's just that much more powerful.
00:49:33
Speaker
That's true. I mean, if you listen to a piece called Requiem, you're going to kind of approach it from a certain perspective. Yeah. Christopher Guerin, thank you very much for being on our podcast, Recreative. Thank you. It's been a pleasure, both of you. Lovely to meet you. Same here.
00:50:13
Speaker
You've been listening to Recreative, a podcast about creativity and the works that inspire it. Recreative is produced by Mark Rainer and Joe Mahoney for Donovan Street Press, Inc., in association with Monkey Joy Press. Technical production of music by Joe Mahoney, web design by Mark Rainer.
00:50:31
Speaker
You can support this podcast by checking out our guest work, listening to their music, purchasing their books, watching their shows, and so on. You can find out more about each guest in all of our past episodes by visiting recreative.ca. That's re-creative.ca. You can contact us by emailing joe mohoney at donovanstreetpress dot.com. We'd love to hear from you. Thanks for listening.