Getting in the Zone

This weekend, Likha will be performing in the opening weekend of the Ethnic Dance Festival in San Francisco. Since my last missive about losing my musical chops, I've been doing several things to help me get back in the groove.

First and foremost is forefronting it all. With all the responsibilities that comes onto our plates (work, family, school, etc), sometimes some responsibilities need to be given higher priority. That's what I mean by forefronting it all. It makes a big difference for me to simply DECIDE to make it a priority. And for me, this means not just saying "Yeah, yeah...I'll do it" but more of "Damn, I had better do this...".

Second is more practice. You can't get to the NBA Finals or the Stanley Cup or to Carnegie Hall without it. Last Sunday, musicians had a gruelling practice. We haven't played that much strings, especially with these new challenging songs, in a long time. But after five hours of playing, the harder pieces were no longer as hard...so repetition and time on task paid off.

Third is immersion. When I first started playing percussion and even string, I would listen to our own or others recordings over and over. If you rode with me in my car, you would here gong music coming out of my speakers. When I go to bed, I would fall asleep listening to Rondalla music. Learning to play music is like learning to speak a new language. How do you learn a new language? Well the best way is through immersion, living it, breathing it, crapping it!

The piece we'll be playing this weekend if from the Bagobo tribe of the Philippines. Our musical instruments include agungs, a tanggunggo (a hanging set of eight graduated, embossed gongs), music of a kudyapi, a kubing (jaw's harp), and a few bird and bug whistles. We picked up this piece from workshops with the Ramon Obusan Folkloric Group in the the Philippines.

The dance we play for depicts a rice planting and harvesting cycle.