Adventures in being a tool.....

Man the last 24 hours have been rough on my emotions.

After coming home from rehearsal yesterday I called Javat aka who I was supposed to deliver a package for a friend in LA. He wanted to have "a cup of tea" with me, so he picked me up at the metro - in a big black fancy car with a driver. Then he took me to the downtown MIR supermarket for lunch - in the fancy section, this is the same supermarket that in a different section has a cafe that offers the only non-granulated coffee in all of Tashkent. Turns out he is the president of the company that owns MIR and a bunch of other stuff. And I was the fetishized American that he got to have lunch with and introduce to all the people in the office. He showed me his store (which is HUGE) and then the office and told the secretary to let me come in and use the computer whenever I want. Then we went to look at brides for hayit, and then went back to his big luxurious house.

I really don't know how to be with rich people here (or in America for that matter). When I tell him about my research and my interests it is obvious that he isn't really that interested. He said to me "this is the first time I've heard of an American coming to study dutar and Uzbek music, I mean, why would you need it?" And when I mentioned that I am hoping to come back next year he immediately said okay, well that's easy, I'll buy you a plane ticket and you can live with us and teach my daughter English. When I said I was applying for (presitigious) grants to try and get funding he replied "why would you need that?" I'm really not sure how to handle his generosity or his offers for things like plane tickets, etc. I get the feeling that he is a very nice guy and naturally generous, but also a very sly businessman and is pretty much only interested in me because I am an AMercian and knowing me is a wierd kind of feather in his cap.

And then today I did some recordings with the freshman maqom ensemble - it was long and of course the boys in the ensemble (the 3 girls seem to have disappeared, I'm not entirely sure why) swarmed me to look and grope my equipment. It was overwhelming. And the recording didn't come out as well as I'd hoped because of the boomy accoustics in the room. Still I have a decent recording of a couple of peices so I shouldn't complain. It just left me really drained and then I went into the main entryway and met up with Rustam Samigovich, who told me that the conference that I gave an abstract to is happening next week - so I now have 5 days to write a conference paper in Russian that hopefully won't offend anyone. I also need to write an abstract for the gender conference at UCLA in March and write that frickin CD review that I should have done before I left. And I have a lesson in 2 hours and a very full weekend and I am feeling really overwhelmed at the moment.

(no subject)

Last night I went to the wildest concert - The conservatory's folk instrument ensemble (i.e. the reconstructed Uzbek instruments that date from the early Soviet Period) played a concert honoring their ties with the French government. So the Soviet invented Uzbek folk orchestra played a concert of 19th Century French classical music. Even more interesting, the program comprised a lot of Orientalist stuff - Saint Saen's Dans Bachanalle from Samson and Delilah, Ravel's Bolero, Bizet's Carmen. So here you have an orchestra of Soviet altered Uzbek instruments playing the music of French composers who were imagining exotic images of Moorish or Levantine life. Add to that they fact that the Uzbek soloist for the Toreodor song sang in Russian.....Gloabilzed music in action!

The really neat thing is that for the most part, the concert really worked, it was a lot more pleasant to listen to and musically sucessful than I ever thought it would have been. And the instrumentalists really get into the music - somehow I think that despite the irony of the situation (which most of the opeople I've talked to seem at least mildly aware of) they really feel this music.

Class didn't happen at the conservatory this morning, but I did get to sit and talk with the people in the class - they are good kids and they are forcing my Uzbek to get better. I had a really interesting experience with Firuza, a student of Malika's who plays in the ensemble and used to be a voice major - she's incredibly talented and very musical. She was sitting down picking out the right hand line of a piano piece and I sat next to her and asked (in Uzbek, since she speaks NO Russian) if I could play the left hand. She said sure and we started picking through the piece. I realized quickly that something was wrong - we were not playing in the same meter - so I told her that look the meter is 6/8, so the rhythm is da dum da dum. We then went on reading the piece and she didn't play the dotted eight, sixteenth, eigth rhythm - and I mentioned it and then she mentioned that this piece is a folk melody and that when they play it traditionally, its played with that different meter - it turns out the melody is in a maxum style syncopated 4/4 rhythm. Once again, the notes have remarkably little relevance to the actual melody, but people hear know how to use them for the purposes they need - usually to remind them of melodic contours. I read throguh the piece like a good american sight reader and it sounded completely wrong, but here I was correcting Firuza because I thought she was reading a piece of music from my tradition - and not following the notes correctly.