Julia Holter says:
Six years ago, Pandit Pashupati Nath Mishra instilled in me some crazy will to become a singer of songs. He was my gurujion a brief intensive study in Benares, India. I listened to his voice every day for four weeks; very little was said, but very much was sung. Whether or not I "understood" what I was hearing during this time, something fundamentally changed in my musical world. I knew no Hindi, and he knew only a bit of English, yet I left Benares louder than I had ever been. What magic had Pashupati carried out on me, that I suddenly too became a performer? Can we speculate by focused listening to his voice? A CD-R of his brilliant, light-classical recordings quietly handed to me toward the end of my study lost its case somewhere in my travels. Back in Los Angeles, years later, I still listen in awe, with limited information about the pieces.
Here is the first track on the album-- the longest and most haunting, in valambit (very slow) deepchandi taal. Pashupati’s voice flows non-stop for eighteen minutes, like a river over rocks. He travels to a new place at every moment, arriving every time with the confidence of natural speech. He must be singing from a very long text? Or not. Over and over, Pashupati repeats almost exactly the same phrase, with some variation, though to the ear it is a different piece of information every time. Like melismas set to the Kyrie, the song expands a small fragment of text into sound so long and profound that the meaning could be either deeply rooted in place, or almost completely obscured.
A fellow student in India at the time, tabla player/percussionist Dan Piccolo, tells me that this piece is a thumri, a romantic/devotional song. I have come across a well-known text by the medieval poet Lalan that fits the typical thumri theme of separation and seems to be the text sung here. It might be tough for someone who doesn’t speak the language to say so, but I see this situation as one in which the meaning becomes more deeply rooted with every long reiteration of the short text. The text translates, roughly, as follows: “Enough! Now stop playing on your flute, dark lover. This braja girl's heart is aflutter, I ask you, please stop playing.” Here, flute-playing Krishna’s threatening magnetic pull compels the "braja girl" Radha to propose a distance. Pashupati’s melody continuously outlines a major seventhchord. The maddened Radha is the unwieldy major seventh (ni, or Western "ti")-- so far from her magnet fundamental (sa, or Western "do") on one side, yet so dangerously close to it on the other side. If that sounds like a contrived interpretation, add to it that subtleties of the near/far paradox can be found when he throws in an occasional, gorgeous, flattened ni, or ga (Western "mi"). These most dissonant moments Pashupati uses sparingly, to full-effect, and they are dizzying and gorgeous.
Pashupati was all song. While watching a video of a performance of his, I reflect how, when he sings, his body language is explanatory, almost as if he were talking. Interesting to consider the unlikelihood of a young Californian ever fully "understanding" what is communicated in music made in such a different world, even if one has studied it for years. But beyond the sheer beauty of his work, what I do take away most of all from Pashupati’s song is the absolute necessity of the voice.
