Friday, March 16th, 2007
Music Party at Auroville
We were priviliged enough to be invited to a birthday party thrown by a load of young musicians. This included an informal concert organised by the musicians… the standard was stunning. One of the big questions when wandering around Auroville is how successfully it manages to bring together different cultures and ethnicities. On the surface, everything and everyone seems quite separated but when you dig beneath the surface, you see that actually it is quite a successful melting pot.
The musicians here played across all cultural barriers, but it was also great to see this happen on a social level too.
The youth of Auroville are amazing people (more on this in future blogs), and it’s a shame that it takes quite a lot of effort for the outsider to realise what they have to offer to the rest of Auroville.
This concert was really tough to photograph, very low levels of light against the wall of a building. I used a 50mm lens at f1.8 at 1/20s.
Lovely sax playing with beautiful tone, with an accomplished drummer who has great energy
This chap runs a music studio in Auroville, and used to be a professional jazz violinist in Germany. This instrument is an electric viola with bottom F and B flat strings… giving it the range of a Cello and a Bass! Many musicians in Auroville have similar crazy ideas for custom made instruments which work really well.
The guy on the left plays beautiful Indian style violin and sings so beautifully that your heart feels like it’s being ripped out. The chap on the right is a farmer from Portsmouth who is also a singer-songwriter and plays jazz guitar. What a cultural melting pot… the guy on the left has a western girlfriend, and the guy on the right is about to get married to a local Tamil girl.
It’s great that we have opportunities to get to know the people here… casual visitors to Auroville just get to see the Matrimandir (the space age golf ball) with loads of people meditating around it, and a few people cycling around. Apart from that, it seems a bit dead.
There are a lot of tourists and much media interest, which can make the residents here quite self-protective. It’s really nice to have the opportunity to see beyond most tourists’ (and journalists’!) surface impressions.
on Sunday, March 18th, 2007 at 2:25 pm:
Wonderful photography; the pictures of the 3 girls on the bike and the man with the little kid on the motorbike nearly brought tears to my eyes; strange isn’t it! But the simple, human element, the light of the sun, the dust and the green of the foliage and the flowers are just stunning in their simplicity.