PREFACE
My first book, Solkaṭṭu Manual, was published in 2008. Neither I nor the wonderful team at Wesleyan University Press had any idea whether it might find an audience at all, or if it did, who might make up such an audience. We have all been pleasantly surprised to find that yes, it did find an audience, large enough to require a second printing. It is still available as of this writing.
I knew the material was solid since I had developed it in my solkaṭṭu classes at Wesleyan University. I had observed firsthand the enthusiasm and engagement of my students, very few of whom were percussionists, and even fewer of whom continued into the study of mṛdaṅgam. What I had not imagined was that this material, and my approach to it, would have an international reach. So I was pleasantly surprised when, a year or two after Solkaṭṭu Manual’s publication, I received an e-mail from a German jazz drummer named Christian Scheuber. Christian had enjoyed working with the book and wanted to know whether I had more advanced material, and whether it was possible to work together over Skype. Chris and I began a fruitful working relationship that culminated in my composing a duet piece for mṛdaṅgam and drum set in miśra capu tāḷa, the seven-beat cycle featured in chapter 6, “Miśra Capu Tāḷa,” of this book. We recorded the piece, which was later released on the CD Shapes of Four, a suite composed by the pianist Regina Litvinova for her quartet. I traveled to Ludwigshafen, Germany, in 2014 to perform in the world premiere of Shapes of Four, and Chris and I have been fast friends ever since. He has done a full German translation of Solkaṭṭu Manual, which has yet to be published.
In 2014 I got another unexpected e-mail, this time from Poorya Pakshir in Iran. Poorya is an expert performer and teacher on the tombak, one of Iran’s principal percussion instruments. After we had exchanged a few messages, he asked for permission to translate Solkaṭṭu Manual into the Persian language. His translation work coincided with our revisions ahead of the second English printing, and he found errors in the original version that nobody else, myself included, had noticed. His Persian translation has since been published in Iran. Poorya entered Wesleyan’s graduate program in music in September 2016, where he earned his MA and is about to begin his doctoral studies.
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