Notes on Love: A Karnatik Music Concert

In Pu. Ti. Na.'s Gokula Nirgamana (The Departure from Gokula), everybody loves and everybody cries, as Krishna, the lover of the town, the apple of everyone’s eye, leaves town forever. They compose poems that circulate all around Gokula on the eve of his departure, marking the world with the many feelings of love and longing. The old and the young and the boys and the girls, all of them, sing of their attachment to this leaving figure, who means so much and cares so little. In both its lyrical import and musical activity, these compositions rehearse a full story of love, all the excitement and the promise, the pulls and pleasures, tensions and projections, and all the loss. Come, listen to these poems in this Karnatik concert, a performance also annotated by meditations on what is so absurd and unbearable about love.

These poems are set to 'ragas' (melodic frameworks emerging out of a constellation of notes) that correspond to the mood and movement of the lyric, sung according to the Karnatik form, extensively popular in the southern part of India and ideologically bestowed the status of the “classical.”

Please register for (free!) tickets via Eventbrite by clicking here.

Please arrive promptly for the start of the performance at 6.30 PM.

Vighnesh Hampapura is a vocalist training in the Karnatik form for the past eighteen years, and teaches music theories and practices as a Visiting Faculty of Performing Arts at Ashoka University in India.