Virtuosities of the Native Alien

This text is about to be published in : Hope/Devenish (ed.) Contemporary Virtuosities, Routledge 2022/23 It is shared with you only for personal research or for teaching – do not share publicly. Sandeep Bhagwati Virtuosities of the Native Alien ABSTRACT All musickers today encounter traditions of music other than those in which they themselves feel at home. In some contexts, some may be expected to make music with musicians from another tradition – practitioners with a take on relating sounds to meaning and life that might be quite different from their own. Often termed ‘world music’, such projects mostly rely on a basic level of musicianship - much like conversations in Hotel-BarEnglish. And while such encounters might feel good to the players, curious listeners might not find them as engaging – even the musicians tend to play with less engagement and refinement than within their own tradition. Is there a virtuosity in encountering another tradition? In switching codes, in relishing another aesthetic, in provincialising your convictions? In over 20 years of working with trans-traditional projects, Bhagwati has met many musicians who are precisely such virtuosos of the inter-musical encounter. He calls them Native Aliens. आवारा हूँ Awara Hoon I am a vagabond आवारा हूँ Awara Hoon I am a vagabond या ग+द- श म0 हूँ आसमान का तारा हूँ Ya gardish mein hoon aasmaan ka taara hoon Or I am a cloud, a star in the sky1 Home and the Sonic World Sometimes it takes years to arrive nowhere - if we can find it at all. We musickers2 are builders of ephemeral abodes, of homes for one evening, architectures for a night: their fabrics flap in the storms that our melodies ride on. Their supports melt away in the heat our rhythms whip up. Driven from venue to venue to rebuild our sonic tents wherever we go, we may easily perceive our existence as that of a wanderer. And like all wanderers, 1 From the Bollywood movie ”Awara” (Vagabond) (Bombay 1951) Lyrics: Shailendra; Music: Shankar-Jaikishan; sung by Mukesh; acted by Raj Kapoor. “Awara” (and particularly this song) is one of the most successful and influential films in global movie history, a complex tale of power differentials, making a joyous and unbowed living in deep adversity, of virtuosic twist of morality and revenge that may well be interpreted as a critical and multi-layered account of colonialism’s devastations – and a sovereign rebuttal of their premises. 2 This seemingly quaint usage derives from Christopher Small’s term “musicking” which looks at music making as being always embedded within a extended social support system: in order to be able to make any music at all, many other nonmusicians and non-audience members must be convinced that it is important to do precisely this kind of sonic work – and support it with actions, work and funds. Sandeep Bhagwati - Virtuosities of the Native Alien 2 we at times ache for a place that we may always return to.3 Most musicians can find a home in the sounds they make - when they musick within a tradition. A sonic tradition4 can tell a musician ”you’re home” when nothing else can. Like the places some of us may call “home”, tradition provides a virtual launching dock that will patiently wait for one’s return, should one be tempted to stray and explore. And like a home, a tradition can make us oscillate between creature comforts, practical challenges – and, at times, emotional suffocation. The latter side-effect of being utterly at home has often been cited by sonoclastic musickers as a good enough reason for leaving behind a tradition they were raised or trained in. It all just seemed so stuffy and drab! They needed a change of airs! But of the many traditionrenouncers I have encountered in my life as a musician, hardly any wanted to entirely abandon the concept of belonging to some community of like-sounding people: all they usually craved was the liberty to choose their community. The most adamant sonoclasts turned to non-idiomatic improvisation – in other words: a carefully evasive tradition that aims to steer clear of any stable, recognizable musical idiom. Yet even their desire to dodge the familiar usually ends up creating a new “idiom of the non-idiomatic”: performances of nonidiomatic improvisation quickly establish a rather consistent manner of shaping and placing sound that makes free improv performances as aesthetically recognizable as the hidebound traditions their players wanted to get away from: when you cleanse your music of established codes, you will in the process create a new aesthetic code that you follow. 3 Georges Perec once wrote: “… j’aimerais qu’il existe des lieux immuables…” (… I would like there to be places that do not change…”) (Perec 1974) “Especes d’espaces” 4 I understand eurological new music, free improv and other experimental musicking scenes to be (albeit often self-negating and thus neurotic) traditions of their own. In today’s context, a(nti)-traditionality is more a strategic aesthetic conceit than an actual musical practice. Free improv players, for example, have “traditional” sonic practices that differ to such an extent that improvisers who evolved in one may well not “flow” with those used to another – John Zorn once professed that for this reason he could not play with Derek Bailey (personal conversation, August 14, 2007). Sandeep Bhagwati - Virtuosities of the Native Alien 3 Musicians thus may be geographic errants, but they do not usually also become aesthetical errants. They eventually settle somewhere. And whatever way of musicking they choose as their aesthetical home defines the framework within which they can become virtuosos of their art. Life in the Shallows All musickers today encounter traditions of music other than those in which they themselves feel at home. In some contexts, some may even be expected or forced by circumstance or necessity5 to make music with musicians from another tradition – practitioners with a take on relating sounds to meaning and life that might be quite different from their own. Often termed "world music"6, such projects often have a bad name among “serious” musicians, possibly because for reasons of time and money, many of them tend to rely on the lowest common denominator of musicking: on a beat as the most efficient glue for disparate sounds and languages and the “song” as the most commercially viable musical form. Such projects often resemble conversations in Hotel-Bar-English where the subject matters one can discuss are severely limited both by the setting and the mutually uncertain command of the language the conversation takes place in. And while such world music encounters might sometimes feel good to the players, listeners who love a musician’s work within their tradition, often find the musical results of these encounters rather shallow in comparison. Yet - are there perhaps musicians who do feel at home in several traditional frameworks? Who excel both in traditional and in trans-traditional work? And if so: what would the concept of virtuosity really mean to such “Native Aliens”7, such vagabond minstrels? Don’t they need to continually navigate potential mishearings of e.g. migrant or refugee musicians The term “world music” was established in 1980 at a UK music industry meeting as a catch-all commercial sales category for both traditional “ethnic” music forms AND commercial cross-cultural music projects, such as those promoted on the “Real World” and “Putumayo” labels. (see e.g Frith 2000). This primarily commercial use of the term has made more traditional and art-oriented musicians and musicologists leery of its usefulness for artistically driven cross-cultural music projects. 7 I define and describe the concept of the Native Alien more clearly in my essay “On Native Aliens” (2015). 5 6 Sandeep Bhagwati - Virtuosities of the Native Alien 4 their work by more tradition-bound musickers – mishearings that prevent them from appearing to be virtuosic? Virtuosity usually describes the ability to not only bring to life the basic or functional elements of a wellestablished practice, but to supercharge this practice with arbitrary or imposed difficulties which render a successful performance so improbable that it becomes a notable achievement. This game of set-up and resolution works well in an environment of dexteritycentric sonic behaviours that move within a traditional space familiar to an audience, where the “success” of a performance can be immediately gauged against standard practice, through anticipation and subsequent closure - or against a written text. Virtuosity already becomes more difficult to grasp when it happens more at the level of composition, such as in a Bach fugue or a Dhrupad performance: i.e. when the challenges to overcome are not perceivable as physical feats but rather invite intellectual analysis – and thus can only be admired by the cognoscenti. It is, however, by no means evident how such concepts of virtuosity could at all be established in situations where musicians move between different traditional frameworks. Is there such a thing as virtuosity-inrealizing-another-tradition, in relishing another aesthetic, in provincializing8 your sense of beauty? Or would a extension of “the virtuosic” to include such trans-traditional encounters make no practical sense – because while all tradition-bound musicians seem to be somewhat alike in their traditionality, all musical vagabonds become who they are in their own unique way - nothing to generalize here? Or would a concept like ”virtuosity” simply not apply to those musical native aliens, whom musickers immersed in one specific 8 I have been extending the concept of “provincialization” – proposed in 2000 by historian Dipesh Chakraborty to describe the erosion of European cultural hegemony - to the aesthetic: namely, to describe the insight and realization (not only by Europeans / European-Americans but by every self-or externally identified so-called “culture”) that one’s own set of cultural values and aesthetics is not the only one in the world - and that it cannot be applied to other contexts except through metaphorical or actual violence. If violence, however, is not your preferred reaction to this realization, the turn towards provincialization would mean that one can still love and cherish one’s own values and aesthetics if one accepts that they are contingent and accidental and therefore not entitled to privilege – or it could mean to recalibrate one’s set of values in the light of this insight. The difference between hegemonial cultures and others is that the latter have already been forced into provincialization, while the former believe this turn to be optional. Sandeep Bhagwati - Virtuosities of the Native Alien 5 tradition generally tend to consider as merely glorified amateurs dabbling in various traditions, while actually becoming masters of none? The Rhizome of the Sonic Over the last twenty-odd years, I have collaborated with a wide range of musicians trained in traditions such as techno, Hindustani classical music, “new music”, Korean “sanjo”, free jazz, Chinese silk-and-bamboo music, indigenous Cree music, baroque music, traditional Basque music, European classical music, Ottoman classical music, Senegalese Griot music, Bavarian folk, Japanese music, experimental electronic music, Bulgarian leshka vocal music, Canadian Métis music, Ruandan music, Bollywood music, Vietnamese music, Blues, traditional jazz, Iranian classical music, indie rock music, Norwegian and Swedish folk, Pacific indigenous Tao music, Scandinavian Pop, Syrian oud music, operatic bel canto, Armenian duduk music, Anatolian folk music, Austrian yodeling, and a few more. Not every tradition listed above corresponds precisely to one musician: some were enacted in various shadings by several musicians - while a few musicians brought two or more traditions each to our collaborations. More importantly, the music a musician played in the projects we collaborated on only sometimes corresponded to their (self-)assigned ethnicity. Many of them had actually learned a music tradition that had not been dominant in the social/ethnic environment they grew up in.9 These collaborations in several locations around the globe10 expressly asked how musicians from several It is my experience and conviction that, because mastering a music tradition always involves both a conscious choice and years of sustained engagement, any given musical tradition, by its very nature, can be mastered competently and imaginatively by anyone who puts their mind, heart and body to it. Connecting with its initially “alien” cultural and emotional significance may be more of a challenge for people born outside the heartland of this tradition, but it is not impossible in principle to absorb those, too. Music making does not recognize any ethnic privilege. And not all of these musicians were aesthetic vagabonds, either. In today’s globalized music contexts it is perfectly possible that the only music tradition an Italian vocalist learns to perform masterfully is, say, the Hindustani khayal tradition – and the only music a Chinese instrumentalist learns to play professionally is the European classical tradition between Scarlatti and Debussy. 10 Frankfurt & Mumbai (Ensemble Modern) from 2000 to 2008, Vienna (Klangforum Wien, 2005), Berlin (Ensemble Extrakte) since 2013, 9 Sandeep Bhagwati - Virtuosities of the Native Alien 6 music making traditions might collaborate in more intricate, more intertwined, more sustainable ways than most “world music” one-night-stands could afford. What to do once the initial surprise of hearing instruments/musicians from different traditions sound off together has waned? How can one find wellsprings of creativity that draw on the sonic preferences and aesthetic catchment areas of several traditions? How does one establish a contact zone that can accommodate more than one way of musical reality, or thinking? How can one navigate the living rhizome of the sonic in which all music traditions are entangled nodes? Which dendrites connect them, which new shoots may grow from their connection? Śabdagatitāra In the course of these creative collaborations, it quickly became clear that in order to collaborate creatively and sustainably, we needed a few basic methodical constraints, a safe space playing field, as it were. There were, of course the seemingly obvious aspirations, such as: ”No musical tradition should dominate our collaboration” or “For each piece, we need to stop the creative process at some point”. These aspirations, selfevident as they seem, were nevertheless not always easy to implement as such. We found instead that using one or more of the following methodical constraints would help us much more to understand what we were about to do – and how to go about it. For they made us aware of the creative options we had. I have labeled them as follows: (1) "grafting onto the stem", (2) "learning to love your common enemy", (3) "polishing the rift", (4) "embracing false friends", (5) "listening to your own inner life", (6) "imitating the impossible” and (7) "musicking in anti-hegemonic aesthetics”. These methodical constraints constitute an expandable toolbox which I have labeled Śabdagatitāra, a Sanskritbased neologism11 that translates as “the intertwining (tāra) of methods of making (gati) sound (šabda).” Montréal (The Sound of Montréal / Ensemble Constantinople) since 2014, Pune (Ensemble Sangeet Prayog) since 2015, Oslo (OsloMusics) since 2019, Toronto (Ensemble Swara Sutras,) since 2021, with some more tentative, short-term projects in Istanbul 2019, Zurich 2021, and Viitasaari 2021. Śabdagatitāra: I chose Sanskrit as an ancient language other than Latin or Ancient Greek to coin this new term. This was partly 11 Sandeep Bhagwati - Virtuosities of the Native Alien 7 (1) Grafting onto the stem Each musician adheres to the musicking aesthetics of his/her own tradition – and accords all other musicians roles within that familiar tradition (e.g. rhythm base, accompaniment, heterophonic voice, etc.). For example, one perceives the other in the role of a rhythm provider, while the latter understands the first as wellspring for their own improvisation. Or: what is actually meant to be a concert form in one tradition becomes a dance form in another context - or vice versa. Thus, a musicker perceives all other musics that are present merely as grafts upon the stem of her/his own practice. This, incidentally, is the most frequently practised method in trans-cultural projects - whether one is listening to a concert for "exotic" soloists and orchestras or a jazz musician jamming with Indian musicians. When applied superficially however, this method can come close to an essentialist manner of dealing with each other – everyone else becomes “just” a placeholder for a tradition, not a rich and complex sonic person, and every other music just becomes “musical material”, not an organic entity in and of itself. In order to avoid such a slide from “playing with others” to “using the others” one needs a finely honed, virtuosic presence of mind, a presence of respect for the presence of the other. (2) Learning to Love your Common Enemy Often seemingly important differences disappear in the face of something that is recognizably alien to all. Commonalities that one had downplayed or ignored in defining one’s own tradition and identity suddenly reassert themselves. And the creative collaboration can then proceed on the strength of those commonalities. When the Teichmann Brothers, a well-known duo of DJs & Electronica, were invited to join Ensemble prompted by fatigue occasioned by the observation that newly minted academic terminologies even in post-colonial and decolonizing discourses continually hanker back to ancient Europe; and partly by a Canadian presenter’s weird insistence that the word “trans-traditional” on a poster might be read by their public as something having to do with “trans-gender” issues. It prompted the contrarian in me to present him with an invented word guaranteed to be devoid of any current societal or cultural connotation – but by that token also rather unfit for PR purposes. To my surprise, this tongue-in cheek move was accepted by their publicist – and ever since then, the usefulness of this term has grown on me. Sandeep Bhagwati - Virtuosities of the Native Alien 8 Extrakte in a project that wanted to musically revisit 1990s Berlin Techno music in a resonant response, its virtuosos of Chinese, Korean and Arabic music, jazz musicians, bluesmen and new music makers all came out as Techno-sceptics. They assured each other of the importance of irregularity or fatigue as aesthetic categories, highlighted the emotional importance of the sound itself being crafted by the interplay of human players and analog instruments, underlined how important silence and endings were in their respective musics, etc. The social and musical gulf they perceived between their own concert practices and electronic dance music made them realise that, in many aspects of music-making, each of them inhabited merely one region of a much wider continuum. And that it might therefore be possible to wander around in or even extend this continuum without immediately losing all points of reference to one's own tradition. In understanding how close we were to each other in musical terms, we learned: when each of us can understand the deeper parameters of our traditional aesthetic framework, there will be much that can connect us. And this insight extended to Techno, too – only on a larger time-scale and using different sonic tools. Thus we had to learn the virtuosity of loving a common enemy. (3) Polishing the Rift At any moment in such an inter-traditional encounter, one may run into snags that can stop the music until both sides understand what the problem is. It may be an ambiguous hand sign or nod, or it may be a different concept of what a properly formed melody is or on which beat a rhythm is heard to begin. For the most part, such snags can be resolved. But sometimes they resist a simple solution: such as when an Indian musician imagines time flow in rhythm cycles to be strictly regular and perceivable, while a Korean p’ansori drummer imagines the flow in rhythm cycles to be mostly inaudible and to appear only in support of the tensions and accents of the singer: they thus count time very differently. This is an example of a rift that cannot be bridged, jammed away, sanded away. But it can (or maybe even should) be left to “fester” in the resulting music. Like glacial erratics, such rifts, if they do not make collaboration impossible, may lend the resulting Sandeep Bhagwati - Virtuosities of the Native Alien 9 music a particular texture or quality – the irritant can become an inspiration for new ways of making music. Like in the Japanese idea of kintsugi, such a rift may be gilded and polished instead of trying to hide it. Rifts between two or more traditions can occur on several levels: 1. the cultural/aesthetic/ideological level (what is, why and for whom or what do we make music?) 2. the institutional/organisational/practical level (how do we make music?) 3. the material/structural/sound level (what sounds when and how?). Surprisingly, the most persistent problems occur on level 2. While musicians love to work on rifts in (3) and are experts in practical problem solving on this level, they mostly prefer to not engage with rifts in (1) at all and leave that to other musickers, such as curators or venues. Rifts in (2) clearly have the greatest potential to disturb the collaborative growth of a music: when it is not clear what a rehearsal is for – (learning the piece?, or establishing mutual trust?), or when it is not unanimous whether a piece is too long or too short, or, as in the example above, when the inner conception of what one is playing does not correspond to that of another player. In all these cases, short of invoking a solution ex machina, one can only either abandon a piece – or polish the rift and make this abyss a feature. This requires a virtuosity of learning to love and incorporate failures. (4) Embracing False Friends Everyone who works in a project engaging a variety of musicking traditions soon encounters false friends: phenomena that you think you know in the other music, but which come from a different way of thinking and hearing. For example, when eurological musicians think they hear functional harmonic progressions in an Arabic melody, or when an Hindustani musician interprets twelve-tone melodies as a particular instance of a raga, or when an indigenous instructional house building song sounds to a jazz listener exactly like a kind of blues. Sandeep Bhagwati - Virtuosities of the Native Alien 10 Many trans-traditional projects are replete with such false friend moments. But they rarely reflect on this phenomenon, and even less see them as genuinely creative affordances. In Śabdagatitāra mode, we would often consciously seek out such false friends to create moments of artistic interest - as connections between two sections, as turning points in a dramaturgical development, as sources of interesting structural tension. For example: consciously harmonizing an oud phrase in a cadential moment only to emphasize the end of a long improvisation; or using lehra-melodies12 as an actual melos for a singer to improvise on etc. Such conscious uses of creative misunderstandings must be understood in all their trans-traditional (cognitive) dissonance before they can be implemented. But when they are embraced in this way, they can enable new virtuosities in juggling with (mis)communications as if they were a creative resource. (5) Listening to Your Own Inner Life Musicians in many non-commercial cultural and traditional contexts are often perceived as neutral, disembodied and a-biographical sound producers, almost interchangeable carriers of function - and they are often judged only by the sound result. A symphony orchestra is the most blatant example of this, but the same applies to many ensemble styles, be it central African Banda Linda or Gagaku. This sound-immanent view of musical events, perfectly sensible in a traditional context, can become an obstacle in trans-traditional contexts: once a musician transcends a certain necessary level of instrumental skill (or even virtuosity) in their own tradition, no "outsider" can really judge the 'intratraditional' quality of what they play: is it correct, good, of acceptable skill or not, does it convey depth or not? Therefore, when musicking across aesthetic divides, the musician's personality becomes an important marker for the quality and aesthetic credibility of their musicking - especially when they lehra: a wave-like, waxing and waning background melody for Indian percussionists that is supposed to orient them in their chosen taal while they play long rhythmic improvisation solos. 12 Sandeep Bhagwati - Virtuosities of the Native Alien 11 have a personality that can communicate musical quality through non-musical elements of their presentation: their assured “earnestness” or ”joy” in playing, their openness to and mental flexibility in demonstrating and discussing their practice, their personal artistic intensity and conviction in shaping the music etc. Connections (synapses) between musicians can therefore also be strengthened through their nonmusical exchange. Many of my project workshops begin with a personal one-on-one conversations between the participants, followed by a "game" in which each participant evokes non-musicalised sound situations from their own childhood (say, the plaintive cry of a street vendor in a sleepy afternoon street full of monkeys and bird noises). All musicians describe their soundscape and its importance to their own memories and then direct us while we try to re-enact this sound as a musical depiction. Thusly anchoring sound production in a performer’s intimate personal history makes us understand not only the person but also the path that led them to this moment. And it thus encourages all musicians (who do not know each other from their shared background experiences in the same music tradition) to connect emotionally to each other, to lend meaning to the other’s sonic imagination. In the process, most of them readily leave their traditional habits when this departure can help them to express the memories of another musician. A traditionally serious singer might suddenly use their skills in trying to imitate a bird-sound etc. Once they leave their “home turf” to make soundscapes for their colleagues, however, they can no more claim that how they make music in their “home” tradition is the only proper one – the step outside has already become irreversible. Something similar can happen with poetic texts, where each musician must choose one or two favourite phrases to "find music" from their traditional musical understanding that would express this emotion – and then “teach” this musical emotion to another musician from another musical background. Again, their own personality, their reading of the poem will ask both partners to abandon their traditional habits of making music – and thus create a third space of collaboration that is based on their life as a person, not their official identity as an expert virtuoso. Sandeep Bhagwati - Virtuosities of the Native Alien 12 (6) Imitating the Impossible “Don’t imitate - innovate!” is an exhortation one often encounters in somewhat dated business management manuals. This thinking has permeated some practitioners’ aesthetic instincts, too: for them, as for some critical listeners, imitating the playing style or the music of another musician is deemed to be an expression with weaker creative potency than the original. In the perspective of the Śabdagatitāra, however, this weakness can become a decisive aesthetic strength. Taking the hint from another maxim: “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery”, one could also see imitative music as the appropriation of another form of music in sympathy and resonance. Both attitudes, resonance and appropriation, become highly desirable for transtraditional music which requires a maximum of mutual sympathy. We all know that actual, exact imitation is simply impossible for humans. We always misperceive, interpret and fit the imitation to our bodies and minds, especially in the embodied live arts. Two performers from the same tradition or language (playing the same instrument) may hope to achieve near-perfect performative imitations of each other. But if we were to ask a wonderful voice imitator to imitate someone who speaks in a tongue they do not master, their imitation would always be off, to a large degree. Imitation across traditions will thus always present us with a deviation. In Śabdagatitāra, one would therefore not avoid imitation, but rather unlock the creative potential inherent in imitating another musician: how it can generate new kinds of musical behaviour! Being imitatively creative thus requires a virtuosic ability to listen and isolate those salient features of someone’s playing that can indeed be repurposed onto one’s own instrument, into one’s own voice. And at the same time this virtuosity also will be situated in an ability to forget one’s own prejudices and just listen to the other. (7) Musicking in Anti-Hegemonic Aesthetics A close look at the majority of commercially promoted world music projects often reveals hegemonic features stemming from eurological and at times afrological musicking contexts: from the temporal containment of collaborative work within strict Sandeep Bhagwati - Virtuosities of the Native Alien 13 rehearsal times, maximally 3:30-minute song formats and simple binary or ternary metres to the excessive production and close spacing of synchronous kairos moments (e.g. tonal harmonies, intermediate climaxes, repetitive phrasing, lyrics that shape the music to echo their content, as if the music were made synchronously, in real time); from tuning together to a common chamber tone and the adoption of the well-tempered chromatic scale to the expectation that everything should be presented in an early evening sit-down concert or via the professional monetarization of music objects. In many other musicking traditions around the world, such elements are much less pronounced, and most certainly not bundled together in an almost normative musical package that shapes and is shaped by western audience expectations. When such "invisible" hegemonies are presumed to be the basic, unquestioned consensus (as they too often are), they will unavoidably influence the way trans-traditional music is made. Many traditions may actually be able to integrate their practice into these structures - often because their practice is highly contextual and socially adaptable to begin with, and does not regard musicking as something involving the production of finished artistic objects. But in doing so they must subordinate their own preferred aesthetic to a hegemonic narrative. Śabdagatitāra also comprises systematic methods of addressing and problematising such aesthetic hegemonies. For example, in the ensembles I work with, we never tune to a concert pitch. Each musician keeps to their tuning and their scales – and slowly begins to navigate this microtonal space we then inhabit as a source of sonic inspiration. Synchronicity and kairos-moments do not need to be pursued or fabricated - they will occur at happenstance, just like they do in the different temporalities of natural environments, and will be much more powerful for it. And no concert can ever be repeated. Each encounter takes place at a specific moment in time and a specific conjunction of place, people and ideas. It is unique each time in the sense that it must be re-made anew each time. This requires a virtuosity in a) intuiting powerdifferentials not between persons, but between musical expressions and musicking environments and b) dialing down these aesthetic differentials while emphasizing Sandeep Bhagwati - Virtuosities of the Native Alien 14 the equity of many aesthetic approaches to sound, listening - and to communication with the listener. Virtuosities of the Native Alien Sometimes it takes years to arrive nowhere. Sometimes it takes great virtuosity to be able to not let the mobile sonic home we musicians carry around with us isolate us, to let our sonic prejudices separate us from other wonderful musicians and their musical worlds outside our ken. Virtuosity in acknowledging the presence of the other without losing ourselves; virtuosity in finding and loving common enemies; virtuosity in embracing failings as findings; virtuosity in recognizing cognitive dissonance and curating creative misunderstandings; virtuosity in opening up one’s intimate, non-musical personality to another musician and treasuring it as a resource; virtuosity in imitating the impossible; virtuosity in understanding and countering aesthetic hegemonies – these are some of the core virtuosities of the Native Alien. I have had the good fortune to work with many musicians who were able to display these virtuosities in such sovereign, imaginative and sensitive ways that I would time and again forget the pain that I too, have never been able to find an aesthetic home in this sonic world. These friends are true virtuosos of the Native Alien: they can make sonic oases in the wilderness of contemporary sound arise from thin air and then let them gracefully disappear into nowhere. Zurich, July 16, 2022/rev. Sep3 , 2022 Sandeep Bhagwati - Virtuosities of the Native Alien 15 References Bhagwati, Sandeep, “On Native https://norient.com/stories/on-native-aliens (accessed on July 5, 2022) Aliens”, 2015 Chakraborty, Dipesh. “Provincializing Europe, Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference”, Princeton UP 2000 Frith, Simon. “The Discourse of World Music” in: Born & Hesmondhalgh (eds.) “Western Music and Its Others”, Berkeley 2000, p.305-322 Perec, Georges. “Espéces d’espaces”, Paris: Gallimard 1974 Small Christopher. “Musicking. The Meaning of Performing and Listening”, Wesleyan UP, Middletown 1998