This is the final postcard from a year-long journey. One year ago, on January 1, 2012, I resolved to sing my way through the 400+ shabds in Gurbani Sangeet, a collection of songs remembered by Bhai Avtar Singh and Bhai Gurcharan Singh. This remarkable collection is a gift to humanity, the first time the oral tradition has been written and published, a tradition which has been passed from generation to generation in the family for more than 400 years. Inside these volumes are the family jewels, treasured compositions that came from the Sikh gurus themselves and masterful musicians through the centuries. Connecting with the songs is connecting with greatness.

I started this adventure invoking the metaphor of a cookbook with 400+ recipes. Like family recipes passed through the generations, these are timeless formulas of sound that still produce delicious results. Gourmets will be impressed with the artistry, complexity, and subtlety. The rest of us will know we have been treated to a memorable feast.

Bhai Avtar Singh and Bhai Gurcharan Singh brilliantly placed lāvān as the last shabd in Gurubani Sangeet. Lāvān is the traditional wedding song for the Sikhs. After the banquet of more than 400 dishes, it is like serving up an inspired and memorable wedding cake. In the first three rounds, the meditative melody and meends in raga suhi kafi create a perfect setting for contemplation, renouncing the ego and preparing the heart. The notes remain in the lower half of the middle octave, never passing madham, and reach down into the mandir saptak, the lower octave. In the fourth and final round the notes attain the pancham and stretch into the upper half of the octave as the atttainment of union is celebrated.

Although the wedding song works nicely to formalize the vows between earthly husband and wife, it is actually a song about the mystical union of soul and God. It’s lovely to imagine an actual wedding in an alternate spirit world where soul, beautifully dressed, meets the perfect spouse for an eternity of wedded bliss. In actuality, what is this union?  If the One is pervading everything, when is there separation? Is there a time when union happens or is there only a time when union is recognized? Is the time of realization the culmination of the spiritual journey or the beginning?

The wedding of an earthly couple, while a culmination of planning and preparing, dreaming and waiting, is only the beginning of a lifetime together. The marriage however isn’t a guarantee of hearts filled with love and a life of enjoyment. There is a continual investment, a continual remembrance, a tuning of the hearts. Does the mystical union require a similar commitment?

In lāvān the first round is a remembrance of Nām simran. Realization of oneness comes in the second round, and the soul sings. This realization fills the heart with love in the third round, and the soul sings praises and speaks bāni. In the fourth round, the mind rests in contentment, the sweet Nām resounds, and the heart blooms. Throughout the wedding and marriage there is singing, joyful music, bāni, love, sweetness and resonance of Nām. This is the path of the Sikh gurus, and in Gurbani Sangeet we have a roadmap, the recipes for a wedding feast just waiting to be tasted.

Prayers of pure praise.
Creator, Hukami, Doer of everything.
Amazing creation, sustainer, enjoyer.
Seer, giver, shelter, forgiver.
Throughout the universe, within all of it,
Obviously visible, secretly subtle.
Tuhi, Love, Amrit Nām
Dhan Dhano, Wāh Wāho
Har Hare
Waheguru.

The placement of the bāni in these volumes is not random. After all of the shabds that describe the various aspects of the seeker’s journey, the vārs remind us that in the end, all of the songs and the journey they describe are really about the all-pervading ONE. The vārs don’t express the experience, the emotion, the challenges, the practitioner’s practice, the grace, or the distraction. The vārs simply praise the Source, poems of pure praise.

The final pauri given in rāga kānrā is a summation:

You Yourself siddha and sadhu, You Yourself yoga and yogi.
You Yourself taste and taster, You Yourself enjoyment and enjoyer.
You Yourself all-pervading, You Yourself do whatever will happen.
Sat Sangat, Satiguru Dhan Dhano, Dhan Dhan Dhano!
Those who meet, speak Har’s speech.
Everyone say with your mouth, Har Har Hare, Har Har Hare!
Speaking Har, all sins will be removed.

And artfully, in Gurbāni Sangeet, the final pauri comes to rest on the sum, at kharaj, the greh svar, the place of dwelling, reciting Waheguru.

Photo by Dr. Francesca Cassio. Bentley University 2012.

If we don’t sing these songs who will?
They can’t stay forever locked in a book!
Find the key, open the door, take a look
Explore, be amazed, walk around
Treasures just waiting to be found!

Working at these shabds day by day is like wearing work clothes, unpacking something here, cleaning up something there, re-arranging, putting some polish on. From the confusion of notes on a page, it’s like putting the house in order so it looks like a song. This week I have been discovering some beautiful compositions in rāga kalyān and forms of the rāga such as shudh kalyān, hameer kalyān and puriā kalyān.

Bhai Baldeep Singh’s concert in Boston was a chance to see rāga kalyān decked out in all its full regalia. The house was not only tidied up, but all the decorations were brought out, like holiday flowers, lights and tinsel, and the dwellers, each note, also dressed in their finest clothes, served a feast to the delighted guests.

The day to day maintenance has to happen, but sometimes it’s a holiday and there are ornaments, treats and gifts that we don’t get to enjoy every day. And after the holiday we go back to work.

One thing you can say about this music is it’s not boring! It is amazing to me how every shabd is something new altogether. I just completed the bagesri shabds in Gurubāni Sangeet, the last one a love song to the Merciful Master,  another gem of a different color.  First of all, bagesri appears at the end of rāga kānrā and the grace of teevar gandhār is a small shift that moves mountains. Then in this shabd, the phrase, s S n d, artfully placed in the teentāl cycle, paints rāga bagesri in another hue.

Did you ever notice that within a genre of music all the artists can sound the same, or all the songs from a particular artist sound like all their other songs? It’s easy for this kind of predictable music, whether it’s devotional or popular music, to just become part of the background, a soundtrack to our lives. Then one day something new catches our attention. All of a sudden someone has captured a different sound, maybe something new, maybe something old done a new way. It stands out from all the other white noise. Great musicians tap into a sound that wakes us up.

Can you imagine what it would have been like in the Guru’s darbār when the masters themselves sang? Or even after the Guru times when the great kirtānyās sang? Going through these volumes there is a sense of that constant connection with greatness. Page after page there is something fresh, a new color, a new flavor, the same rāga with a different scent. It must have been amazing to hear this music for the first time, when no one had ever heard it before. It is certainly amazing to discover it now.

When I was a teenager it was the 1960’s and 1970’s. Something new was happening on the radio in America. We would listen to the songs we expected to hear and suddenly there was something new. One day amid all the bopping beats there would be a slow ballad or out of the screaming electric dissonance someone would suddenly release a sweet acoustic love song. Traditional sounds of gospel, folk, classical, country or blues would be reworked in new ways. There was so much creativity and it was the sound of a cultural revolution. Our ears were never bored!

The music of the Guru times was also the sound of a cultural transformation and beyond that, it was truly a spiritual revolution. The music remembered from that time is like a manifesto expressed in words of sacred bāni, placed in artful poetic form, graced with meaningful melody and delivered in cycles of potent rhythm. Powerful anthems, simple tunes, soulful devotional hymns and heartfelt love songs express an infinite variety of experience from the soul journey.

When I started this project, I didn’t know what would happen. There was simply an intention to try and sing each of the songs recorded in Gurbāni Sangeet. It has been a journey of discovery, awareness of riches hidden in plain sight, a vision of what the music might have been, a confrontation with my own limitations and blocks, a shift in perception, a gift and a blessing. An added benefit is improved sight reading skills. With just a few more rāgas to go, I hope to finish the project by the end of the year. But the journey feels like it has just begun.

11-9-12
Today I woke up at 3:00 am to sound of rain pounding on the roof, pouring from the rafters and splashing off the hard, dry desert floor. It is also the day I will sing the last rāga malār shabd in Gurubāni Sangeet.

Rāga malār is a rāga for the rainy season and traveling through these shabds is like driving through a storm. In the desert we anticipate the precious drops of rain that bring green life to our dry world but the rain can also come so hard and fast it is hard to see past the water, and flooding can change the landscape forever.

Rāg malār makes its entrance in Gurbāni Sangeet with a slow, steady chārtāl, like the slow steady rhythm of the rain as it begins to fall. Then the pace picks up with choti teen tāl and builds in complexity as pārtāls are introduced, combining rhythms, creating beauty and drama, displays of grandeur as powerful as lightning bolts and thunderclouds.

The bani of rāga malār describes the state of the seeker and the seasons of the soul journey. The poetry celebrates the showers of blessing, calls out in love and longing or  fear of the torrents to come. Like the peacocks and songbirds singing down the rain, the soul sings along.

At least eight different malārs have been remembered in this collection from the memory of tradition. The malār collection concludes with rāgas and blends in sweet, singable songs with tāls like rupak, dādra and iktāl. These delightful melodies are like the gentle rain that continues to fall after all the drama of the storm has passed. What remains is the peace that lingers on a cloudy day, the bittersweet seeing, knowing what has come, what has gone, what has been lost, what has been gained.

“It has been said that, at its best, preservation engages the past in a conversation with the present over a mutual concern for the future.”
—William Murtaugh, Keeper of the US National Register of Historic Places 

I think this brilliantly describes the work of Bhai Baldeep Singh and the Anad Foundation. Preservation is not about getting locked in the past or looking backwards instead of forwards. It is about seeking the counsel of the ones who came before, seeing the present   through their eyes, enriching the future with lessons of then and now.

How many ways can you say this song is great? How many times can you say this shabd is so beautiful? How many words can describe how powerful the composition is or how profound the peace that remains when the song is done? How many emotions can a heart withstand, struggling with the challenge of taking the song off the page, enjoying in amazement when it comes, singing, seeing, knowing, clarity and heart breaking realization, feeling the limitations of time and space. Turning the pages day after day, I’m not tired of it. Entering the last few months of this year-long project I am absolutely not feeling a sense of completion, but remain in awe of the bounties, it is only a beginning.

I pray my friends and family will love and appreciate the depth of meditation, the inner knowledge, the beauty to be seen, the wisdom shown, the perspective offered by these beautiful shabds. Although my voice does not do these songs justice, there is a space these songs invoke, obviously composed from depth and breadth of vision, outwardly expansive, inwardly penetrating. This book and these amazing old songs are an amazing gift from Bhai Avtar Singh and Bhai Gurcharan Singh. Who could have remembered them otherwise?

I’m reminded of my initial attempt in the 70’s to learn shabds from a book someone gave me. It would take days and weeks to work the notes off the page. Of course I didn’t sing these songs well, What did I know about rāg and tāl? But there was something that captivated me and something that even an ignorant person like me, sitting with a harmonium, could pull out of a song on a page.

It’s very different now, after having been taught. Learning required sitting with a teacher to unlearn old habits of mind and voice, train the ear to hear, acquire the tools and build the skills to discover a song and sing it. And the journey has just begun.

Moving into raga sarang this week was like moving into familiar territory. Singing a shabd that has been taught and learned is a totally different experience, when the words and melody are known and subtleties have been shown. Singing a song is different from learning a song. Playing the instruments, the voice relaxes, the mind rests, the song sings.