Songlines Jewels:

The narrative paintings series entitled “Songlines Jewels” were made in 2006, while I was a Senior Performing and Creative Arts Fellow of the American Institute of Indian Studies residing in Chennai for my project “Innovative Music Meetings: Creative Collaborations with Carnatic Music”. This intensive research phase with musicians from this highly devotional and song-based compositional tradition had a decisive impact on my work which became visually evident in these paintings. Although the basic language types were similar to the imaginational map series, suddenly there was a conspicuous addition of color and absence of the background grid. Although I have more than a 16 year relationship to Carnatic Music, I realized that I was entering a new phase of visual representation of music that I could hear emerging from this narrative-rich tradition with its inexhaustible treasure chest of musical “jewels”. However, the paintings also evoked other cultural associations that I was not consciously aware of while painting, especially the affinity to the unique culture of the Australian aboriginals, their dot paintings, and song cycles - “Songlines” with their built-in navigational tracking devices and an archetypal symbolic world through their concept of the “Dreamtime”. Therefore, musically interpreting “Songlines Jewels” through concerts in Europe in the autumn of 2006 required a distinctly different approach to the analytic one for the imaginational maps -an approach in which a more intuitive reading of the symbolic terrain created by the painting was needed and the interpreter was encouraged to explore the wealth of generated associations.

Final reflections:

Through my own musical experiences, I have discovered that new notational approaches can act as bridges towards innovative music meetings- they are no longer confined to the western contemporary new music communities but are tools for visually communicating important musical ideas from any world musical tradition to any other. Furthermore, given the diversity of cultural approaches to music making, symbolic representations of music through new notational forms can evoke archetypal images enlarging the platform for a broader musical-spiritual dialogue.

Copyright 2007 Rajesh K. Mehta

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