Entry #5 Khirkiyaan and Jaipur

 Hello, for my post today I am taking a piece from a classmate's blog. Matthew Dulas gave a presentation today in class about Sacred Brass Music, the piece he shared was Khirkiyaan by Reena Esmail. It's translation from Hindi to English is Windows. Reena Esmail said about the piece 

"So much of my work with brass instruments has come into being because of incredible and intrepid brass players who have shown me new windows into my own music. Each movement is a transformation of another piece of mine for another instrumentation, reimagined for brass quintet."

This piece is unique, not only because of it's name, but because of the complex rhythms. It constantly switches between mixed meter time signatures, requiring the performer to have a good sense of time and a strong ability to subdivide. It also has many Indian based tonalities, from the note bends to the harmonic mixtures between the different voices. 

Here is a recording, I hope you enjoy it!

Because this piece is inspired on Indian Culture, I picked a game today that is named after a city in India. Jaipur. Jaipur is a two player game that is incredibly fun. My wife and I love playing this game. You are a trader and you collect cards from the center of the game center, then when you have at least a pair of matching symbols you can exchange the cards in for a matching token. There are 7 different styles of tokens and within each token there is different point values, so the first person to take each token gets a higher one than the next person. This game requires you to not only save cards so that you can get more tokens, but to be quick so that you can get the first of each one! 

I hope you enjoy both the recording and the game today. Try playing this game and let me know what you think, put on the recording of Khirkiyaan in the background, or just put it on anyway!!