Rajna Swaminathan – “Of Agency And Abstraction” – Out April 26th on Biophilia Records
Of Agency and Abstraction, the highly anticipated debut album by percussionist, composer, and vocalist Rajna Swaminathan, will be released on April 26, 2019 byBiophilia Records. Swaminathan (mrudangam, voice) is joined by her long-standing ensemble RAJAS, which has, since its inception in 2013, featured a rotating cast of New-York-based improvisers from the Indian classical and creative music scenes. Of Agency and Abstraction features a unique configuration of stunning and sensitive improvisers:Anjna Swaminathan (violin), María Grand (tenor saxophone), Miles Okazaki (guitar), andStephan Crump (bass), along with guest artists Ganavya (voice) and Amir ElSaffar(trumpet).
With deep roots in the South Indian tradition of Karnatik music, Swaminathan has carved out a distinctive space for herself as a young innovator in the New York jazz and creative music scene. Expanding the horizons of the mrudangam, a barrel-shaped drum, Swaminathan has deftly adapted her technique over the years to suit various musical contexts: Amir ElSaffar’s 17-piece Rivers of Sound ensemble, the elaborate cross-cultural productions of Ragamala Dance (Minneapolis), myriad ensembles led by acclaimed pianist-composer Vijay Iyer, and the experimental forays of eminent Karnatik vocalist T.M. Krishna. Culling from these vast experiences as a freelancer, Swaminathan’s phenomenal debut reveals a breathtaking command over a wide range of compositional sensibilities, and the nuances of each sonic palette are intertwined with a rare ease.
The album is co-produced by Vijay Iyer, who has been Swaminathan’s mentor and collaborator since she first entered the New York jazz scene in 2011. Swaminathan is also Iyer’s student in a groundbreaking new doctoral program for “Creative Practice and Critical Inquiry” at Harvard University’s music department. The kinship between their approaches is evident in their mutual passion for rhythmic multiplicity and for finding new expressions for South Asian musical sensibilities. Of Agency and Abstraction serves as a kind of musical manifesto, illustrating the various trajectories Swaminathan has taken in her experiments over the years with RAJAS, an ensemble she formed upon first moving to New York City. The ensemble is named after rajas, a Sanskrit term in Hindu philosophy referring to “the inner energy that compels us toward action, creation, and change”.
As the Financial Times has said of her compositions for RAJAS, they have “wedded beauty by courting chaos, with the methods of loose-knit latter-day jazz at the service of a recognisably South-Asian melody and pulse.” The album, as Swaminathan offers in the liner notes, is intended to reflect this interspersing of beauty and chaos through its ruminations on agency, as a force of “chaos, deviation, uncertainty, improvisation,” andabstraction, a “sublimation of the material, the embodied.” Indeed, the music bears witness to the many refractions of agency and abstraction through her life and creative process, particularly in their shared “associations with one of the most troubled concepts of music and of the human condition: freedom.” Ultimately, as Swaminathan states, the music is not concerned with expressing freedom, but instead bodies forth “playful and prayerful meditations.”
The album opens energetically with the jovial “Offering,” based on the raga (melodic mode) Gavati and featuring a lively percussive dialogue between Swaminathan and Miles Okazaki. The carefully honed sound of the core quintet continues through “Peregrination” and “Vigil,” diving into lithe, otherworldly textures and intricate rhythmic metamorphoses. Noteworthy in the quintet sound is the way that violinist Anjna Swaminathan’s (Rajna’s sister) daring glides dance between her South Indian roots and experimental string techniques. Her fluid expressivity, in combination with Stephan Crump’s agile touch on the bass, allow the ensemble to journey through a galaxy of resonance and intonation.
The centerpiece of the album is an epic suite of four compositions (“Departures”/“Ripple Effect”/“Communitas”/“Retrograde”), driven initially by Ganavya’s strikingly powerful voice, and opening into a lush latticework of horn and string conversations, all held together with undulating percussive currents. Ganavya improvises with excerpts of centuries-old Marathi mystic poems, bestowing both a peaceful benediction (Sant Dnyaneshwar’s Pasayadan, in “Departures”) and an unwavering cry for the world to acknowledge the divinity in all people (Kanhopatra’s Dhanya Dhanya, in “Ripple Effect”).
Coming out of the suite — which concludes with a sinuous duo improvisation by María Grand and Amir ElSaffar — we hear an array of pieces woven from various sonic fabrics: the gentle ballad “Chasing the Gradient” with its twinkling guitar throughline; the initially wistful “Rush,” which gives way unexpectedly into a whirlwind of angular strokes; the lyrical and buoyant “Vagabonds;” and the mysterious, eccentric curves of “Tangled Hierarchy.” The album closes with “Yathi,” which features Swaminathan’s husky voice circling hypnotically in and out of the ensemble tapestry with raga-based ornamentations, eventually merging with Ganavya’s voice (improvising through the remaining verses of Sant Dnyaneshwar’s Pasayadan) and finding denouement in a pensive swirl of sound.
Swaminathan was born into a musical family in Maryland, and first started studying mrudangam from her father, P.K. Swaminathan. She then became a protegé of mrudangam legend Umayalpuram K. Sivaraman, and eventually established a name for herself in Karnatik music, one of the few female percussionists to do so. Since 2011, she has increasingly dedicated her time to emerging projects and collaborations in the New York creative music scene. Swaminathan began her doctoral studies at Harvard in 2015, and has continued her work as a freelancer and bandleader alongside her scholarly pursuits.
RELEASE DATE: April 26th, 2019 via Biophilia Records
UTA researcher aimed at redesign abstractions in virtualized systems to improve efficiency
IMAGE: Jia Rao. view more
Credit: UT Arlington
Jia Rao, an assistant professor in the Computer Science and Engineering Department at The University of Texas at Arlington, has been awarded a four-year, $498,000 National Science Foundation Early Career Development, or CAREER, Program grant to redesign abstractions in virtualized systems to improve efficiency.
The Faculty Early Career Development Program is the NSF's most prestigious award for junior faculty. Winners are outstanding researchers, but also are expected to be outstanding teachers through research, educational excellence and the integration of education and research at their home institutions.
Abstractions are used to hide capacity in computer systems by removing less important details to attend to other, more pertinent ones. One type of abstraction--virtualization--is a key component of cloud computing and has changed how computer systems use resources by allowing multiple virtual computer architectures and systems to run off of a single physical machine. However, performance, cost-effectiveness and predictability issues are keeping virtualization out of domains such as scientific computing and big-data analytics.
"The problem with existing abstractions in virtual systems is that, despite the benefits to cloud computing, abstractions incur a lot of inefficiency and unpredictability to cloud users," Rao said. "Our intention is to improve resource management in any kind of virtual system to enable elastic, effective and efficient use of those resources."
Virtualization is the process of creating a virtual copy of real physical resources to help ease the management of computer systems and allow maximum flexibility in resource management. Using virtualization, it is possible to build a computer system where several virtual machines, each assigned to different users, can run off one physical machine. However, it is difficult to meet each individual's needs and maintain high utilization and efficiency in the system due to semantic gaps, or critical missing information between levels of abstraction.
For instance, a user of a virtual machine has the illusion of a dedicated resource and continuous availability, but those resources are actually built upon a physical resource shared among many users. Since resource management software was designed for a physical system with continuous availability, the software doesn't work efficiently in a virtualized environment because each user's demands on the physical system are different.
"We hope to bridge these semantic gaps by augmenting existing, regularly adopted abstractions while retaining the benefits of abstraction, including modality, security and portability," Rao said. "We will then use the knowledge we develop in designing abstractions in virtualized systems to guide the design of abstractions in future hardware systems that will support multi-tenacy."
His research is an example of data-driven discovery, one of the themes of UTA's Strategic Plan 2020: Bold Solutions | Global Impact, said Peter Crouch, dean of the College of Engineering.
"Cloud computing has changed how the world uses computer networks, and Dr. Rao's research will make the cloud more efficient. This could lead to even greater opportunities for business, the scientific community and anyone who uses the cloud as part of their daily lives," Crouch said.
Seven other UTA faculty have active NSF CAREER Award support:
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From Winslow Homer to Georgia O'Keeffe: The Road to Abstraction at the Taft
Georgia O'Keeffe, "Ranchos Church," No. II, NM, 1929, oil on canvas, 24 1/8 x 36 1/8 in., acquired 1930.The Phillips Collection, Washington D.C.Winslow Homer to Georgia O’Keeffe: American Paintings from The Phillips Collection — the Taft Museum of Art’s current temporary exhibition in the third-floor gallery — begins with a lush work by George Inness. Set in an Italian countryside, associate curator Tamera Muente points out its three-dimensional appearance during a tour.
Entitled “Lake Albano,” a cypress tree cuts softly through the middle, acting as a space divider. Tile-roofed villas peek out from hills in the distance. In the foreground, people lounge, their features hazy and soft. Painted in 1869, the work represents the crossroads of Romanticism and Realism.
In the same room, Homer’s painting “To the Rescue” hangs in contrast. Two women walk along a seashore; they blur into the indistinct horizon, surrounded by clashes of white, tan and grayish blue. One of the women’s scarves hovers in the wind as a man carrying a rope follows behind them. Here, Muente says, Homer uses “broad, expressive strokes” to create a sense of human struggle against the sea.
Beginning with work in the late 19th century, the exhibit moves through 100 years, tracing all the way to the 1960s. Running through May 19, Winslow Homer to Georgia O’Keeffe includes 54 paintings and one sculpture, all drawn from The Phillips Collection in Washington D.C., which was founded on the private collection of Duncan Phillips. “You’re not only seeing a broad overview of the development of Modernism,” Muente says. “You’re also seeing an individual’s vision.”
In part, that vision was to set American artists on equal par to their European counterparts. Phillips believed that self-taught artists like John Kane and Grandma Moses, artists of color — both Allan Rohan Crite and Horace Pippin are featured — and immigrants deserved to be supported and represented. One of the sections — “Memory and Identity” — is dedicated to this.
These works vary in style and subject, from the crumbling industrial landscape of Kane’s “Across the Strip” to Grandma Moses’ “Hoosick Falls in Winter,” which warmly depicts a small town covered in fresh snow.
“You do see this dichotomy of artists inspired by nature and artists inspired by urban life and industry,” Muente says.
Of the latter category was Edward Hopper, who has two paintings featured. In one work, “Sunday,” a man sits on a curb in New Jersey. A slant of yellow light spills over his hunched body. As Muente notes, the colors seem “off kilter.” Like much of Hopper’s work, it’s a lonely depiction of modern urban life. 
Edward Hopper, Sunday, 1926, oil on canvas, 29 x 34 in., acquired 1926.The Philips Collection, Washington D.C.
Edward Hopper, Sunday, 1926, oil on canvas, 29 x 34 in., acquired 1926.The Philips Collection, Washington D.C.
“There are (artists) like Georgia O’ Keeffe, who are looking at nature and they’re simplifying it, kind of distilling it to its essence. And then people who are inspired by the city as well. We’re moving through the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s, when American cities are growing at an exponential rate,” Muente says. “So people like Edward Hopper were looking at the ways the city isolated people and changed their lives.”
O’Keeffe, who played with shadows, light and form rather than fine details, often filed her subjects down to their bare bones. She once said, “It is only by selection, by elimination, by emphasis that we get at the real meaning of things.” That concept could easily translate to the work of artists that came decades after.
By the time visitors enter the last gallery, they’ll be greeted by complete abstraction, says Muente. But everything else builds to that. And by walking through each room — divided into thematic sections — the road to Abstract Expressionism reveals itself.
“When you move into the last space, one wall will be Cubist-inspired work, but it’s still kind of hanging on to representational paintings,” Muente says. “In those works, you’ll still be able to make out a shape here and there that maybe echoes something you would see in the real world, whereas the Abstract Expressionism paintings — unless it’s something you’re bringing to it — are not based in visual reality.”
The exhibit feels like a collective breath. Take in: salty seascapes, a minimal adobe church, smog-filled cities, families unwinding. Let out: vibrant colors, swirls of shapes, uneven textures, saturation.
"It gives our visitors the chance to see the road to abstraction; because we don't show abstraction in our permanent collection, we get to do that in our temporary show," Muente says.
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