i sold my sitar today, my living room is so much less without it's beautiful warm glow and its strings. i tuned it one last time before i gave it away forever, sympathetic strings, forgot the tuning for the lower strings made of copper wire but tuned them all in unison. and i realized it doesn't matter what the "real tuning" is. for so many years i didn't play the sitar because i was intimidated about doing it right... and i passed on a lot of this fear whenever i did play for other people.

but as i was talking about the instrument, about how the frets can be moved and the strings can be tuned in different ways, and even during playing we pull the meend... it's an instrument full of possibilities, every possibility, why should we be concerned with doing it right?

my ear hears an interval, as i tune the sympathetic strings i feel like adjusting a fret, that suggests a scale or an idea. why not paint with sound colors? why not be free? how much more adjustable are our voices than this sitar?

of course it has been nine years since i first studied indian music, maybe it is finally enough a part of me that i can relax the boundaries. when that will happen with opera, i don't know. performance is tomorrow, wish me luck.