The Season of Love and Honey: Sitar and Poetry of Vidyapati

Description

As with many of India’s great mystical poets Vidyapati is known for beautifully blurring the distinction between the spiritual and the physical and artfully merging and connecting the differences of duality. His best loved poetry is a collection written between 1380 and 1406 that has become a literary and devotional masterpiece on the relationship of Radha and Krishna. This evening over zoom, musician David Whetstone will recite some of the best loved and translated poems of Vidyapati while weaving his masterful sitar playing with the mystical verse. David Whetstone is a sitarist disciple of the renowned Ustad Vilayat Khan. He has collaborated and toured for over 40 years with poet Robert Bly and Rumi translator Coleman Barks, resulting in numerous recordings and films. He teaches at Macalester and Carleton Colleges in MN.

David Whetstone is a disciple of the legendary sitarist, Ustad Vilayat Khan.  He has collaborated and toured extensively with poets Robert Bly and Coleman Barks, appearing with them in numerous recordings and films.  David co-founded Ragamala Music &  Dance Theater and supplied original text, stories and music utilizing both Indian and Western vocal and orchestral idioms, for critically acclaimed programs such as Ragamala, The Puppet Master, Canticle of Mary, and Ashoka, Beloved of the Gods.  David has performed in venues such as Lincoln Center, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Guthrie Theater. The Rochester Symphony & Chorus premiered excerpts from his opera, White Nights, after Fyodor Dostoevsky’s short story, live on Minnesota Public Radio.  An American Institute of Indian Studies Senior Research Fellow, David’s first fundamental sitar training was with Dr. Brian Q. Silver, and he has trained with numerous others, including vocalist Hafeez Ahmed Khan, Deputy Director of All India Radio.  David also has trained in Western classical music, having studied with Philip Meyers, Solo Hornist of the New York Philharmonic, for five years.  Recent appearances have been with poets Li-Young Lee and Jane Hirshfield, writer Mirabai Starr, and theologian Matthew Fox.  David lives in Minneapolis, and is a Senior Lecturer at Carleton College.

David began to teach for the University of Minnesota at the age of nineteen, and he has evolved methods that particularly enable an adult beginner to advance rapidly.  David’s  training in both Indian and Western classical music facilitates good communication of the ideas and concepts of sitar to young and old pupils.