Taking advantage of my temporary singlehood, I haven't gone home at the close of the business day at all this week. On Monday, I stayed late at work to put in some extra hours that hopefully I can redeem for some happy time when the girls are around. Tuesday I lingered at the nearby Border's until the subway fares were no longer at their rush-hour levels. Wednesday I went to the Kennedy Center to see a performance by a South African group on the Milennium Stage, Thursday I went to a firm activity at the Phillips Collection, and tonight I went to an Indian raga concert at the Smithsonian.

And now for the reviews.

The Ngqoko Cultural Group is comprised of six women and one men. The performance I attended on Wednesday (sitting on the second row!) was their U.S. premier. They are dedicated to preserving the indigenous music of their people, the Xhosa. And let me tell you, Xhosa music is unlike anything I've ever heard in a lifetime of listening to music. It's quite monotonous and repetitive, with repeating refrains over and over. The women hum, sing in mumbly (or maybe that's just the way Xhosa sounds to an English-speaker) tones, ululate, shout, whistle, and shake their shoulders just a little. But then they started doing what they called split-tone singing. It's a very low hum that comes out almost as a guttural growl, but they shape their mouths so that the overtones resonate just as loudly as the principal tone. The result: one woman sings two notes simultaneously. And then four of them start doing it, in (non-Western) harmony. All this, and they broke out some tinny bows to play, as well as a friction drum (you rub a stick stuck through the center with a wet rag instead of hitting it). All in all, this is not something I'm going to start looking for on iTunes. But as an experience of learning about my fellow sojourners on this Earth, I'm glad I went.

The Phillips Collection is a private modern/impressionist art museum near Dupont Circle, and the firm got us in to their special exhibition of newly acquired modern art. I have a back-and-forth relationship with modern art. Some of it I dig, some of it I just roll my eyes at. One of the senior partners came up behind me as I was looking at one particular color-field painting and muttered, "This is not my thing. This is really not my thing." Then he began gesticulating wildly for his wife to come join him over by the Degas. The docent who was leading our tour kept providing helpful insights such as, in reference to a self-portrait, "You see he's squinting," or in reference to a weird modern piece where the painting was actually sticking out of the frame, "Notice how this painting has actually ben constructed in three dimensions." Thanks for the help.

Tonight I scored a standby ticket for a performance of Indian classical music, performed by two father-son duos: Partha and Purbayan Chatterjee on sitars and Anindo and Anubrata Chatterjee on tablas. I had actually studied the raga form at BYU, but as I sat down (on the second row, thanks to a guy's wife who decided not to come!), I realized I don't think I've ever seen a sitar in person before. Even though I had a basic knowledge of how they work, what with their drone strings and sympathetic strings* (I was close enough to count that there are 20 strings in all), it took me several minutes to really figure out what was going on as far as who was making what sound when. I don't know if this is typical of Indian music, or if it was just these particular performers, but it was very fluid and informal. They started tuning up, and I couldn't tell you exactly where the point was that the tuning stopped and the performance started. Likewise, the different sections of the raga melded right into one another, and then it just kind of faded out. Raga is a lot like jazz, and that may be one of the things that kept my attention so fixed. There's a structure and a harmonic and rhythmic pattern set, but it's mostly just improvisation. But raga, I learned, is marathon improvisation. Before they started the first performance, they warned us, "This first raga will last approximately 50 minutes. Depending on what we do." It turned out to be just barely over an hour of lush and envigorating music, without stopping, and - this is the most amazing thing, considering it never ever got boring - all with the same drone notes playing over and over and over and all in the same harmonic mode. I mean, even Ravel's excrutiating Bolero changes chords once in a while, and it's only a fraction of the length of this raga. But they kept changing the mood, changing the tempo, and nailing the most killer sitar and tabla solos I've ever heard. I may start looking up raga on iTunes, and I'll definitely keep my eyes peeled for future live performances. If you get a chance, don't miss it.