Seeking imbalance in a new medium: Paghjella and Polaroid

 This month in general and this week specifically has been underlined and scored by new explorations in music and photography. I have been pursuing the study of Cantu in Paghjella -- a corsican tradition of a capella singing -- with a small group of other vocalists. This group is still very much in its infancy but I have already unlocked some interesting elements of rhythm within the style. Without going too far into the specifics of what makes this style unique, Paghjella is semi-improvisatory and follows the rhythmic and melodic improvisations of the segonda singer. In a week's time we have gone from having almost no idea of how to sing this style to having a whole verse of a classic Corsican worship song down. I don't feel right posting this on my blog for privacy reasons with those involved but I'm happy to present it in class. I think it was really exciting to explore the ways of making and following improvised rhythm. I believe that this fulfills the second learning outcome on the syllabus.

In my photography, I was plagued by technical difficulties. Several of my cameras have begun to misbehave recently. My Yashica's F16 stop is now hardwired to act as a bulb by a malfunctioning resistor. My Zenit has light leaks. My fixer is expired and opaque. So I decided I didn't need that fluff. I'm a firm believer in the phrase "limitations need creativity", so I decided to limit myself. I gave myself the remaining 8 shots in my Polaroid camera and I sought to make beautiful pictures from them. I drew inspiration from the layouts on page 43 of the reading, which has examples of ways that have examples of scale, depth and motion. I limited myself to just one of these figures. I chose the bottom-left figure which organizes the word "move". I sought to bring motion to my photos, which I did by organizing my framing overwhelmingly to the left of the frame to give the pictures a feeling of moving to the right. Any movement or presumed movement I captured I was sure to move to the right. I've included scans of these pictures in this post.