Rhythms of music emerge in context and resonate with the world around. The ancient rhythms of Indian music are from before the industrialization when living environments became primarily defined by machines. As it were, we can hear the rich complexity of nature from before modernity through these ancient rhythms of Indian music that were directly transmitted from generation to generation.
Sirishkumar Manji learned the rhythms of Tabla through playing with his father from a young age already. His father Pandit Bhagwanji Manji, learned Indian music through playing with his father Manji Bharadwaj, who learned from his father and Pandit Omkarnath Thakur. and so on. Based on the direct transmission of his father and diverse other Gujarati sources, Sirish has reconstructed a plethora of old ancient Indian rhythms. Together with Caroline Nevejan, Sirish has been documenting and organizing the basic character of these many rhythms. As a result 'a Tabla rhythm library' is coming into existence. Where we know a handful of rhythms in western music, it is said that Indian music includes all together 109 rhythms. From a 2 beat up to a 32 beat, and including for example 8 kinds of 16 beats, they are constructed from different syllables in a variety of divisions.
In an early experiment at the BBC Imagineering lab at Performing Arts Labs in London in 1999, it was found that Sirishkumar Manji with his Tabla could handle any latency in feedback when playing online music. The western musicians who tried as well, could not handle this at all. At the time, Sirish argued that any latency ‘just creates a different beat’. Since then, Caroline Nevejan and Sirishkumar Manji have been exploring how the old knowledge of Indian rhythms can help to understand the new realities of online collaboration in on-and offline merging realities. They have been studying how these ancient rhythms reflect complexities that can also allow for an unknown flexibility in the modern systems world.
In the Venice 2025 Rhythm workshop we will explore if and how the old rhythms can be recognized in today’s world. In a first presentation of the Tabla Rhythm Library, participants of the workshop will each receive a specific beat on their phone. While walking in an hour from the Arsenale to Ca’Foscari University, participants are asked to play this rhythm over and over again while being alert to where in Venice, or where in their imagination, they see this specific rhythm materialize.
When all have arrived, we will discuss how we can recognize the old rhythms in our world of today. Then Sirish and Caroline will present the Tabla Rhythm Library. We will conclude with a discussion on how can we use this old knowledge of rhythm to inspire new ecologies of tomorrow in which natural, collective and artificial intelligence will merge.
