Mark And The Bazantar It is different than anything else you have heard. It's as if
you're hearing an entire string section of a symphony ... but when
you look, you see just one man and his instrument,
his own invention -- the Bazantar.
Mark Deutsch has been playing music his whole life, learning
from masters all over the world. At age 12, he started performing
publicly, playing jazz with the upright bass. Mark's journey has
always been to combine and express the essence of spirituality
through the medium of music. With the Bazantar, he found his answer.
At age 32, Mark had a series of dreams indicating to him a
design for an instrument which would help bridge the gap between his
spirituality and music, and the seeming gap between East and West.
It took ten years of development since that initial dream, but
finally the Bazantar was born.
The Bazantar is an upright bass, embedded with sympathetic &
Pulitzer-Prize winning poet, Yusef Komunyakaa, puts it this way:
"Mark Deutsch is a mesmerizing virtuoso on his Bazantar that
sounds like many instruments woven into one surprise."
On December 18th, we will have the pleasure of hearing Mark's
music and the inspiration behind his work. The event is hosted
in our home and there is no cost to attend -- please RSVP for
more details.
The Bazantar Don Campbell, author of The Mozart Effect, says that Mark
has "created explorations into the depths of sound where the roots
of tonality beneath Eastern and Western systems are one."
The Bazantar is a five-string acoustic bass, fitted with
an additional twenty-nine sympathetic strings and four drone
strings. The instrument possesses a melodic range of over five
octaves, while its sympathetic range spans four octaves. This results
in an interplay between melodic, sympathetic, and drone strings which
weaves an unexpected landscape In the late 1980s, Mark Deutsch began exploring North Indian
classical music. The subtlety of this style, combined with his
pursuits on the sitar, inspired him to delve deeper into the study of
music. He started exploring the mathematics of sound, particularly
music's underlying frequency structure. This search revealed
nonlinear mathematical patterns that exist in sound and are found
universally in the natural world, including the over-tone series,
fractals, the golden mean, seashells, and the Fibonacci series.
In October 1997, the final version of the Bazantar was completed.
"What's obvious about Deutsch's
invention, though, is that it has arrived at a logical time. As
the world 'gets smaller' and cultural boundaries disappear or
are co-opted, the Bazantar combines two traditions that have
normally kept a safe distance from one another - Western and
Eastern," Randall Robert, music editor for Riverfront
Times, aptly states.
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drone strings, tuned to the pythagorean fibonacci sequence, one of
the most naturally occurring rhythms in nature.
of
resonance that is remarkably rich in texture.