Film Ragas is a new series that symbolizes the hybridization of film and music and foreshadows the new direction of Film productions that Mehta and ORKA-M are embarking on.

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The narrative paintings series entitled “Songlines Jewels” were made in 2006, while I was a Senior Performing and Creative Arts Fellow of the American Institute of Indian Studies residing in Chennai for my project “Innovative Music Meetings: Creative Collaborations with Carnatic Music”. This intensive research phase with musicians from this highly devotional and song-based compositional tradition had a decisive impact on my work which became visually evident in these paintings. Although the basic language types were similar to the imaginational map series, suddenly there was a conspicuous addition of color and absence of the background grid. Although I have more than a 16 year relationship to Carnatic Music, I realized that I was entering a new phase of visual representation of music that I could hear emerging from this narrative-rich tradition with its inexhaustible treasure chest of musical “jewels”. However, the paintings also evoked other cultural associations that I was not consciously aware of while painting, especially the affinity to the unique culture of the Australian aboriginals, their dot paintings, and song cycles - “Songlines” with their built-in navigational tracking devices and an archetypal symbolic world through their concept of the “Dreamtime”. Therefore, musically interpreting “Songlines Jewels” through concerts in Europe in the autumn of 2006 required a distinctly different approach to the analytic one for the imaginational maps -an approach in which a more intuitive reading of the symbolic terrain created by the painting was needed and the interpreter was encouraged to explore the wealth of generated associations.

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These graphical drawings are used as a meta-notational framework which allow for multiple interpretations for western and non-western musicians and instruments as well as provide navigational information for moving musicians, choreographic instructions for dancers, and film projection material. The musical compositions are derived from the natural measurability and scalability of being drawn on a Cartesian grid - (graph paper felt more familiar to me than staff paper!). The x-axis is used for temporal scaling and the y-axis for pitch and a superimposed pitch and time scaling measurement is employed for vertical objects. All of the drawings contain fours basic object types: Ornamental objects (O-objects), Pointillistic objects (P-objects), Trajectory Objects (T-objects) and Relational Objects (R-objects). The Ornamental objects represent lyrical and microtonal forms and have, through various forms of shading, instructions for a particular type of sound transformation or "muting". The Pointillistic objects are used as percussive clouds and are in addition to being interpreted by acoustic instruments, also sonically rendered by a graphical computer program. The Trajectory Objects are glissandi, and finally the Relational Objects -the dotted lines- are gluing devices which interconnect the objects that are crossed on their paths and generate musical pieces which are scored through a timing diagram.

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