Krithi: Cows at the Beach

Intercultural creative practice is a topic that has attracted a lot of recent scholarly attention. As improvising musicians from very different cultures and traditions, we decided to analyse a recent collaborative performance that we were involved in to unpack the ways that we were interacting through music. As performers, we were interested primarily in the ways that such an analysis would help us to work more effectively in intercultural situations, but we also wanted to understand the synergies and dissonances that exist between improvising cultures more broadly. For the essay we adopt the musical form of a krithi, a Carnatic compositional form that allows for joint statements and improvised exchanges. Through this dialogic process, we propose improvisation as a kind of negotiation that occurs between musicians, and between musicians and their culture, highlighting some of the specific challenges and rewards that we faced.