Teed Rockwell, MCMF President with his Touchstyle Veena
MCMF President, Teed Rockwell – For over thirty years, Teed has been playing many forms of world music on an instrument he now calls the touchstyle veena—a guitar-like instrument which is played by tapping the strings with the fingertips, making it possible to play a separate part with each hand. Teed was one of the first people to play the Chapman Stick®, the most widely known touchstyle instrument. Today he plays a customized Warr Raptor®, which evolved through five different kinds of tuning and stringing before it reached its current form. Because ” Veena” is a general word in Hindi and Sanskrit for any kind of stringed instrument, and because his instrument was customized to make it especially adapted to Indian Ragas, he decided to call his instrument the touchstyle veena. He has performed in concerts and recordings with traditional musicians from many different cultures, including South America, Africa, China, and Ireland. He originally studied Hindustani ragas to find material for the fusion music in which he composed with harpist Diana Stork for the world music trio Geist. He performed this music at many well known concert halls, including Grace Cathedral, Great American Music Hall, the Yerba Buena Center, and the Herbst Theater. Geist toured Europe numerous times, receiving international airplay and sales for their CD More Light. They were featured on the Polygram compilation album Harpestry, which reached the top ten on a Billboard chart, and has so far sold over 150,000 copies. But as time went by, Teed became more drawn to Hindustani music in its purest form. He took hundreds of classes with great Indian musicians, including Salamat Ali Khan, Habib Khan, K. Sridar, Laxmi Tewari, and especially the great sarod maestro Ustad Ali Akbar Khan. He became the music critic for India Currents magazine and wrote over a hundred articles on the many different styles of Indian Music. For him, ragas are the most complete music of all. They have the intellectual subtlety of quantum physics, the spiritual profundity of the Vedas, and the heartfelt emotion of a lover’s cry. So much of our art and music separates these elements. A great performance of a raga brings all of them together in a single moment.
www.myspace.com/teedrockwell