Acknowledgements

There are teachers who give you information, and there are teachers who change the way you hear the world. Fugan Dineen is the second kind.

In the spring semester at Yale University, Fugan stood before a room of students in MUSI 4106: Exploring South Indian Rhythmic Design, and invited us into a tradition that none of us had ever practiced. We arrived without the syllables, without the cycles, without any felt sense of tāḷa in our hands or voices. We came as complete outsiders. And somehow, over thirteen class sessions, he made us feel like practitioners.

What made Fugan extraordinary was not simply his command of the tradition — though that was evident in everything he did. It was the care with which he held the room. He never once made the music feel like an obstacle to be cleared, or a code to be cracked. He treated it as a living thing, something to be entered with humility and reverence. And he brought us with him.

Through the difficult weeks of the semester, when the phrases wouldn't land and the cycles slipped through our fingers, Fugan was a steady and calming presence. He waited. He listened. He found another way in. He never flattened the tradition into something easier to swallow — instead, he insisted that we understand not only the arithmetic of tāḷa, but its full depth: the cultural weight, the devotional history, the centuries of embodied practice that give these syllables their life and power.

He did not let us approach South Indian music as tourists. He invited us into the practice and made us responsible to it.

By the end of the semester, something that had felt unimaginable in week one had quietly become real: our class had built a nearly thirty-minute piece together, one we were genuinely proud to call our own. The room we performed it in felt different from the one we had first walked into. So did we.

It is a rare and precious thing — rarer than most people know — to meet a teacher who can do that in thirteen sessions. Fugan Dineen is that teacher. He gave a group of students with no background in this tradition something they will carry for the rest of their musical lives.