“百弦”伦敦站：拨弦与击弦

Your confirmation email carries the ticket. Show it on your phone at the door, or bring a printout if you prefer paper.

If the email has not arrived, check your spam folder first. Still missing, write to [email protected] and we will send it again.

Ticket sales are final once confirmed. If something has come up, write to [email protected] at least 7 days before the event and tell us what happened.

We look at each request on its own merits. A refund is not guaranteed, and we cannot consider requests inside the last week.

You choose between a full refund and a transfer to the new date or an equivalent concert.

Refunds for a cancelled event go back to your original payment method within 7 to 14 business days. You do not need to claim them.

Come at the door time on the event page rather than at the start time. It gives you room to find a seat and settle.

The concert opens with an alap, the slowest and quietest stretch of the evening. Walking in during it costs you the part that sets up everything after.

Yes. The concert runs in two halves with a short interval between them.

The first half holds the classical raga set. The second opens out, and on most of our bills it changes either the players or the form.

Whatever you are comfortable sitting in for a couple of hours.

Our audiences turn up in jeans and in saris on the same night, and neither looks out of place.

No. Seating is unreserved, so pick any free seat when you arrive.

Arriving at doors rather than at the start gets you the closer rows, which is where this music rewards you most.

No, not during the performance. The musicians improvise, and a raised phone or a lit screen pulls the room out of the music. Put the camera away and stay with the sound.

If you are covering the concert for press, or need to record for another reason, write to [email protected] before the day. Filming without that permission is not allowed.

Switch it off or set it to silent before the music starts, and leave texting until the interval.

This holds for the whole concert. A single screen lighting up in a quiet hall reaches the stage.

Write to [email protected] before you book and tell us what you need.

Wheelchair spaces and seats near the stage need arranging with the venue in advance, so the earlier you write, the more we can do.

Yes. You do not need to recognise a raga or count a taal to follow what happens on stage.

The music opens at a crawl with no pulse at all, then the tabla enters and the rhythm takes hold. That shape repeats through the evening, and most people read it by the second piece. Sit close and give the opening time.

A long-necked lute with a gourd body, movable curved frets, and a set of sympathetic strings running beneath the playing strings.

The curved frets let a player pull a string sideways and bend one note into another several steps away. That bend, the meend, is where most of the expression lives, and the sympathetic strings keep ringing behind it.

A pair of hand drums. The smaller wooden one sits under the right hand and carries the pitch. The larger metal one under the left hand supplies the bass and bends it, by pressing the heel of the palm into the head while striking.

The black circle on each head is what makes the sound recognisable. It weights the skin so the drum rings at a definite pitch rather than thudding.