I attended one of the Spiral Music performances, the acoustic shows performed on Wednesdays under the spiral staircase in the lobby of the Rubin Museum of Art. The performance that I saw featured T M Hoffman who played the koto, shakuhachi, and sang vocals and the tabla player Narendra Budhakar. The koto is an Indian version of a steel guitar, with thirteen strings spanning the length of the four-foot instrument, and plastic bridges that set the tuning for each string. The koto was played in a variety of ways, including using fingerpicks, a cello bow, wooden wands, and a metal hammer. The shakuhachi is a Japanese flute made of bamboo. The tabla is a set of Indian percussion instruments quite similar to the bongos. Both musicians were dressed in Indian-style garb, with robes and bare feet. The seats for the performance were on the floor, and the audience sat cross-legged to view the show. All of the lyrics were in Indian, and the concert effectively had the feel of a Himalayan cultural event. Hearing the music of the region was a great accentuation to the visual artwork that the Rubin Museum has on display. They played many traditional Indian songs, such as a song for the rainy season of India. The concert exposed me to music I have never heard before, just like the museum exposed me to art I’ve never seen before. Music is said to be the universal language, but the music played was as alien to me as the Indian language. It bore no resemblance to the classical music that I have listened to throughout the semester. The concert really showed me how Americanized I am, to the extent that a whole continents culture is almost entirely foreign to me. If nothing else, the trips to the Rubin Museum that I took and the concert that I watched there have broadened my cultural knowledge of the world as a whole. It would be very interesting for me to explore various other international cultural centers and see how it compares to American and Himalayan culture as well.