| Musical Instruments :: Introduction |
| By : Ajit Hari Sahu | Previous | Next |
| Posted on : 29 Aug, 2005 | Total Views : 533 |
INTRODUCTION
Rudra veena -As we sit and listen to a programme of the vichitra veena or even the Rudra veena, does is ever occur to us that these complicated and ancient instruments might have and their humble origins in the ronza gontam of Andhra or the gintang of Assam: a zither made of a short length of bamboo with one or two strips of its bark raised to form 'strings' beaten with a small stick? Or, perhaps, while a masterly recital of the tabla is going on; but certainly pot from which it might have been conceived. The violin bow might well have grown out of the act of fire-making by scraping one rod over another.
Musical and musical instruments have become so sophisticated and specialized now that rarely, if ever, do we pause to search for their roots in the simpler act of life; we take them for granted! But we must ponder over this a little more, if we are to understand the deeper relations to social developments and to the relation of music to its instruments. And as we probe into this area we begin to see that both might have had their beginnings in non-musical activities.
Perhaps, the reader has heard the music of the Nagas of the eastern provinces of India or of the Todas of Nilgiris in Tamil Nadu. These people have a kind of shuffling movement-their dance-accompanied by howls and screeches, resembling their hunting calls. The whole performance has a strange feeling of rhythm and melody. And, if you compare these sounds with the high intricacy of raga and tala, they may not sound musical. Yet there is much music there and many a raga and tala has, who knows, its first fountains in these non-musical acts of howling.
What is true of music in general is more evident with instruments. Many scholars-and, of course, there are many who dispute the point-are of the opinion that quite possibly the idea of making a harp originated in the twang of the hunting or martial bow and the plectrum in the arrow. Indeed, when Ravana enters the final battle against Rama, the proudly says, "Rama does not know of my skill in war. I shall play the veena of my bow with the plectrum of my arrow; and the hearts of my enemies will tremble and they will flee in disarray." There are theories that folk stringed instruments like the tuntune are really animal traps made portable! These concepts may sound far fetched; but there are instances which are more plausible. Take, for instance, the scrapers used by some of our forest brethren such as the Pulayans, to make fire. This is just a strip of bamboo with notches on the surface on which a rod, also of bamboo, is rubbed vigorously and the heat so generated is used to light a fire. This implement becomes the scraper or stridulator called the kokkara, the gargara, the ruga braiya, the Kirikittaka or the scokti vadya of the devil dancers. More simple to visualize is the transformation of culinary vessels. Pots, pans and other containers employed for storing, measuring and cooking grain, when covered with hide, becomes drums; and it is not difficult to see how a tabla or a dagga came into existence this way. An eating plate of metal beaten becomes the thali, a common folk instrument. We have all seen road workers pounding sticks with wooden discs attached at the lower end. This is called the dhimmas or the tippani which is a tool for beating and leveling gravel. As they work the men and the women sing, keeping the rhythm with the dhimmas. After the day's labour, the work movement itself becomes a dance and the stamping stick a musical instrument to keep time-called the tippani nach.
Thus it is evident that more often than not the beginning of music and musical instruments are to be found in tools and activities entirely unmusical.
Lebang gumani-Again, even what we know and call musical instruments are quite often dual or even multiple in functions: sometimes musical and often otherwise. For example, the conch shell (sankh) is a part of the musical ensemble, pancha vadya of Kerala, Karnataka, Orissa and so on. But, like the trumpet, the sankh was also a martial and heraldic instrument-to announce the beginning of a battle or the achievement of victory. Hindus use it in their worship as well, both as an auspicious sound and as a container of holy water or milk. The pancha vadya or the panchamaha-sabda was also an insignia of authority. When a mahamandalesvara-feudal lord-lost a war, he had to surrender his pancha vadya ensemble, of trumpets, gongs, drums and oboes, to the victor. Even the drum is not always restricted to music. It is an effective accompaniment to the rural announcer or the cinema ticket-seller. And of course, the African tacking drums are famous: the pitch and intensity of their sounds and their patterns are messages conveyed though long distances. Indeed, "to beat the tammattai" (a frame drum) is an idiom in Tamil measuring "to blow one's trumpet". Note again the dualuse of the drum abd the trumpet. But there are some strange cases like the lebang gumani Tripura. It is curious combination of bamboo clappers to which are attached miniature tuntune-s and is played with claps and twangs of a weird quality, along with other instruments. They say that on hearing the sounds, insects attacking the crops in fields gather round the musicians and are caught. Quite a musical way of preventing agricultural rampage! Even more interesting was the stringed instrument of theives. As they prowled in the dark, the kakali which had a low tone was strummed gently. If no householder wowoke up, it was an "all clear" for further advance! There is a story in Dandin's Dasakumaracharitra, the first Prince's story (about 6th century A.D.) in which the Prince says, " . . . I learned how the entire city was constituted according to wealth, professions and morals. Then, in the darkness as black as the poisonous stain on Siva's throat, I set out, wrapped in a dark-blue coverall and with a sharp sword bucked on, carrying the necessary equipment and tools; mattock, soft-sounding string instrument (kakali), tongs, dummy head, sleeping powder, trick lantern, 'fly-in-light' bugs, and so forth I found the house of a wealthy miser, a made a breach in the wall, entered the house after having reconnoitered the interior through a small peephole, roamed, unmolested around inside as if it were my own home, stole a large capital of the merchant's funds and made off."
The discussions so far reveal the necessity for a major definition of a musical instrument. Just as music itself begins in the hazy mists of some rhythmic-melodic impulses of man, instruments also have vague origins. Indeed, the first instrument is the body itself and is used for keeping rhythm: stamping, clapping, beating the thighs or the buttocks. This was why our ancients called the human voice the gatra veena (the body veena) or the daivi veena (the God-given veena) and all other veenas as the daravi veena (veena of wood). The only definition that we can think of then, is that, any object which can produce 'music' is a musical instrument: from a piece of stone or a leaf to the most complicated computerized electronic tone synthesizer.
The word gatra veena may make us wonder at the usage of the word veena, because we usually associate it with stringed instruments of the plucked variety. However, it seems to have meant any instrument, including the voice, capable of producing melody. Strings of all kinds were called veena: harps like the chitra and the vipanchi, fingerboard plucked ones like the Rudra veena, the Saraswati veena and the kacchapi veena, bowed ones such as the Ravana hasta veena and the Pinaki veena. Winds instruments similar to the nagasvaram and the shehnai were often known as mukha veena-that is, a veena played with the mouth (=mukha); even today the Hindi been means the Rudra veena (a zither) as well as the pungi, the snake charmer's wind instrument. Similar confusion exists in mardal or madal which is a two-faced drum from the tribal areas of Madhya Pradesh. But maddalam or maddale in the southern parts of our country is very different in shape and structure, though it is also a bifacial drum. Again was the muraja a large damaru or was it something like our present day mridanga? These questions of nomenclature may seem pedantic to the lay student of music, but become extremely important to the specialist historian. The confusion is evident, for instance, in the case of the veena. We now use it to mean a lute or a zither, with or without frets. However, if a historian meets the term in an ancient text and concludes that today's veena has a hoary ancestry, he might be wrong; for the archaic word might have meant something else: a harp, most probably! This is not idle conjecture or vague pedantry, as there are many cases where such altogether unconnected derivations are made and discussions by organologists tend to lose all sense of direction or relevance, resulting in warped history.
It is necessary, therefore, to be on one's gourd when studying the past story of our instruments. Any references in a book without corroborative material will not mean much more than a pointer. Other sources, will naturally have to be examined. These include literature (proverbs, folk songs, folk stories, sophisticated literature and so on), epigraphic records, books and manuscripts on music, paintings, sculptures as well as a careful survey of tribal and folk instruments as they exist. We know only too well the idiom, "to blow one's own trumpet". The Kannada equivalent is jagante barisu. Jagante is a metal plate used as an instrument by mendicants (barisu = to play); this proverbial phrase, then, shows the existence of such an instrument in Karnataka. There is an Oraon song in which a boy says,
On the fort hill, I have seen beans spreading and ripe.
A monkey is eying the beans, and I say,
"I will kill you with my bow and arrow
I will skin you
And make a mandar of the skin.
When I play the mandar
Village maidens will come to me."
Her we find an interesting references to the fact of a monkey's hide being utilized for making drum heads by certain tribes. The Santals also use ape skin for making their drum, tumda. To catch the animal, they go to the forest where monkeys live. And when they have located a suitable haunt, they chant the Hanuman mantra by which the animals become immobilized; then they are caught and killed, the skins being used for making drums. Apart from folk stories and songs, classical literature-right from vedic time-has a fund of information which has yet to be fully documented. For instance some of the vedic references are: aghati (cymbals), adambara and lambara (drums), nadi (flute), karkari and vana (stringed instruments). Ramayana and Mahabharata have: noopura (ankle bells); bheri, dundubhi, mridanga, pataha (drums); sankh (conch), venu (flute); and vallaki, a seven-stringed harp. Similarly, literature from all other languages could be examined for a fuller study. But the most fascinating and rewarding source (though to be scrutinized with great care) is the visual representation in sculptures, icons, reliefs, wall paintings, miniatures and illustrated to manuscripts. The data are vast and varied, extending in time and space. Among the earliest evidences of this kind are finds from the Indus valley scripts and hieroglyphs. We also have illustrations in many cave paintings-right from the prehistoric ones in Madhya Pradesh to Ajanta. Temples and monuments scattered all over the land offer us rich quarries of information and so do the miniature paintings. All this is too big a storehouse for any one person to handle. Piece by piece the jigsaw has to be put together by archaeologists, art historians, linguists, ethnologists and musicologists working as teams for several years. The work has just been started-by a few individuals-and in times to come we will be able to get an idea of not only the historian of our instruments, but of their fantastic variety.
These motley forms have posed a big problem of classification. How many kinds of instruments are there? Are they to be grouped according to the material they are made of? Or, should the method of playing be the criterion? Is it the musical function that decides the issue? The problem, then, is not easy and many schemes have been tried both in our country and outside.
On the basis of their musical utility three classes were recognized in India: those meant for accompanying singing were known as geetanuga, and those used in dance as nrtyanuga; solo instruments were suska.
The Chinese classification depended on the materials of construction: kin (metal), che (stone), t'u (earth), chu (bamboo) and so on. Western scholars tried other ideas and, in the 19th Century, Mahillon divided instruments into four broad categories: autophones (later called idiophones) which require no retuning once they are made-for instance bells, rods, rings, gongs; the membranophones or drums; the chordophones or strings; the aerophones or wind instruments. It is usual, in popular works on music, to include the first two in a common class: that of percussion instruments.
But the classification prevalent throughout the world now was formulated in India at least two thousand years ago. The first reference is in the Natya sastra of Bharata who is said to have lived sometimes between 200 B.C. and 200 A.D., though this date is still a matter of discussion. He also gave four classes: ghana (solid) or idiophones, avanaddha (covered vessels) or drums, sushira (hollow) or wind instruments, tala (stretched) or stringed instruments because they have tensed guts or strings. Later writers also tied their hands to grouping instruments. For example, an author gives three types: tala (strings), vitata (drums) and tata-vitata. Another thought of three kinds: charma (leather), tantrika (string) and ghana (solid). Kohala, before the 6th Century A.D. has ghana, sushira charmabaddha (bound with leather) and tantri. The Sangam works of Tamil -2nd to 6th Century A.D. give us five classes, tole-karuvi (tole = leather), narampu-karuvi (narampu = gut), tulai-karuvi (tulai = hole, hollow), kancha-karuvi (kancham = metal) and mitatru-karuvi (human voice); karuvi in Tamil means a tool or an instrument. Notice the inclusion of the voice also in the family of instruments, which reminds us of the gatra veena of Sanskrit texts.
Today, Bharata's four major groups are accepted. However, for technical purposes a detailed depth classification is necessary. According to the latest attempts there are sixteen kinds of ghana, eleven of avanaddha, twelve of sushira and fifteen of tala vadya, leaving aside the modern electronic instruments.
Vadya, of course, is a very general term for instruments, though in ancient literature we meet other words like atodya and turya synonymous to it; karuvi has already been mentioned.
The importance of instruments and their history in the overall panorama of music cannot be overemphasized. First, we have to admit that without them not much musicology is left. It may sound an exaggeration, but it is true that if there were no musical instruments, there might not have been any music theory or grammar! For there is no way of measuring vocal sounds directly in the throat itself. On the other hand, the lengths of strings, their number, tension, tuning and such measurable quantities make it possible for us to develop sound-musicology. Similarly, the number of holes in a flute or the number of frets in a veena, as well as their distances also afford us methods for studying musical scales. One of the earliest such statements is by Bharata himself. In his Natya sastra he gives an experiment on two harps-called the dhruva-veena and chala-veena -by which he defined the finger intervals of pitches. Again, Narada (1st Century A.D.) was the first to tabulate the correlation between the vedic and the lay notes, using the flute. Ahobala of the 17th Century-to mention another important example-describes the placement of frets on the veena of his times; and from this it is possible to calculate the approximate relations of notes in the musical scales then prevalent. Secondly, and such musicological importance apart, the very nature of instruments has had profound influence on the development of our music. This is difficult to discuss here, but we may note that by about the 10th Century A.D., harps disappear from the Indian musical proscenium and veenas such as the Rudra veena, the kinnari, the kacchapi and later on the sitar, the sarode and the Saraswati veena become popular. This has brought in an enormous change in our music, both in its practice and in its theory. Thirdly, the substance out of which instruments are made give us important information on the material culture of a people. The wood, the kind of bamboo or grass tell us about the flora. The nature of the hide, deer, cow, buffalo, alligator, iguana, gives us slues on the fauna. So also, the metal used in making strings or the earth for fashioning pots of drums indicative of the technical know-how at the disposal of a society.
