The Music of Hindostan c14.4

c14.4

In Hindu music the graduated intensity of the sound is very little regarded, either in singing or playing or drumming, because their whole scheme is not accentual, but quantitative. It is true that the first of the bar (the *sam*) is louder than the rest often, not always; but this is not in order that it may, as with us, stand out against other accents, but because two quantitative schemes are apt to coincide there, and two sounds are louder than one. The time-intervals are with them all-important, and show great variety; it is seldom that more than a few bars, out of hundreds, are drummed in exactly the same way. And the drumming is practically continuous; it is only occasionally silenced for special contrast. The pitch, again, is all-important, for it is invariably the keynote, and frequently the drum is the singer's only accompaniment. Lastly, a maximum of variety is got into the quality; and this not mainly by the variety of the instruments. For though there are scores of shapes for drums, tambourines, cymbals, triangles, and so forth, they are not usually assembled together, because concerted music is the exception, not the rule. The variety is got out of the drum, or the pair of drums themselves. They are played with the full hand and the fingers, rarely with sticks; there are half a dozen strokes for the right hand and three or four for the left. Of these Lady Wilson's¹ drummer said, 'The beat (with the left hand) is like the seam of my coat—that must be there; the other notes (with the right hand) are like the embroidery I may put according to my own fancy over the seam.' These 'notes' are differentiated not by pitch, but quality. They are also articulated by great intricacy of time-interval. For neither of these two things has our music any real analogues; and the Bengalis do not overstate the case in their saying 'Yantrapatir mṛdāṅga' (the drum is the father of instruments). It is proposed now to examine Indian drumming under these two aspects: quality and metre.