Dear Herman (if I may),
About the paste used nowadays to produce varying membrane thickness in mrdangam : "Iron filings or manganese dust mixed with cooked rice provide the black-paste [sic] on the right head of the Mridangam." (P. Sambamoorthy; Laya Vadyas, New Delhi : All India Handicrafts Board, 1959, p. 3). I haven't heard it called mārjanā in this context -- of course, this doesn't mean it is not attested.
What is alluded to in Naa.tyazaastra, ch 33 under mārjanā could be something like the above, but that is not clear. Another possibility is something like this : "[i]n the drum Urumi, the milky juice of a plant is applied on the right head and rubbed. This head when stroked, gives that characteristic sound. In fact, Urumi is an onamatopoetic name." (P. Sambamoorthy, op. cit. p. 3).
Coming back to the mridangam, the effect of the paste at the
center of Indian drums has been elucidated by C. Venkata Raman
(Nobel Prize in Physics, 1930). He showed that :
"in the Indian musical drums we have a circular drum-head which
is loaded and damped in such a manner that all the overtones above
the ninth are suppressed and these nine are grouped in such a
manner as to give a succession of five tones in harmonic
sequence."
see
Scientific papers of C. V. Raman, volume 2, p. 464
(reprinted from "The Indian musical drums" Proc. Indian Acad.
Sci. A1 179-188 (1935)).
available at archive.org. This is why the sound of the mridangam
markedly differs from that of a drum with a mere circular
(uniform) membrane, as anybody can check.
The above volume of over six hundred pages contains C. Venkata
Raman's contributions to acoustics. He was himself a competent
violin player, and he analyzed, among other things, the workings
of a variety of musical instruments. The papers relevant to Indian
drums are articles 42, 43, 45 and 46.
Many sections of these papers may be followed with little scientific background. For this reason, some of his arguments, that only require musical sense and experimenting with strokes, may be historically relevant in part, although that wasn't his focus of interest. He does not refrain from using modern physical concepts in his papers.
In ancient Tamil literature, there were also much bigger drums as
long as a bed (this refers of course to how poet மோசிகீரனார்
nearly escaped death, see புறம் 50). If these war drums looked
like timpani, the relevant tuning may have been different.
The timpani or kettledrums also admit of tuning -- see
the beginning of the second movement of Beethoven's D minor
symphony op. 125 (the "choral" s.) for a familiar and remarkable
example among many. However, modern timpani do not sound at all
like the mridangam, apparently because only the first three
frequencies are controlled in the former, as opposed to nine in
the latter. "The three principal modes, under normal playing and
tuning conditions, have frequencies nearly in the ratio of 4:3:2,
thus giving timpani a musical pitch which is easily discernible."
(CA Anderson and TD Rossing, J Acoust Soc Am 66, S18
(1979), Abstract). It appears that the loading here is provided by
the large air mass enclosed in the drum, rather than by a paste.
At any rate, a variety of physical phenomena, some rather subtle,
need to be taken into account to understand the effect of drum
shape and tuning. Even if the physics had not been understood in
ancient times, the musical implications of surface treatment were
observed -- otherwise these treatments would not have been
adopted in the first place. And it is apparent they are missed if
one disregards the correlation between drum construction and the
sounds it can produce -- they are very difficult to guess
indeed.
(Sir) CV Raman is better known for his work in Optics. He
discovered what we now call the Raman effect. He explained why the
blue color of the Mediterranean, or of ice in glaciers, are
different from the blue color of the sky. Recall that it is Lord
Rayleigh that had explained why the sky is blue even though the
sun isn't.
I hope this helps somewhat,
Kind regards,
Satyanad Kichenassamy
Dear List members,
I would like to know more about the so-called tuning paste, or the mud smeared on the membrane of a drum (Skt mārjanā) or (in Caṅkam poetry) a lute (yāḻ). What does it actually do, for instance, is it making the leather more supple?
With kind regards, Herman
Herman TiekenStationsweg 582515 BP Den HaagThe Netherlands00 31 (0)70 2208127
website: hermantieken.com
The Aśoka Inscriptions: Analysing a corpus, New Delhi: Primus Books, 2023.
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