Dear Professor Tieken,
I’m not familiar with any tuning paste applied to a lute (yāḻ யாழ்).
Here are my personal observations:
1. When I was learning to play the vīṇā (வீணை; at 10+ years of age), my teacher Madurai Shanmuga Vadivu (the famous M.S. Subbulakshmi’s mother) showed me how to apply some sort of wax to my tender fingers (NOT to the strings) so they could move easily on the taut strings.
2. When my brother was learning to play the drum (மிருதங்கம்), his teacher showed him how to apply சோறு (choru/cōṟu, which was nothing but a tiny ball of cooked plain white rice from mom’s kitchen) to the drum-head. He had a special black stone (like a pumice stone which pedicurists use now) to rub the paste on the drum-head.
3. Now, in the YouTube Culture, I see ‘mridhangam' players applying some sort of powder to their drum-head. Perhaps the traditional rice-paste is not suitable now for the touring artists?
(I’ll try to ask someone about it and let you know if I get a response from him.)
My guess is that this kind of paste, oil-based or grain-based, is not for ‘tuning’ but is needed to make the surface that produces the sound smooth, pliable, and taut as the case may be, so it’s easy on the fingers of the player who triggers the sound.
With apologies for my ignorance of musical technical terms, I say the following:
In a string instrument like violin or vīṇā, there are little rings in the base of the instrument which you can move up and down the strings for tuning the instrument; no need for any paste-application.
In a drum also, the edge is tapped with a black stone to tune the drum.
The paste, oil/grain-based, is applied only to the two entities — the sound-producing entity and the sound-creating entity.
The 'paste' is like the ‘user-interface’ (UI) as is used in the new-world technology! ;-)
Regards,
rajam
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 Tieken
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The Aśoka Inscriptions: Analysing a corpus, New Delhi: Primus Books, 2023.