Tabla Tarang

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Tabla Tarang , also tablatarang , is a rare melody instrument in Indian music , which consists of 10 to 16 tuned kettle drums that are set up in a semicircle around the musician.

The drums correspond to the dayan , the high drum of a tabla drum pair , and are tuned to the individual notes of the scale used in the raga . The instrument is played with the fingers of both hands. In contrast to the tabla , only one touch is used, i.e. one tone per drum. For longer-lasting tones must vertebrae are played. Tarang in itself means "waves" and in the context "melody of the tabla".

The tabla tarang is rarely played because tuning is time-consuming and musical expression is limited compared to other Indian melody instruments. The deepest drum has a skin diameter of 16 centimeters, the highest of 11 centimeters. The range is two octaves. The drum pair tabla is used for rhythmic accompaniment .

The earliest knowledge of the young instrument comes from Maharashtra at the end of the 19th century. At that time, the famous singer Vishnu Digambar Paluskar (1872–1931) is said to have given his students singing lessons by means of tuned tablas . One of the students was Vishnudas Shirali, a singer and multi-instrumentalist. From 1930 he accompanied the ballet of Uday Shankar (1900–1977), the pioneer of modern Indian dance . Shirali introduced the tabla tarang into the orchestra, which he later became director. Uday Shankar gave the instrument the rank of solo instrument and made it known to a wider audience. Other dance ensembles took over the tabla tarang in their orchestras. The drums came to Europe through a tour of the Indian dancer Menaka from 1934 to 1936.

The most famous player was Kamalesh Maitra (1928–2005), who played in Uday Shankar's orchestra and made the instrument known in the West from the 1950s. He was the only musician who ever developed full-length ragas on the tabla tarang . Previously, solos were played for a maximum of a quarter of an hour.

Shirali's successor as orchestra leader was the vichitra vina player and music teacher Lalmani Misra (1924–1979), who played tabla tarang , among other things . The most famous tabla player from Kolkata , Jnan Prakash Ghosh (1912–1997) also played tabla tarang .

A similar musical instrument set up in a semicircle, which does not belong to the membranophones but to the idiophones , is the jal tarang . It consists of differently sized, water-filled porcelain bowls. Duggi tarang is a series of the small kettle drum duggi corresponding to the tabla tarang .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Laura Patch: The Tabla Tarang. Booklet of the CD: Tabla Tarang - Melody on Drums. Kamalesh Maitra, tabla tarang , Trilok Gurtu , tabla . Smithsonian / Folkways 1996