The soul of music

The harmonium is part of many households. It is required in temples and gurdwaras. No music director can compose tunes without this instrument, says Shekher Phadnis

THE harmonium has long been a favourite with musicians, including the wandering minstrels who sling it on their backs. For learning the fundamentals of music, the harmonium is absolutely essential and, in fact, it is part of many households in India. It is required in temples and gurdwaras as an accompaniment for singing bhajans and kirtans. It is essential for tamasha and folk music and also for touring musical troupes in rural areas. No music director can compose without the ubiquitous harmonium. The harmonium also forms an integral part of the qawwali repertoire, as many qawwals use the instrument while performing.

The harmonium was introduced to India by missionaries in the mid 19^th century, and though the design remains, it boasts of some Indian innovations like "drone stops" and a scale-changing mechanism. It might surprise the music lovers to know that the harmonium was invented by Parisian Alexandre Debain in 1842. May be because of its French origin, that the Indian government still considers the harmonium a foreign instrument. Though it is made in India now, the government still treats it at par with the guitar, violin or piano and levies VAT of 12.5 per cent on it. The least priced harmonium costs Rs 8,000.

But musically speaking, the harmonium is essentially an alien instrument to the Indian tradition, as it cannot mimic the voice, which is considered the basis of all Indian music. Meend (glissando), an integral part of any classical recitation, is not possible on the harmonium, and as such, one cannot faithfully reproduce the subtle nuances of a raga on this instrument. The harmonium is thus despised by many connoisseurs of Indian music.

Purists in Indian music opine that the harmonium, the piano and the electronic keyboard, with 12 keys to an octave, cannot capture any of the microtones that Indian music is famous for, and it would be necessary to design a harmonium with 22 keys in an octave so that it can it can handle all the nuances of Indian music.

Samvadini, a modified version of harmonium, is often used by Indian harmonium maestros to perform solo on the instrument.

The harmonium is used to accompany bhajans, folk music, ghazals, Hindi light songs, qawaalis, kirtan, Shabads, classical and semi-classical forms of Indian music.

But in the Carnatic music, the classical music of South India, harmonium’s use is very much limited. Music maestros like Devudu Iyer and Madurai M.R. Vasavambal helped to establish a place for the harmonium in Carnatic music, but their careers were restricted to the drama stage. As per septuagenarian Carnatic musician Palladam Venkataramana Rao: "People do not take up the harmonium because it is not possible to produce the gamaka (subtle variations in the pitch of a note, that produces a kind of ‘shaking' of the notes) on it. But gamaka alone does not constitute Carnatic music," says Rao, who is perhaps the only artiste who gives solo harmonium Carnatic music concerts. All India Radio banned the use of harmonium by classical artistes from 1940 to 1971 for the same reason. "The ban on solo performance was lifted only recently," says V Ramnarayan, editor of the Sruti magazine, a journal devoted to Indian music. The violin slowly slipped into the place that the harmonium had vacated as an accompaniment in concerts. Musicians also found that the violin could reproduce the concert-embellishing gamakas that the harmonium could not.

But harmonium proved to be a great success with eminent Hindustani musicians like Gyan Prakash Ghosh, Appa Jalgaonkar, Ustad Zamir Ahmed Khan, Ustad Bhure Khan, and in Carnatic music, Perur Subrahmania Dikshitar and Alathur Venkatesa Iyer were outstanding harmonium vidwans, who played nothing but Carnatic music on the keyboard instrument.

The invention of the electronic organ in the mid 1930s spelt the end of the harmonium's success (although its popularity as a household instrument declined in the 1940s as musical tastes changed).

Teakwood is mainly used for making harmoniums. "We make harmoniums with single, double, triple reeds where the same key would produce different tones. We specialise in instruments with four set of reeds," says Elangovan of Madras Music Emporium at Chennai.. Various persons are involved in woodwork and assembling the instrument in his shop. Unlike instruments such as the veena and guitar, where the tuning is done by the users, harmoniums have to be tuned as they are being made. "Business has become dull over the years as many people prefer keyboard over harmoniums," says Elangovan. Benares, Pune and Kolkata are other important harmonium-making centres. — MF