Melody of the duck instrument

SUGANTHY KRISHNAMACHARI

Having learnt the oboe, Martina Leopoldt is keen on mastering the nagaswaram.

Photo: S.R. Raghunathan

unusual: Martina Leopoldt.

Ever since I dipped into our collection of records, to listen to the New York Philharmonic playing Prokofiev’s ‘Peter and the Wolf,’ conducted by Leonard Bernstein, the oboe has been, to me, synonymous with the duck. That’s be cause, it is the oboe that represents the duck in this piece. When I tell oboe player Martina Leopoldt this, she laughs, and says, “It’s not just you. Many of my friends in Germany call it the duck instrument too.’”

Martina is in Chennai to give finishing touches to her thesis for a post-graduate degree in Musicology. She is a student at the University of Leipzig, and the topic of her research is ‘Nagaswaram — ritual and religious connections in music — especially in connection with the Tiruvaiyaru Tyagaraja festival.’ She took the help of Prof B.M. Sundaram and Injikkudi E.M. Subramaniam for her thesis.

Curiosity kindled

When she was eleven, Martina decided to learn how to play the oboe. “An oboe teacher had just arrived in Ilmeneau, the small town in which I lived. Just out of curiosity, I enrolled for oboe lessons. My face would turn red when I played the oboe. My friends would tease me and say, “You are not only playing the duck instrument, you even look like a sick duck!”

How did she get interested in the nagaswaram? “When my grandfather visited Chennai in 2005, he bought a nagaswaram for me. I didn’t know a thing about it, until 2007, when I visited India, and learnt how to play it.”

She filmed the nagaswaram players at Tiruvaiyaru this year, and at the Tiruvannamalai and Chidambaram temples. “I even went trekking up to the Sorimuthu Ayyanarappan temple in the Mundanthurai sanctuary in Tirunelveli. This temple in a forest has a nagaswaram and thavil player, while many temples in more accessible places don’t have ritual nagaswaram playing. They say they lack funds. I also wanted to visit the Agastya temple, but the permission from the Forest Department didn’t come in time. So I couldn’t visit that temple.”

“In the West, we usually don’t use microphones for classical music concerts. But you have microphones in your sabhas, and that spoils the quality of your traditional music. Why aren’t your auditoriums designed keeping acoustics in mind?” she wonders. She’s a girl with very strong views on adhering to the traditions of music. Surprising in one so young. Martina is only 22.

In the 17th century the oboe made its way into concert halls. Today the nagaswaram too is heard in sabhas, a development Martina is not happy about. “The nagaswaram is the loudest wind instrument in the world. And your sabhas provide amplification for the nagaswaram too! Indians seem to have such a fascination for technology. I even heard an electronic veena. I didn’t like it one bit,” complains Martina.

She laments that in Europe, Hindustani music is known more widely than Carnatic music. “I couldn’t find many books on Carnatic music in our libraries, but there were many on Hindustani music.”

“Bollywood music is popular in India, and A.R. Rahman has used the oboe in a song in the film Jodha Akbar. That might make the oboe popular here!”

Martina plans to continue nagaswaram lessons under Balamurali, who studied in Annamalai University, and now lives in Germany. Once she submits her thesis, she’s going to come back to India, to train under Injikkudi Subramanian. And of course, there’s also that trek to the Agastya temple that she missed this trip, but is determined to do soon.

Comparative study

In a lecture recently organised by the Centre for Ethnomusicology, Martina spoke of the role of the oboe in every period in the history of Western music, and then of the similarities and differences between the oboe and the nagaswaram. Some highlig hts:

Like the nagaswaram, the oboe is a double reed instrument of the woodwind family. It’s made of a wood called grenadilla, which comes from Africa. “Of ten pieces of the wood, roughly one will be suitable for making an oboe. That’s why the oboe is expensive. An oboe costs 8000 Euros!” Martina explained. “Reeds have to be changed every week, and each reed costs 20 Euros, but I make my own reeds.”

The oboe too has a conical bore, but the reeds of the nagaswaram are thicker, which makes the latter more difficult to play.

Amazing ability

“No oboe player will be able to play for more than two hours at a stretch. And I am amazed at the ability of nagaswaram players who play continuously for more than six hours in temples,” Martina observed.

The modern oboe has 45 keys, and therefore one cannot produce gamakas on it. But the baroque oboe has only three keys, and is more like the nagaswaram, because you can produce microtones on it.

In the baroque oboe too sound is produced mainly with the oral cavity, as in the case of the nagaswaram. Both the nagaswaram and the oboe originated as outdoor instruments, although the nagaswaram was used in religious processions and the baroque oboe in military processions.

S.K.

Lawyer who nurtured music -- Prof. Sambamurthi

Source http://www.hindu.com/fr/2008/10/31/stories/2008103150970400.htm

ENCORE

Lawyer who nurtured music

SRIRAM VENKATKRISHNAN

PIONEER Prof. Sambamurthi worked all his life to make musicology an integral part of Carnatic music.

INNOVATOR Prof. Sambamurthi

Prof. P. Sambamurthi passed away on October 23, 1973. The Hindu published a detailed obituary on October 24 in which it recorded that the end came about at the Royapettah Hospital, Madras, after a brief illness.

The article first listed his awards and stated that he was a recipient of Padma Bhushan. And it went on to say, “Prof. Sambamurthi was honoured with the title of Sangita Kalanidhi at the 46th annual conference of the Music Academy, Madras in 1972. He was elected Fellow of the Sangeet Nataka Akademi in 1963 in recognition of his services to music.” It was an unprecedented list of honours and the Professor, as he was always known, deserved every one of them. He had worked hard all his life to make musicology an integral part of Carnatic music. And he began his endeavours at a time when music was largely an oral tradition with very little support for theory despite the various treatises on it and the proliferation of printed works in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries.

By then, the gurukula system was fast fading and even in the 1880s, there had been attempts by the Madras Jubilee Gayan Samaj to train students in music en masse by the establishment of schools for this purpose. Though this effort failed, the idea caught on and sporadic attempts were made in the 1900s as well. The Rev. H.A. Popley ran a summer school for music in 1918 which taught music to Christians. By 1921, this had become an annual feature, the entire course lasting six weeks.

In 1924, Sambamurthi, fresh out of law college, but more interested in music and better known as a performer on the flute, was invited to give ten lectures on the “Musical Forms in South Indian Music” at the summer school.

He so impressed the Rev. Popley that he was immediately appointed as a lecturer in the school. With Popley returning to London in 1926, Sambamurthi became Vice-Principal of the school and by 1927, became the Principal.

Not content with carrying on what the Rev. Popley had begun, Sambamurthi set about creating a syllabus for the school. The course expanded to comprise Elementary, Intermediate, Advanced and Honours sections and soon became a full-day school for the summer months, functioning out of various buildings in the city.
Created a syllabus

There were classes on theory and practice and each Friday, the students had to present, by way of public performances, what they had learnt. To introduce a fun element, Sambamurthi organised weekend outings to places of musical interest in and around Madras city.

Not everyone was impressed with such group singing. The noted critic ‘Kalki’ Krishnamurthy panned the attempt as monstrous but it was generally welcomed as an innovation. Encouraged by the response, Sambamurthi enlarged the summer course into a full five-year course. In addition, a Teacher’s Training Course was also introduced which became very popular among the music teachers of the Corporation Schools. Students began coming in from all over India and soon a separate course for instruments was also added.

The Music Academy, Madras, was started in 1928, with Sambamurthy as one of the founding secretaries. This body lobbied with the Government to introduce music as a regular course in colleges and in the Madras University.

The Queen Mary’s College (QMC) was the first to do so and Sambamurthi was appointed lecturer. At around this time, he was also asked to teach music in many schools of Madras, so much so that he had to evolve a rota system of teaching in all the schools and still continue as lecturer at the QMC and serve as Principal of the summer school! He of course, never practised law!

The Madras University funded his travel to Germany in 1931 to study at the Deutsche Akademie. In 1932, when the Music Department of the Madras University was formed, he framed its syllabus. Later he was to serve as its head for 25 years. From then on, there was no looking back either for him or for musicology. He wrote innumerable books, framed syllabi for several universities, helped the setting up of the Central College of Carnatic Music (now Isai Kalluri), was Professor of Musicology at the Venkateswara University and represented India at numerous music conferences abroad. He was also Director, Sangita Vadyalaya, Madras, from 1961 to 64 where he worked on creating and improvising music instruments. Sadly, the summer school that he put on the map, closed down in 1941. But it had served its purpose as a launch pad for musicology and systematic teaching of music.

(This article owes much to inputs from Dr M.A. Bhageerathi, faculty member of QMC, whose doctoral thesis was on Prof. Sambamurthi’s contribution to music theory.)

(The author can be contacted at srirambts@gmail.com)