Ancient Indian Drum Syllables and Bu Ston's Sham Pa Ta Ritual

Abstract

North India and solka.tu in the South, which are associated with specific drumstrokes and which seem to represent their sounds. These may, in fact, represent a more complex course of development in Indian musical history than has been previously assumed. On the basis of information presented in a number of texts, including one of the oldest surviving Indian musical notations and a 14th-century Tibetan dance manual, I propose to reopen the question of the significance of the syllables, and to present an alternative hypothesis for interpreting them. Unless one simply accepts as a truism the notion that every field of research includes important questions which may not only remain unanswered, but which may even be still unasked, the reasons for such a reinterpretation may not be immediately apparent. Certainly, there seems to be a general agreement on the nature of the drum in the writings of well-qualified Indomusicologists. Robert Brown (1965:91 ff.) presents an expert and valuable musical-linguistic discussion of what he calls the principles behind the choice of vocal to represent the sounds of the mrdangam; and his statement: highly developed practices of drumming, such as are found in Africa and India, the performer tends to symbolize his rhythmic patterns of sound in terms of vocal syllables accords well with Wade's explanation (1979:141): Presumably, such were originally meant to imitate the sounds of the strokes to which they referred, but with time the use of became more complex. In other words, the consensus seems to be that the drum represent a kind of oral notation devised to represent what must have been, by implication, independently existing musical sounds. Such views appear to derive from field observation of contemporary musical practice, which carries the convincing force of evidence seen