Dealing with dissonance, restoring harmony

October 27, 2020 12:40 PM

"My son Akash represents our fourth generation in this occupation," Ashok Yadav told me. "My grandfather was the first in our family to take up tuning and repairing harmoniums - a skill he learned from musical instrument shop owners in Jabalpur 60-70 years ago. In those days, far more people were into classical music and playing harmoniums. This skill earned our landless family a living."

By Ira Deulgaonkar for the People's Archive of Rural India, which has many stories about life and labour in rural India.

posted by smcg (10 comments total)

Having never heard of the harmonium, let alone the ways it's been modified in India and Pakistan, I looked for some examples of harmonium music. I'm currently listening to this and grateful that it's longer than I originally thought.
posted by trig at 1:18 PM on October 27, 2020 [1 favorite]

Oh wow that archive, thank you.

I had heard of harmoniums, because in Anglo literature they signal religious feeling without much money. But what an amazing suite of changes made for Indian classical music! And how delicate an ecology of skill is endangered here.

(I was surprised that any reed instrument became common in a monsoonal climate, but the Wikipedia article is quite good on that - these use metal reeds, and part of their 19th c popularity was designing them to be transportable and durable - relevant for the US, too.)
posted by clew at 2:07 PM on October 27, 2020

I played one of these regularly about 10 years back, when I was noodling around in Kirtan music with a couple of other hippies. The one I had was borrowed, and felt cheap - the bellows would definitely have been the first to go, and the keys were made of plastic. Hard to play! Not so much from the key weighting as how to get the bellows into a rolling drone that felt natural. probably easier with higher quality instruments.
posted by SoundInhabitant at 5:01 PM on October 27, 2020

Thank you for posting this!

No harmonium post is complete without Ek Chatur Naar. Dueling banjos ain't got nothing on Bollywood.
posted by basalganglia at 5:29 PM on October 27, 2020 [1 favorite]

Harmoniums (harmonia?) seem to be the central instrument in the devotional qawwali music played at Sufi shrines (pretty much around the clock, by groups of musos who travel there specifically for the gigs) like Chisti's tomb in Ajmer or Nizamuddin's tomb in Delhi.

You could spend a lot of time just lounging around on the cool marble and listening to their amazing music.
posted by UbuRoivas at 7:00 PM on October 27, 2020

tl;dr? This is really a pretty tragic story.
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 7:02 PM on October 27, 2020

basalganglia, ugh, that's yet another fond childhood memory gone down the drain of racism/colorism.

"Kala re, ja re, ja re,
Khare nale mein jake tu mooh dhoke aa!"

"Black dude, get outta here,
Go wash your face in the pond before you challenge me!"

Fuuuuuuuck, that's disgusting. I used to sing that as a five yr old. :(
posted by MiraK at 6:36 AM on October 28, 2020

This was fascinating, thanks for posting.
posted by soundguy99 at 7:04 AM on October 28, 2020

If you think you've never heard a harmonium, but you are a Beatles fan, you have definitely heard a harmonium. Go back and take a listen to "We Can Work It Out". :)
posted by nayantara at 9:21 AM on October 28, 2020

MiraK, thanks for the translation. I don't speak Hindi, and I hadn't seen subtitles for songs in old Bollywood. Padosan's one of my favorite movies, but those lyrics are really gross.
posted by basalganglia at 5:30 PM on October 28, 2020