One Week, One Drone: Deciding What to Tune and What to Fix in the School's Instrument Room
The school music room holds five instruments for the practical: a four-string tanpura with a cracked bridge and one frayed string; a harmonium whose reeds are stamped C sharp; a sitar with two broken sympathetic (taraf) strings and a slightly loose Ma fret; a tabla pair whose bayan head has gone slack; and a swarmandal. Three candidates must perform. Candidate A sings at about C, B at about D, and C has no reliable sense of absolute pitch and simply follows the drone. The centre requires an acoustic drone and does not permit an electronic tanpura. The school has one week and a small budget, and the harmonium is the only pitched instrument that can be retuned quickly. The teacher must decide what to spend on, what pitch the room will settle at, and which instrument each candidate will actually be heard against.
1. Classify the five instruments under the traditional four-fold scheme and justify the harmonium's placement, since a candidate may be asked to defend it in the viva.
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Classification.
- Tanpura - tata (string, plucked).
- Sitar - tata.
- Swarmandal - tata (strings, plucked/struck).
- Tabla (dayan and bayan) - avanaddh (stretched membrane over a resonating body).
- Harmonium - sushir (air column/reed aerophone).
The harmonium defence. The keyboard is a mechanism, not a sound source: the note is produced by a metal reed set vibrating in air pushed by the bellows. Classification follows the sound-producing medium, not the interface, so the harmonium is sushir, exactly as a shehnai or bansuri is. A candidate who answers "keyboard instrument, so it is a separate category" has confused mechanism with acoustics.
Gap to note in the viva. This set contains no ghan (solid, struck without a membrane or string) instrument. If the examiner asks for one, the correct answers are jaltarang, manjira or ghungroo. A complete answer names all four classes, not just the three represented in the room.
2. Set the tuning policy for the week: which pitch wins, what gets repaired first with a small budget, and how do candidates A, B and C each handle it? Justify each decision against the risk involved.
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Whose pitch wins: the tanpura's. It is the acoustic drone the centre requires, it is what the examiner will hear, and no candidate is marked on absolute pitch. Absolute pitch is a practice convenience; relative placement of Sa against the drone is the examinable skill.
Do not tune the tanpura up to C sharp. Raising it a semitone increases string tension on an already cracked bridge and risks a thin, buzzing jawari - spending the budget to create a second fault.
Budget order.
- Replace the frayed tanpura string and have the bridge checked; tune to C, the pitch the strings were built for.
- Retune the bayan (water/syahi adjustment), since the tabla is examinable in its own right.
- Re-tie the sitar's Ma fret; broken taraf strings add resonance only, so they are the lowest priority and can wait.
- Leave the harmonium at C sharp and use it sparingly; reeds shifted a semitone often drift.
Candidates. A sings at C - no change. B must transpose and sing in C, practising daily with the tanpura so the transposition is not a last-minute shock. C's lack of absolute pitch is an advantage here: he simply takes Sa from the drone. All three should be rehearsed against the actual tanpura, not the harmonium.