A central area of interest for me is the connection between drumming, dance, song, and text. It seems to me these practices share mutual ground in the Sinhalese performance context (with many inter-penetrative elements) despite their gradual distillation and crystallization into distinct disciplines through the influence of a particular structure of education (compare what Bob Simpson calls the “total context” of learning within the old ritual system, to the modern education system, for a sense of this).
I’m working towards a longer article on this topic. In the meantime, I thought I would share a handful of key theoretical terms I have learned of, related to Sinhalese and South Asian drumming, some of which exemplify the porous nature of Sinhalese drumming in relation to adjacent disciplines.
akshara – a drum letter or syllable, which can represent both timing and quality within the context of memorized patterns; these can be performed both vocally and percussively. Comparable to North Indian bol and South Indian solkattu. The five basic Sinhalese drum syllables, out of which many others can be derived, are thath, jith (or dith), toṃ, naṃ, and tha.
maatraa – a beat within a rhythmic cycle (taala, see below), with the first beat called the sam.
padaya – A complete line of drumming. The root “pada,” meaning foot, evokes the inter-relationships I’m so interested in. As Jim Sykes insightfully notes, “As a word that refers to poetic feet, ‘pada’ has roots in the Hindu Vedas and early texts for thinking about the relations between music, dance, and theatre.” (Of particular interest, too, are bara (“heavy”) pada, which are elongated but also performed by both drummer and dancer in a more grounded (ie. heavier) fashion, linking the temporal with the physical or affective.)
taala – musical meter, or a regularly recurring pattern of beats and accents. Taala is usually kept in South Asian traditions via a clap and wave system, finger-counting method, or with percussive instruments (eg. taalampota). I like the distinction Sykes makes between rhythm and meter when he defines meter as “abstract, measured pulse points” – ie. a theoretical abstraction that attends to embodied rhythm.
thith–kramaya – A theory of Sinhala drumming music by W.B. Makulloluwa (1922-1984) who developed it as a pedagogical tool for implementation within the emergent national school system in Sri Lanka. “Thith” refers to the short stroke produced on the tālampota (the other, long stroke being theyi). Many scholars find this system inadequate, especially when it comes to theorizing low-country traditions.
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SOURCES
Simpson, Bob. “Possession, Dispossession and the Social Distribution of Knowledge Among Sri Lankan Ritual Specialists.”
Suraweera, Sumuditha. Sri Lankan, Low-Country, Ritual Drumming: The Raigama Tradition.
Sykes, Jim. “South Asian Drumming Beyond Tala.”
Gaman Thaale 