As a kid, my favorite musical instrument to play was the alto saxophone. Now that I spend most of my musical time playing harmonium, I often wonder at the connection between the two. After all, both instruments produce their sound by forcing a stream of air across a reed. Today, however, I realized what fundamentally sets apart these two types of instruments.

For a saxophone, as with a clarinet, the reed is cut from cane and is rather soft and pliable. As a material, it exhibits no preference for one frequency of vibration over another, and so with just one reed on the saxophone’s mouthpiece, a full range of notes can be played – from quite low to very high. As my fingers pressed the saxophone’s keys, pads closed up holes in the long metal tube body, effectively changing the length of the resonating chamber. It was this length that determined the frequency of vibration (i.e. the pitch – the note), the pliable cane reed vibrating more or less quickly to keep pace with the more dominant tube-length attribute.

With a harmonium, this is not the case! Every single note on the harmonium’s keyboard has a different reed beneath it. The size of the air chamber (the boxes of the harmonium) never changes. Instead, the reeds are cut to specific lengths (low notes are longer reeds, high notes are shorter reeds) and made of metal (usually brass) which expresses a strong preference for a specific vibrating frequency. Such reeds are suited for playing a specific note, and none other, which for a harmonium fits the bill perfectly – but would spell disaster for a saxophone.

And so I reach a new conclusion: A saxophone would never work with a metal reed, and a harmonium will never work with cane reeds.

What physical aspects of the harmonium contribute to its beloved characteristic sound? And how can those physical aspects be improved, to enhance and make more consistent that sound?

Over the last few years, I have often found myself fussing over and pondering harmonium reeds. They are one of the more common parts in the Indian-made harmoniums to fail, usually by going out of alignment and causing a grating, metallic buzzing sound. They are also, however, the essential component that leads to the vibrant, reedy, sustained tone of the harmonium.

Other instruments, such as a guitar, cello or piano, rely on their wood selection and wood craftsmanship for their tone. For these instruments, a string initially produces the tone, but the string itself is quite thin and very quiet (think of strumming an electric guitar when the volume is off). And so these instruments have “sound boards” and “resonating chambers” built in to their design, to pick up the quiet string’s note, and amplify it many fold.

For a harmonium, however, the wooden box is not a sound board, it is mostly a structural encasement for the inner parts, such as the hidden secondary bellows which expands to fill the lower half of the harmonium’s box. For a harmonium, it’s the reeds that determine its tone, in combination with the small channel the reed plays through, hidden at the back of each key on the keyboard.

Last week, I took apart an old Hohner harmonica (harmonicas, along with accordions, are the closest living relatives of the harmonium), in hopes of gaining new insights about how to improve harmonium reeds. Then I stumbled on to a community of custom harmonica builders, who helped me understand two critical aspects of the acoustics of vibrating musical reeds:

First, the metal reed must be situated in its reed box (the small, sturdy brass rectangle around the reed) with the smallest possible tolerances. The harmonica customizers were praising one reed maker who brought the tolerances down to .0005″ (a tiny fraction of an inch), made possible by advanced computer-aided machining techniques. With that tiny a gap around the reed, very little air is being lost. This not only makes the bellows generally more efficient, but more critically, gets the reed vibrating quicker. This is called “responsiveness,” and it’s a thing I’ve noticed severely lacking in many Indian-made harmoniums. Before now I’ve never understood what caused it – even after all leaks in the bellows and boxes are cured, such harmoniums still aren’t very responsive. You press a key down, and it takes a half a second before sound is coming out. What I can see now (physically see – open up a harmonium and you’ll see plenty of light shining between the reeds and their reed boxes) is that when reeds aren’t made with fine tolerances with regard to their reed boxes, responsiveness goes downhill.

Second, the type of metal and thickness profile of the reed must make it as close to “ideal” a spring as possible. An “ideal” spring oscillates with a “simple harmonic motion.” Such a vibrating object has a unique property that suits it for music making – namely, that no matter how much force it is played with (i.e. loud or soft), its frequency is the same. Interestingly, this is not true for most physical objects. Can you imagine playing a middle C on the piano… and playing it harder, it goes a bit flat, and playing really hard it goes very flat? Gosh that would be awful, and thankfully not the case – piano strings vibrate rather ideally, maintaining their pitch at all volumes. Unfortunately, that’s not the case with the current state of harmonium reed design. When you play your harmonium softly, the reed is a bit sharp. Play it at a “normal” volume and it is as “in tune” as that particular harmonium can be. Play it loud, however, and the pitch (the frequency of vibrations) drops, causing the note to go flat.

My guess is that since harmonium reed-making technology got to India more than a century ago, the craftsmanship and purity of metal required have both been in decline. Today, it’s hard to get harmonium reeds from the Indian makers that are in tune to begin with, but even those that are in tune have this frustrating property of going rather flat when played loudly. I wonder how much this could be mitigated by more precise thickness-profiles and better metal purity.

I recently received an email from a beginning harmonium player, curious if it’s possible to play nursery rhymes and other songs, such as the Beatles, on her harmonium.

My response?

Absolutely!

We have this funny notion that the harmonium is an Indian instrument, but actually it was born in Paris! It had a nineteenth century heyday throughout Europe and the US, and was brought to India as a portable church organ by the British, where it has continued to flourish.

The harmonium is a remarkably versatile instrument, and musicians of many backgrounds have embraced it. At various points over the last two hundred years, the harmonium has been prominently featured in Christian churches, Sufi mosques, Hindu mandirs, and Sikh gurdwaras.

And since recorded music began, many eclectic musicians have used it as a non-traditional color to paint with: George Harrison turned the Beatles on to harmonium, which they played on many of their later more spiritual tracks (easy to hear on “The Inner Light”). Other modern artists to use harmonium in live shows or on their albums include Tori Amos, Jeff Buckley, Pink Floyd, Radiohead, Sigur Ros, and Tom Waits.

Some of these artists discovered the harmonium through their interest in Indian spirituality, others simply through their European heritage. I’ve met many second generation European immigrants here in the US who recall having a “squeeze box with pedals” (the old form of harmonium) in their childhood home in the old world.

And so my answer to the original question is Yes – absolutely! The harmonium can play the same chords as any piano or guitar, so whether you like the Beatles or Jack Johnson, Lady Gaga or Bob Dylan, you can google the chords to their songs and try it out on harmonium.

Bhakti Fest – A sprawling bi-annual gathering of the Bhakti tribe in Joshual Tree, California. Features multiple days of non-stop kirtan led by Jai Uttal, Krishna Das, the Mayapuris, Wah!, and dozens of other well-known and up-and-coming kirtan musicians. Called the “Woodstock of Kirtan.”

Sat Nam Fest – This bi-annual Kundalini Yoga and Kirtan festival is put on by the inspired organization Spirit Voyage, and features top Sikh kirtan musicians: Snatam Kaur, Gurmukh, GuruGanesha Singh, Mirabai Ceiba, and many others.

Wanderlust – This yoga mega-fest happens in beautiful outdoor locations around the country, including Vermont, California and Colorado. Many of the yoga classes during the day are accompanied by sacred music, and the evenings are filled with top kirtan musicians as well as rock bands.

Festival of the Holy Name – This ecstatic celebration of the Hare Krishna Maha Mantra is held annually in Alachua Florida. Featuring non-stop kirtan led by a rotation of the top musicians in the Hare Krishna community, including the Mayapuris, Ananta Cuffee, Bada Haridas and many others.

Omega Ecstatic Chant Weekend – Held annually at Omega’s main campus in Rhinebeck, New York, this is one of the oldest American kirtan festivals coming up on it’s seventh year. Many top kirtan artists from all traditions are featured: Krishna Das, Deva Premal and Miten, Jai Uttal, Donna De Lory, Dave Stringer, Radhanath Swami, The Mayapuris, C.C. White, and lots more, interspersed with yoga and meditation sessions.

Beloved – This four-day camping, art, and music fest on the Oregon coast casts a wider net than just kirtan, but includes in it’s musical line-up Jai Uttal and Shimshai, as well as the renowned Sufi Qawwali ensemble Fanna Fi Allah.

[Excerpted from an actual email exchange with an Irish student who is in my Bhakti Breakfast Club online harmonium class]

Hi Daniel,

…I’m a huge Krishna Das fan and it was as a result of his work that I got involved in this in the first place.

One area that I struggle with though is timing. I have a decent sense of rhythm, however I feel that I’m timing challenged… I’ve no problem with the straightforward 4/4 chants where everything is on the beat, however I struggle keeping it together on the other stuff, especially slow ones.

I did some music lessons when I was a kid and understand the basics. It really feels that it’s almost as if the “gene” to auto-time has not been granted to me. Or it’s like the challenge of playing, singing, keeping a beat and taking care of timing is too much to ask of myself (at the moment). I would dearly appreciate any pointers you could give me on this…

Regards,
Jan

Dear Jan,

…I want to commend you for doing such a great job communicating what you’re struggling with musically. You obviously love kirtan a lot, and are calling on all the musical skills you’ve got to make it happen. And, some areas are strong, and others need some work. Which is fine, and how it is for all of us! Here’s a few thoughts about rhythm.

When you get down to it, musical development falls into two categories: rhythm, and melody. (“harmony,” usually meaning chords, is a subset of melody)

While playing a kirtan song, a lot of musical skills are being called on simultaneously. You’re singing and playing harmonium – that’s two instruments at once, pretty amazing right there! But you’re probably also playing chords on harmonium, and singing melody with your voice – that’s two totally different rhythms and different notes! You’re calling on keyboard fingering, visual recognition of the black and white keys, pumping while monitoring your volume level, remembering the lyrics and singing with feeling, etc.

All to say, there’s so many things being done at once, that if one of them is a challenge, it’s hard to muster the conscious attention to really work on it.

SO! Working on rhythm involves a two-pronged-approach. On the one hand, you do want to work on rhythm in the context of a song. That’s challenging, as mentioned above, but sometimes there’s a certain phrase or note that throws you off, and really you need to work that specific spot repeatedly until you crack the code.

On the other hand though, the second prong is doing rhythm exercises independent from the rest of the music stuff. Strip away melody, chords, pumping, harmonium, singing. Just work on rhythm. When I do this with a student one-on-one, we start by tapping our knees with a solid rhythm. Then I make some variations on that rhythm which the student has to mimick. It gets gradually more challenging and/or fast, till they’ve got a real “tongue-twister” in a rhythmic sense, and that’s a rhythm they can take home and practice till they get it into their body.

This is like going “under the hood” to work on rhythm directly, and there’s lots of ways to do this.

1) Look in to “TaKeTiNa.” This is a fantastic system for developing rhythm skills, based on body-motions. Stomp, clap, tap, snap… “cracking the code” with your body, where rhythm lives. (p.s. rhythm does live in your body, it’s part of your human birthright! There’s no “gene” for rhythm that you could be missing. It’s just more latent than other music skills you’ve developed further. All you need is practice and patience and guidance!)

There might be a TaKeTiNa group in your area, I don’t know if it’s in Ireland! There are some great books and DVDs about it that you could search out on Amazon.com and perhaps also YouTube.com.

2) Get a metronome. (A small digital metronome costs $15 to $30, get one online or at any music store.) Practice clapping along with the beat. Set it to 60mm and clap along. Set it to 70, or 80, or 90…. or 180! and clap along, tap along, snap along… encode those beats into your body, into your muscles and bones. And, use it when practicing exercises or songs. If you’re playing a kirtan song at home, set the metronome to something moderate, perhaps 60 or 80mm (depends on the song and your mood), and keep 20% of your attention on the metronome’s “clicks” while singing the song. If you get off beat, bring your attention back to the metronome to get in synch again.

3) Practice with a friend who plays drum of some sort and who also wants to practice!

4) If you specifically need to work on 3/4 timing, put on Krishna Das’ Hare Krishna Waltz (or any other song in 3/4) and say with the beat:

ONE – two – three – ONE – two – three …

And when that’s easy, then add a clap on “ONE,” like:

CLAP – two – three – CLAP – two – three …

And if that gets easy, then turn the music off and do it on your own, while imagining the music.

…OK! There’s lots more I could say, but this is an email for Krishna’s sake, so I should wrap it up. The main thing is that it’s just a muscle you need to develop, and over time it’ll get stronger, you can’t help that from being the case. If you do any of the above, it’ll just expedite that process, as would anything else that emphasizes rhythm, like dancing (rhythmic dancing, like African, jazz, tap, swing… less so with modern), or learning to play a drum. I’m tossing out lots of ideas here though, if you’re busy and all you can muster is to keep up with your harmonium practice, and learn new songs in the Bhakti Breakfast Club, I sincerely believe your rhythm will develop naturally from year to year. Music’s a gradual process, so look for the progress from year to year.

Alright Jan, I look forward to seeing you in class! Drop a note any time.

All the best,
Daniel

I am in my bedroom, doing yoga while “Mozart for Meditation” plays on my computer. Outside my window, a sunrise fills the sky. It’s rays of light seem to pulse and shift hues in response to the music, beautifully interweaving with the rhythms of the violins, violas, and cellos…

I reflect, “Mozart is just one instrument in God’s symphony.”

Inconceivable is the extraordinary concerto that God is composing in this very moment, in which Mozart is but one element, the sunrise another, my breathing another still!

I imagine a branching symphonic structure. The musician has in her palette many notes, timbres, and so on. The composer has in his palette many musicians. God has in his palette all of created existence. What further node is beyond God, in which God is but on color in that palette?

I reflect, “God is but one instrument in God’s symphony.”

[Excerpted from my musical diary - 4/13/2008]

I am lying in bed on a warm April afternoon, just emerging from a wonderful nap. Two hours ago, I put on some Hariprasad Chaurasia to meditate to… then, getting sleepy, decided to do some “napitation” in bed.

As I am waking up, I hear the music still playing, and am enjoying it’s gentle caress. There is a high-pitched vocalist sliding from one pitch to another in beautifully emotional descending phrases. As my conscious mind returns, I reflect that the album actually has only flute for melody… with tabla and tamboura for accompaniment.

The vocalist turns out to be a wailing baby next door – I have the window open on this hot afternoon, as do the neighbors. I watch my mind gradually separate the baby’s sounds from the polyphonous circumscription called “the music.”

What sound exists within the song, and what sound outside the song? Only a thought determines. Put that thought to sleep, and the whole world is liable to be a song.

It was only recently that mantras began to grace western recordings. In the 70′s and 80′s, George Harrison planted seeds of kirtan by incorporating mantras into his songwriting, most famously with his song of devotion “My Sweet Lord” culminating in the joyous repetition of the Hare Krishna mantra. In the 90′s, chant music really took root when Krishna Das began recording albums of entirely kirtan music, with rhythmic underpinnings from rock and world music. In the 2000′s, kirtan blossomed into a substantial genre of music, with many world-class musicians such as Jai Uttal, Deva Premal, Snatam Kaur, and Dave Stringer joining Krishna Das in creating full kirtan music albums with various blends of musical elements from rock, jazz, soul, Indian music, and other world musics.

In the 2010′s, we are getting a thrilling infusion of kirtan nectar from the Hare Krishna community, with Gaura Vani and As Kindred Spirits, the Mayapuris, and the Kirtaniyas dancing onto the scene with their Bengali-style mridangas and kartals, and myriad mahamantra melodies.

The latest album in this vein is the Kirtaniyas’ “Heart and Soul,” released in December 2011 by a talented young quartet of bhakti yogis led by kirtan wallah Vijay Krsna. The album begins with a meandering introduction, a musical sunrise invoking the sounds of an Indian village temple. Male and female voices enter in sweet somber unison, beautifully invoking Sri Radha and Sri Krishna. Soon the heartbeat of the mridanga drum leaps to life and band is singing “Radha Ramanda Haribol” in joyous response to Vijay Krsna’s lead vocals. As the rhythm gradually escalates, the harmonium leaps to life, supporting the melody and spicing up the rhythm with Qawwali-style syncopated chords. As the kirtan reaches it’s ecstatic climax, the lead vocal is passed between band members. This is characteristic of the inclusive, community-oriented, Hare Krishna kirtan style that does not seek to glorify a single musician’s virtuosity, but rather to employ all the musical skills of the gathered sangha in the communal praise of Radha Krishna.

The album continues to eb and flow through the many moods of kirtan – sweet delight in the name, passionate longing for the divine, the wistfulness of a violin here, the energetic pulse of a mridanga there. By the final track, “Gopi Lullaby,” I’m very ready to rest with a smile in the lush river of drones and delectable bhajan lyrics that, for now at least, only my heart understands. Gratitude for this music melts into gratitude for life, as Sarasvati’s voice fades away, leaving a sparkling trail of tamboura drones buzzing in my imagination…

Here’s a news brief you won’t catch on CNN or Fox News: Global Harmonium Shortage hits the Kirtan Community Hard!

It’s all too real, and not a temporary emptying of shelves caused by Black Friday either. You won’t hear about it on the evening news, because kirtan music, and the instruments used in playing kirtan music, is a rather small niche, and a bit off the radar of the mainstream media. But for us in the chant community, it’s a real problem that’s been coming for a while now.

The story begins in Paris, where the Harmonium was invented in the nineteenth century. It became popular throughout Europe, and in America as well, and many different manufacturers created competing designs, patenting and crafting new ways to lay out the harmonium’s bellows, reeds, stops, and other parts. This was a highly innovative time for keyboard instruments – in fact, the piano itself had just been invented a hundred years earlier. In the perspective of the evolution of Western Music, Harmoniums were just one of a flurry of instruments based on the piano’s keyboard that had their fifteen minutes of fame. This includes the pianoforte, harmonichord, new types of clavichord and harpsichord, harmonium, accordion, and eventually electric organ, and synthesizer keyboards.

And so the harmonium had it’s moment in Europe and America’s fancy, and later petered out. All Western harmonium makers (and harmonium reed makers) stopped manufacutring the instrument by 1950, presumably shifting into producing other instruments.

And yet here were are, playing our harmoniums and singing kirtan, so, what happened? Well, in a “saved by the bell” moment, a stroke of luck had some Christian missionaries from Britain take a kindness to the harmonium as a portable church organ, as they sailed to India on ships that could not fit full pipe organs. When they arrived in India, the harmonium was a major hit! Christianity took hold in some spots, but the harmonium travelled like wildfire, as musicians from all of India’s religions (including Hindu, Sikh, and Muslim) incorporated the harmonium into their spiritual musics. And so just as the harmonium was fading into the dusk in the Western world, it was being raised to the heavens in India, with many dozens of manufacturing shops tooling up to produce harmoniums – with the legs removed, of course, so that they could be stationed on the ground and played while sitting on the floor.

Then in the late 20th century, in a kind of ironic global ping-pong, Eastern Religions began to take hold in the West, and by today, many of us have taken up kirtan – singing God’s names within sanskrit mantrans – as a heartfelt daily practice… which… relies on the harmonium! Try as we may to import our spirit from somewhere else, it’s always right at home beneath our own hearth; and try as we may to enjoy the exotic Indian sound of the harmonium, it is really a European instrument in origin!

Which brings me to today’s conundrum: As kirtan is growing like wildfire in America and Europe and elsewhere in the Western world, the only manufacturers of harmoniums are currently in India, and this is a problem! India is known for it’s spirituality, it’s artwork, it’s culture and cuisine, it’s dance and music… but not for it’s manufacturing. Can you name an Indian model of car? And so, as the demand for harmoniums is globally increasing, the small Indian shops that produce harmoniums of mediocre quality by hand in cramped settings, and who struggle to get their shipments handled decently enough so that American importers don’t just receive crates full of splinters and screws, are having a hard time keeping up with that demand. Shipments destined for western importers are arriving months late, to stores that have largely pre-sold the incoming instruments. Quality overall is declining as the small shops try to produce more instruments rapidly, but without the infrastructure to scale up properly.

And so, each day I receive emails from people wondering, “Where can I get a harmonium? I’ve heard a Bina 23b or a DMS 24a is the best thing to get, but I can’t find any shops that have them in stock. What do I do?” I tell them they should ask the shops if they can pre order one, and be patient while they wait some months for it to arrive. And in the meantime, share some tips about harmoniums at my Kirtan Central page – www.kirtancentral.com/harmonium. But I’m starting to play with the notion that we should begin making them again here in the states.

Whenever I get an email that makes me cry tears of gratitude, I put it in a special folder for safe keeping. Periodically I pull these sweet notes from harmonium students out and read through them, to remember why it is that I’ve chosen this path of teaching music. Each one serves as a critical reminder of how meaningful sharing sacred music is, and helps me retain a sense of fulfillment in my work. I thought I’d share a few of my favorites here with you, in case you’re also contemplating embarking on the journey of learning harmonium.