Why do harmonium players sometimes appear to play their instrument differently from each other?
The harmonium is recognised primarily as a wind instrument that is used specifically as an accompaniment to voice as opposed to solo playing. In most cases, particularly for light-classical music, it is played by the singer himself/herself but occasionally a second harmonium player is introduced to provide solo musical interludes between vocal lines and verses and add general backing.
The harmonium was frowned upon by purely classical singers as it was not considered an Indian instrument due to its European roots. As a consequence it was rarely used on the concert platform. Gradually as the harmonium became more prevalent it gradually won acceptance and many artists now use harmonium to provide background melodies for Raga compositions.
A common observation by layman has been to point out that some harmonium players seem to play the white keys predominantly over the black, while others play the opposite way for the same songs. Indeed sometimes the same pitch may be heard but different keys are used. Why would this be?
The first point of note is that there exists no classically developed structure for playing the harmonium due the fact that it is used to accompany rather than be played as a solo instrument. This means that playing the harmonium is not an exact science itself and would certainly go some way to explaining the different playing styles between artists.
Second and rather more importantly, Indian music does not fix notes to particular tones. Rather the starting point or Sa becomes the keynote or tonic and is the key that all other tones are then related to along the scale. The differences in peoples voices accounts for the varying starting points of the tonic and would account for changes in the way that different players played. Therefore most male and female artists would play the instrument differently from the outset as their voice pitches are clearly different. Whilst most males singers would start their basic scale for accompanying themselves from a Sa of B flat, B, C or C# (majors) a female singer may be accompanied anywhere between G# and C. This is the main reason why harmonium players appear to be playing the same song differently. It is down to the pitch theat they themselves are singing from or accompanying.
As a point of note, the advent of the scale change harmoniums, which allows a singer to transpose his or her Sa or tonic yet play the same keys, has to a large extent now alleviated the problem of singers who wish to sing songs in different pitches but did not possess the skills to accompany themselves from different keys.
The harmonium master Tulsidas Borkar
