Panchavadyam
പഞ്ചവാദ്യം पञ्चवाद्यम्
Also The five instruments, Chenda melam as its neighbour.
Music Kerala
What it is
Panchavadyam is the temple percussion orchestra of Kerala, five instruments played together in a rhythmic structure that expands and contracts over an hour or more, performed standing in two facing rows in a temple courtyard. It is not accompaniment to anything: it is the performance, with no melody and no song, and audiences of thousands follow its arithmetic. With the chenda melam it is the sound of a Kerala temple festival, and at Thrissur Pooram the two are the event.
How it is built
Five instruments: timila, an hourglass drum slung at the shoulder and the leading voice; maddalam, a heavy barrel drum; ilathalam, cymbals; idakka, an hourglass drum played with a stick; and kombu, a long curved horn. The structure is a triangle: the rhythm begins in a very long cycle at slow tempo and the cycle is halved stage by stage while the tempo rises, through six kalas, until the final stage is very fast and very short, and it ends together. The number of beats is counted by the audience and the transitions are the moments that draw applause.
How it is learnt
The question a family actually has
Begun at about ten, usually in a family or under a local asan, and learnt by vaaythari, spoken syllables, before any instrument is touched. A timila player drills the basic phrases for a year or more. Group playing is learnt by standing in the row and being carried, and a young player is placed between experienced ones. Fifteen years is a reasonable estimate for a lead timila player. The Kshetra Kala Peetham and the Kalamandalam now teach it formally alongside the family lines.
Whose lineage is whose
Where a claim is contested, by whom
The Marar and Poduval communities held the temple drumming right by service tenure and still supply most players, and the major festivals are led by named asans whose reputations are regional. Thrissur Pooram gives the panchavadyam its largest stage, where the two sides compete and the madathil varavu is played for hours. The debate inside the tradition is about speed and about size: ensembles have grown far larger than they were and the tempo of the final stages has risen, and older players hold that the slow opening, which is the hard part, is being shortened to get to the loud part.
Worth knowing
The triangle
The structure is often drawn as a triangle: wide at the base and narrow at the top. The first stage has the longest cycle, perhaps a hundred and seventy six beats, at the slowest tempo, and each successive stage halves the cycle and raises the speed, so the music gets denser and shorter at once, six times over. The audience counts. The last stage is a few seconds a cycle and ends on a single stroke together from a hundred players. Knowing the arithmetic is what being a listener consists of, and children learn to count it before they can play anything.
Ilanjithara and the four hours
The Ilanjithara melam at Thrissur Pooram is played under an ilanji tree in the temple compound and runs about four hours with some two hundred and fifty performers. It is a chenda melam rather than panchavadyam proper, but the two sit together in the same festival and the same audience follows both. People take positions hours early. There is no stage, no amplification and no announcement; the melam begins and the crowd settles and counts.
Where the regions differ
- Tamil
- Kerala
- Telugu
- Kannada
- North
- Maharashtra
- Bengal
- Punjab
- Assam
- Sri Lanka
- Nepal
- Gujarat
- Odisha
- Mithila
- Kashmir
- Tulu Nadu
- manipur
- rajasthan
- konkani
- sindhi
- jharkhand
- himalayan
- kodava
- Kerala
- Thrissur and central Kerala are the heart of it, with the Pooram the largest stage and the Marar and Poduval families supplying most players.
- Tulu Nadu
- The coastal Karnataka temples use related ensembles and the two traditions meet at the Kasaragod border.
Connected to
Deities
Festivals
Temples
Related arts