The tradition counts music among the arts of speech, and so it sits within Arts. It is two musics, at least. The music of the people is song: the folk songs, glu, of work, of the road, of drinking and of love, different in every region; the circle dance songs; and the urban song forms of Lhasa, nangma and toeshey, the first slow and ornamented, the second fast and from the west, both accompanied by a small ensemble of dranyen, piwang, lingbu and yangchen. The music of the monasteries is the orchestra of ritual: the long horns, the shawms, the great cymbals, the drums and the conch, and the deep chant of the assembly.
The instruments
The dranyen, the long-necked lute, is the instrument of Tibetan song and has its own pages here. The piwang is a two-stringed spike fiddle; the lingbu a bamboo flute; the yangchen a hammered dulcimer that came late and stayed. The monastic orchestra is another world: the dungchen long horns whose sound carries across a valley, the gyaling oboes, the rolmo and silnyen cymbals, the nga drum, the dungkar conch and the kangling trumpet.
Notation
Tibet wrote its chant down. The dbyangs yig, the notation of the monastic chant, draws the rise and fall of a melody as a curving line above the syllables, with marks for the voice’s swell and break, and manuscripts of it survive from centuries ago. It is one of the oldest systems of musical notation anywhere. Secular music, by contrast, was never written: a song lived as long as someone remembered it. The notation writer in the dranyen pages is an answer to that.
What is here
The dranyen, with its history, how it is played, and the notation writer; the other instruments; the song forms; the chant notation; and the history of the music, in Tibet and in exile.