Tibetan secular music was never written. The monasteries wrote their chant, in one of the world’s oldest notations, but a song for the dranyen lived only as long as someone could play it, and many have gone. The notation writer is Genla’s answer: a way to set a song down, beat by beat, to hear it played back, to print it for a student, and to share it as a link or a file.
The notation
The writer uses the numbered notation of the sheets used at the Tibetan Institute of Performing Arts. The digits 1 to 7 are the seven degrees, Do to Ti; 5 and 6, So and La, sound an octave low on the instrument and carry a dot beneath. A 0 is a rest, a dash holds a note for another beat, a dot after a note adds half its value. Digits written together share one beat and take a beam beneath them; a space begins the next beat. Bar lines, repeat signs and section headings are written as they are on the page.
The tuning
The instrument sits in D major. The three open courses are La, Re and So, and So and La are re-entrant: they sound an octave below the rest.
| Number | Solfège | Pitch | Open course |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Do | D3 | |
| 2 | Re | E3 | yes |
| 3 | Mi | F♯3 | |
| 4 | Fa | G3 | |
| 5 | So | A2, an octave low | yes |
| 6 | La | B2, an octave low | yes |
| 7 | Ti | C♯3 |
The playback uses seven notes recorded by Tenzin Norbu, formerly of the Tibetan Institute of Performing Arts, through the instrument’s own resonance, so what is heard is a dranyen and not a piano pretending.