India's First Pop-Up Museum Of Rare Instruments Is Coming To A Bangalore Music Festival

[On 16th-19th January, 2019, Homegrown is throwing a first-of-its-kind music festival in Mumbai designed to celebrate the city’s vast and diverse music culture. Dive deep into a wide variety of dynamic workshops, exhibitions, curated tours, panels, pop-ups, performances and parties that promise to be inclusive of all kinds of tastes and people.

There’s something for everyone, click here to find what’s perfect for you.]

[Echoes of Earth is India’s first ecologically crafted, sustainable music festival. Held in Bangalore, the festival spans across 150 acres of land with over 40 artists across 3 stages. Homegrown is collaborating with them this month to bring you exclusive content about the festival, how they plan to uphold their ethos of sustainabality, and all the amazing things you can expect to find at the festival.]

Museums are acting bridges between our past and present. They are homes for things we have never fathomed, and evidence of the journey that has been our evolution. Unfortunately, in India, we stand largely underserved when it comes to quality museums, even though there’s a multitude of people ready to embrace this culture. It’s important to note, too, that Museums have evolved from their traditional brick and mortar structures, much like anything else in the world today. Pop up museums have been hugely successful world over - the Museum of Ice Cream, The Pop-Up Museum of Ideas and the Museum of Feelings are all exemplary of this success.  Ahead of the curve then is Echoes of Earth, India’s first sustainably crafted music festival in Bangalore, for bringing with it a pop-up Museum of Rare Indian Instruments. These will be mainly of a folk and classical nature, with the intention to encourage the museum culture in our country.
Replacing brick with bamboo
The first significant feature is the structure of the museum itself. It has been inspired by the Angklung, an Indonesian instrument made out of bamboo tubes attached to a bamboo frame. In a press note, Echoes of Earth revealed that the museum layout has a central stage with a circumferential display corridor. “The concentric walls of the corridor are made of alternating curved panels of, bamboo screens in the form of the Angklung, and bamboo frames with a patchwork of recycled old chattais. The instruments are displayed in the niches created by the staggered placement of the two different panels, forming segments of the circular periphery. Each screen is made in the image of the actual instrument, which visitors can play and experience the notes.” Indeed - the whole structure essentially functions as a music instrument!

A tribe’s touch 
The instruments that will be displayed have been created by tribes across India. We have listed instruments from two of the many tribes being represented at the pop up Museum. The Warli Tribe is a tribe from the Dadar and Nagar Haveli Union Territory. An instrument indigenous to this tribe is the Tarpa, a wind instrument believed to have been gifted to them by Narandeva, as reported on The Alternative. The instrument is made of honey bee wax, palm leaves, bamboo and water gourd, a local vegetable. Echoes of Earth will be bringing down Tarpa players with a keen interest in demonstrating how the instrument is made. Representing the north eastern tribes, you can expect to find instruments from the Karbi tribe, hailing from Assam. Their most famous instrument, according to Muse India, is the Cheng drum. “Made from the trunk of ‘phang’ (gomari wood), it is hollow inside with the mouth covered with hide. The drum is struck with a piece of cane, ‘Cheng-be’, to make the sound. Now used in all the cultural activities, the Cheng was used earlier exclusively during the Chomangkan, a ceremony in honour of the dead. Generally, it is the ‘Dui Hudi’ or the master drummer who plays the cheng.” Other instruments from this tribe that you can expect to find are Karbi flute, Serja, Dholdeng, and Murik.

An interactive Museum of Rare Instruments seems like the perfect addition to a music festival that already celebrates sustainabilty and the outdoors. Make sure to catch all the live gigs, and the interactive sessions and workshops throughout the festival. For complete information on the sustainability aspect of this festival, read our article here.

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Feature Image Courtesy Bijit Dutta

Words: Tansha Vohra