Monday was a full school day without the distractions of national holidays or visits out for our students. Over the previous week we had started to work on the projects but with the presentation to the director and governors on friday Dan and I were beginning to try and instil a sense of urgency into our students, that each group needed to produce, not just a display board, but a drama, a song and a poem. Everything needed to be learned by the students and school children using the entire group with all the new skills that we might have taught them. For some of the groups who are seeking to incorporate technology into a song, or ethics into a poem this is proving quite a challenge and urgency is not something that our students seem to grasp. A whole day of work certainly progressed the projects and with a little help from Dan and I where there were gaps all the groups were heading in the right direction. At lunchtime he and I performed a lunchtime concert of traditional English folk music, Greensleeves which I sang, Close to the wind which song that Fairport Convention perform about the transportation of people to Australia, and Dan played a Scottish folksong. Sadly despite cameras being out almost all the time, including illicit photos of places were they weren’t supposed to be used, no one got any photographic or video evidence of our performance.

The Tabla Guru came again after school lessons and this time taught us another rhythm which was designed to strengthen the use our our left hand. Once more he gave us so much time which was a real honour and this time he even checked my annotation of the words and signed it as correct. Being told i had got it right made me feel like a school child who gets a gold star on their homework - it didn’t happen much when I was young so it was always quite a special experience.

I didn’t join in later in the evening but the children spend time after their Tabla lessons practicing the verbal version of what they have been taught. Each Tabla rhythm has a verbal rhyme that the guru teaches before he lets them touch the drums. Each beat is called a matra and it is made up of two bol’s. There are verbal sounds which correspond to each place that the drum is to be hit. ‘Te-re’ is an example of a matra and there are 16 matra’s in one Abutan.
te-re ke-te ta-ko ta-ko
ta-ko te-re ke-te ta-ko
ta-ko ta-ko ta-ko ta-ko
te-re ke-te ta-ko ta-ko
This is an example of one abutan, this what the children learn and practice before they place their hands on the drum.
Ko