Part of Carnatic Classical
Carnatic instrumental music is South Indian classical music played on veena, violin, flute and mridangam. Instrumentalists play the same songs as singers, in a singing style.
Historical Timeline
Jaw harps are played across most of Eurasia and South and South-East Asia. The Grinnell College collection reports etymological evidence that the instrument reached the subcontinent from the north-west. Citing Curt Sachs, it places India at the boundary between West Asian and East Asian types of jaw harp, and it links the morsing's form and musical context to West Asian traditions. The Victoria and Albert Museum holds iron jaw harps in its Indian collections: one catalogued as from Avadh, and a mochanga presented in 1890 by Sourindro Mohun Tagore. None carries a date of making.
Sruti magazine traces one lineage in detail. L. Bhimachar (1931 to 2024), of Bangalore, honed his morsing by listening to the All India Radio (AIR) artists Madras R. V. Pakkirisamy and Pudukkottai Mahadevan. He developed his own bani, a style or school of playing, that stresses the percussion syllables suited to the morsing, where most players voiced the mridangam syllables with force. His children B. Rajashekar and Bhagyalakshmi M. Krishna are senior morsing artists, and in 2009 Rajashekar became the first morsing player from Karnataka given an A grade by AIR.
Early bone jaw harps in China
The jaw harp family is at least 4,000 years old. In 2018 archaeologists announced more than 20 bone jaw harps of that age from Shimao in Shaanxi, which Xinhua reported as the earliest string instruments found in China.
Enters Carnatic concerts
Sruti magazine gives the early 1900s as a possible date for the morsing's entry into Carnatic concerts. There it came to keep the tala, the rhythmic cycle, alongside the mridangam and the other percussion.
L. Bhimachar and All India Radio
L. Bhimachar of Bangalore takes up the morsing in the early 1940s, after studying vocal music and mridangam. In 1979 AIR Bangalore opens a post for a morsing artist and appoints him as its first.
Morching Tarang and national award
The Bhimachar family takes its Morching Tarang to a jaw harp festival in Amsterdam in 2006. A.S. Krishnan, a top-grade AIR Chennai artist, receives the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award for 2024 for Carnatic instrumental music on the morsing.
Playing Techniques
Mouth and Breath
The player's mouth and breath decide which parts of the morsing's sound are heard. The plucked tongue gives one fundamental pitch plus a series of harmonics, higher tones above it. Shaped as if forming different vowels, the mouth becomes a resonator that reinforces one harmonic at a time. Breathing out while playing, Grinnell notes, adds a wind-instrument quality.
Tongue and Tuning
The morsing has a horseshoe-shaped frame with two straight arms. A metal tongue, or lamella, is fixed to the rounded end and runs between the arms. Its free end bends up to form the trigger that the player strikes. Players choose a morsing matching the soloist's sruti, the reference pitch; Sruti magazine notes that the instrument can be tuned to slightly different pitches.
Pitch and Melody
A single morsing keeps a fixed fundamental pitch, according to Grinnell; mouth and tongue change its overtones and timbre. To use the morsing as a melodic instrument, L. Bhimachar's children created the Morching Tarang, a piece for several morsings, each tuned to a different note of one raga (melodic framework). They played it for 30 minutes at the Fifth International Jew's Harp Festival in Amsterdam in July 2006.
Journey to Mastery
Follow this structured journey to master this discipline
Grip and Plucking
Breath and mouth shaping
Mridangam syllables and tala
Shadowing the Mridangam
Tani Avartanam
Past Performances
Featured Artists
Renowned performers of this discipline