Tabla Tuning on the Workshop Stage: Toward a Materialist Musical Ethnography

Focusing on the climactic moment when a customer comes to the shop to collect his or her drum, this article describes the fine-tuning of tabla in great detail. In the process, the paper addresses the dexterous manual gestures and acts of diagnostic audition performed by tabla makers, relationships between players and makers, as well as the interconnection between material and interpersonal constraints that influence fine-tuning. This musical ethnography of tabla tuning is grounded in a methodology based on new materialist scholarship such as object-oriented ontology and actor network theory. It advocates for greater acknowledgement of the ways in which instruments influence musical practices as well as the musical contributions of instrument makers, and it demonstrates the practical application of materialist scholarship to the study of musical practices.