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Instruments

Tupan, Tapan, Davul, Daouli

Classification: Membranophone - drum

Description:

The two-headed drum is one of the oldest, most characteristic Balkan instruments. It has many names—from tupan (Bulgarian) or tapan (Macedonian, Kosova Albanian), to the Turkish davul or daul and the related words in Greek (daouli) and Albanian (daulle), to the south Serbian goč. Even more varied are the drum’s many playing styles, from the highly punctuated and textured phrases sharing the musical foreground in the traditional zurla/zourna ensemble to the continuous vamp providing rapid-fire drive behind today’s brass and fusion ensembles.

Like drums around the world, the tapan creates a contrast of high and low tones. Traditionally, strings stretch skins over each end of a shallow broad cylinder made of hardwood (often walnut). Heads, usually made of goat skins, are specially cured to allow for stretching and shaving to different thicknesses to provide different tones: the bass head is thicker and played with a beater; the lighter and thinner head is hit with a switch to produce a treble tone. In general, the beater plays the main beats of the dance rhythm, while the switch plays fills, syncopations, and accent beats.

Nowadays, outside of folklore ensembles, most working tapan/daouli players use plastic-headed drums with mechanical mounts. Why? Reliability, weather resistance, ease of repair, and sufficient tension to allow the extremely fast and precise playing called for in current styles.

Along these lines, a friend in Florina, Greece, tells of a high place on the road to Kastoria known as Daouli. In earlier centuries the road was too narrow to allow traffic both directions in snowy weather. A drummer stationed at each end would beat his drum to warn oncoming traffic that a caravan had passed through.

But mostly, whether playing with gajda, zurla/zurna, lyra, accordion and clarinet, or brass, tapan/daouli provides another kind of public utility: the beat that moves Balkan feet.

Jerry Kisslinger, 2011

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