Stationery music

A unique competition that taps into every student’s fascination with beating desks and canteen tables.

There’s music in all things, if men had ears,” Lord Byron had said. You had to be there at the British Council auditorium on Friday evening to realise how right he was.

It was the finals of Red Bull Tum Tum Pa, a competition developed by the energy drink brand to connect with its core consumers, the youth. The event involved four-member bands of college and university students vying to make music with stationery items such as pens and pencils, books, files, bags, paper, pins, rulers, scissors, staplers, rubber-bands, punching machines and so on, with which they had to play an original composition, and a cover, a version of a popular hit. Participants could use almost anything; but there were two riders — they had to use a Red Bull can and they couldn’t sing.

 

That pretty much laid the field wide open for improvisations. So someone scratched a file with a scale, while another used a box of pins as the rattle; the flap of paper signalled the end of one composition, while for another team it was the loud screech of a sellotape being pulled. Then there was a lot of beating on the desk — something all of us did as students — with beating on books, pencil boxes and such stuff for variation.

With innovation an important criterion for marks, teams came up with all sorts of novel musical instruments. The Chennai team, which won the competition, used drafter’s boxes, those long plastic cylinders in which architects and engineers store their drawings. “It’s like a bongo,” says Balasubraniam, sliding the cylinder to show how the sound differed according to length. The Delhi team, comprising architecture students of Indraprastha University, improvised a guitar using a hollow box on one side of which they had carved a circle for better acoustics, an eraser as a fret and three rubber-bands strung on it for strings. “This belongs to my father, who’s also an architect,” says Delhi’s Reet Mukherjee, beating a staccato rhythm on a hand-held mini-printer.

Reet and his teammate, Sahej, play for a band called Urban Soundscapes, as do many others in other teams. They are part of the thriving music scene in most urban colleges today, with numerous bands playing a range of music from country to folk, rock, hip hop, metal and fusion. Antony Antony of the Bangalore team, a second-year BCom student from Christ University, is a beat-boxer. “Of course, we aren’t allowed to use any sounds coming from our mouth,” he says, taking a breather from practising Michael Jackson’s “They Don’t Care About Us”.

It takes some amount of training or experience in music to be able to turn out a stage-worthy performance with unconventional implements. Chennai, especially, had all musicians who played professionally — Bala was a member of SP Balasubramaniam’s Shruthilaya Orchestra and had toured abroad with him, as has Praveen Kumar, who has been learning the mridangam since he was five years old from Guruvayoor Durai, the well-known guru.

It’s the first year Tum Tum Pa is being held in India, informs a Red Bull spokesperson, and even globally the event is only a couple of years old. The qualifiers for Tum Tum Pa were held earlier this year in colleges in eight Indian cities, of which five teams from Delhi, Mumbai, Pune, Hyderabad and Chennai made it to the finals. As for the prize, the Chennai team will soon be travelling to Rio de Janeiro for the world finals, where they will be beating the desks against winners from other national championships.