Drumming
Created | Updated Oct 20, 2010
A marvelous way to get away with beating the hell out of something that can't fight back, this activity is, besides being a thoroughly successful venting exercise, a way to touch, through music, the primal bits of your spectators. Music is the language of life, and rhythm is at the heart of music; even the absence of rhythm is a pointed aural statement.
Everything is a rhythm: the seasons, the tides, the traffic outside your window, your moods, your routines, your metabolism, your heartbeat. A powerful, emotive drummer can change everyone's heartbeat in the room. You can lift people up, enlighten their moods.
The drum, along with all music, is taken much more seriously in other cultures than in our commodity-driven western societies. African natives make drums out of the bark of trees under which their relatives are buried, because they believe that beating those drums enables them to communicate with the departed. This is only one example of how seriously nature-bound peoples hold the essence-of-humanity activity of drumming.
Of course, we don't get the chicks like guitar players do.
-- Chris Federico, Field Researcher
Everything is a rhythm: the seasons, the tides, the traffic outside your window, your moods, your routines, your metabolism, your heartbeat. A powerful, emotive drummer can change everyone's heartbeat in the room. You can lift people up, enlighten their moods.
The drum, along with all music, is taken much more seriously in other cultures than in our commodity-driven western societies. African natives make drums out of the bark of trees under which their relatives are buried, because they believe that beating those drums enables them to communicate with the departed. This is only one example of how seriously nature-bound peoples hold the essence-of-humanity activity of drumming.
Of course, we don't get the chicks like guitar players do.
-- Chris Federico, Field Researcher
