{"id":163,"date":"2017-09-19T05:03:40","date_gmt":"2017-09-19T05:03:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gcornish.digitalscholar.rochester.edu\/MHS123_Fall2017\/?p=163"},"modified":"2017-09-26T11:45:46","modified_gmt":"2017-09-26T11:45:46","slug":"technology-of-percussion-gesture-and-the-drum","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gcornish.digitalscholar.rochester.edu\/MHS123_Fall2017\/assignments\/everyday-technologies\/technology-of-percussion-gesture-and-the-drum\/","title":{"rendered":"Technology of Percussion: Gesture and the drum"},"content":{"rendered":"

Drums and percussion instruments were some of the earliest forms of music. They were used as a way to communicate many different things. They have been used throughout time in militaries as a way to pace troops and intimidate their enemies, \u00a0used as part of religious ceremonies, and even some animals use drumming for mating<\/a>. There are two main ways that I believe that have led to the progression of to what percussion is today: the technology of the drum itself, and the reason behind the act of drumming (which I am referring to as the technology of the gesture).<\/p>\n

There are many different forms of gestures, a gesture of love, war, musical gesture, and I think that gestures have largely shaped the aspects of \u00a0percussion today. This is due to the fact that percussion is such a physical instrument compared to others. In a lot of contemporary works, body percussion has been used quite often in making good effect of a gesture. In the piece “?Corporel<\/a>” by Vinko Globokar , The drum is actually removed entirely, and the piece is based off of gestures that depict a very dark story, and I think that this is a great example of what a gesture can represent: a motion that can communicate a certain emotion\/thought\/or action without words. “Corporel seems, on one level, to dehumanize the performer by transforming him into an instrument and stripping away the veneer of civilization \u2013 or at least it seems to make him regress into a sort of primal unconscious. At the same time, his gestures, percussive and vocal, generate an oddly compelling sense of authentic expression, one not filtered through convention.”<\/a>\u00a0Taking this piece, along with the video of the birds drumming for a mate, it draws attention that, even without some form of societal conditioning, \u00a0gestures are one of the more effective forms of communication. Gestures, although seemingly complex, haven’t themselves changed at all, although ways for using them has. As society and music started to evolve, and music\/instruments began to do so as well, leading to developments of an aesthetic alongside music, the idea of virtuosity.<\/p>\n

Physical gestures that relate to a musical gesture, as a performer, also allow us to help further along the understanding of a piece as well (example<\/a>). In an intense atonal piece like this, using physical gestures really make the audience able to connect to the piece on a first listening, and I believe that this idea comes from dance. In dance, using physical gestures are used alone to show a story. As music becomes more intellectual, and some pieces (like the Mantovani) that wouldn’t be immediately understood, combining the music to gestures that were inherited by dancers (although not exactly a dance) is allowing percussionists to further explore new ways of performing. A middle ground between dance and the marimba piece would be this<\/a>; this clearly has aspects of dance and percussion that are both using gestures to portray a narrative of playing with a ball.<\/p>\n

A much smaller scale of using gestures in percussion, (and skipping past the years and years of societal evolutions that led to this) is the development of the\u00a0moeller<\/a> stroke. This stroke allows the percussionist to add a gesture of fluidity and efficiency to their playing, which is slowly becoming integrated into the lives of most percussionists.<\/p>\n

Without even getting into the technology of the drum itself and how that has changed since we developed from animals hitting drums from war or mates, the technology of the gesture, although it is still being used for a lot of the same reasons, has developed to a level of nuance through the progression of different art forms that has greatly impacted the percussion world and will continue to do so.<\/p>\n

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Drums and percussion instruments were some of the earliest forms of music. They were used as a way to communicate many different things. They have been used throughout time in militaries as a way to pace troops and intimidate their enemies, \u00a0used as part of religious ceremonies, and even some animals use drumming for mating. … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Technology of Percussion: Gesture and the drum”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"image","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[109,6,110,108],"class_list":["post-163","post","type-post","status-publish","format-image","hentry","category-everyday-technologies","tag-gesture","tag-music","tag-nature","tag-percussion","post_format-post-format-image"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gcornish.digitalscholar.rochester.edu\/MHS123_Fall2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/163","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gcornish.digitalscholar.rochester.edu\/MHS123_Fall2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gcornish.digitalscholar.rochester.edu\/MHS123_Fall2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gcornish.digitalscholar.rochester.edu\/MHS123_Fall2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gcornish.digitalscholar.rochester.edu\/MHS123_Fall2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=163"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/gcornish.digitalscholar.rochester.edu\/MHS123_Fall2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/163\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":185,"href":"https:\/\/gcornish.digitalscholar.rochester.edu\/MHS123_Fall2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/163\/revisions\/185"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gcornish.digitalscholar.rochester.edu\/MHS123_Fall2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=163"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gcornish.digitalscholar.rochester.edu\/MHS123_Fall2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=163"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gcornish.digitalscholar.rochester.edu\/MHS123_Fall2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=163"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}