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There is something elemental and powerful about percussion. Since time immemorial people believed that the sound of a gong, a drum or a rattle could scare away evil spirits and attract good fortune. Along with the voice, it is one of the earliest and, at one level, one of the simplest ways of music making: beating a stick against a drum, tapping a foot, or clapping hands. There is rhythm, to varying degrees, within all of us.
Playing percussion can be intensely physical, with the hands acting directly on to the instrument (on the congas, say), or with the sticks or beaters becoming extensions of the body. But percussion is not just about making a noise and hitting things. At its finest there is a beauty of precision and a visual excitement that can take your breath away: the castanet work of a flamenco dancer, a vibes player skipping over the metal bars, a rock drummer thundering round his battery of tom-toms and cymbals, an orchestral percussionist ‘pealing’ the tubular bells.
There are two main types of percussion instrument:
• Indefinite pitch: where no specific note is produced, e.g. tambourine, maracas, triangle.
• Definite pitch: where the instrument is tuned to specific notes, e.g. xylophone, timpani, steel drums.
Sometimes a basic groove can come from a percussion instrument as ordinary as a milk bottle hit with a screwdriver (on Bob Marley’s ‘Jamming’); at the other end of the scale the composer Edgard Varèse created a work called Ionisation in 1931 that calls for no fewer than 13 performers, each playing an array of multiple percussion.
The dominant feature of every military band is its big bass drum. Throughout the history of percussion instruments, this drum has been the mainstay of time-keeping, whether it is used for a marching army or in a late-twentieth century heavy metal band.
Early versions of the bass drum (it was certainly known in Asia around 3500 BC) were often gigantic constructions, although the world’s largest bass drum record is claimed by one with a diameter of over 3 metres: built for Disneyland by Remo of Hollywood. Both sides of the drum have heads, so the marching player can strike the heads with felt-covered drumsticks with alternate hands. The resulting boom has great power, but the drum is not really suited to rapid notes or drumrolls.
In an orchestra, the bass drum is usually held in a tilting position on a stand that can be adjusted for a better angle of attack. A smaller bass drum struck by a foot pedal is a staple of the drum kit (ideal as an advertisement hoarding, like Ringo Starr’s Ludwig bass drum for The Beatles). In the late 1960s and early 1970s there was a vogue for using a double bass drum kit inspired by Cream’s Ginger Baker.
Repertoire
Outside military bands, Berlioz notably used the bass drum in his 1827 overture Les Francs Juges. A century and a half later the bass drum was providing a heartstopping, chest-heaving beat on dance tracks like New Order’s ‘Blue Monday’ and Roxy Music’s ‘Dance Away’.
Related Instruments
The kendang, central to Indonesian gamelan music, is also a double-headed drum but with a much wider barrel-shaped body. The odaiko, also double-headed, is used in Japanese theatrical music.
Castanets are closely associated with the musical and dance traditions of Spain, but they are by no means unique to the Iberian peninsula. Clappers were played as far back as Sumerian times, and the Egyptians fashioned wood, bone and ivory into forearms and hands that worked like castanets.
Castanets are disc-shaped pieces of wood hollowed out on one side with a loop of cord holding each pair together. Although the word castanet derives from castaña, the Spanish for ‘chestnut’, they are most frequently made from other woods, including walnut and ebony.
In performance, the loop is placed round the thumb or middle finger, so the two halves can be snapped together by the palm and fingers.
Flamenco dance virtuosos like Antonio Gades and Cristina Hoyos have the ability to manipulate the castanets with spellbinding speed and breathtaking dexterity to complement the rhythm of their footwork. In the orchestra, for ease of use, the castanets are mounted on the end of a stick and held apart by elastic.
Repertoire
Castanets can be heard to good effect in Maurice Ravel’s Alborada del Gracioso and Manuel de Falla’s The Three-Cornered Hat, as well as William Walton’s gentle pastiches ‘Tango-Pasodoblé’ and ‘Noche Espagnole’ from Façade.
Related Instruments
Other wood-on-wood instruments include the claves, two wooden sticks some 20 cm long, much used in Cuban music (especially the rumba) and the wood block, an oblong rectangle with a resonating slit hit by a drumstick to produce a penetrating click, favoured by Dixieland and ragtime bands.
The rhythm sections of Latin American bands are enhanced by a range of propulsive percussion instruments, of which the largest are the congas, the single-headed drums that found their way from Africa to Cuba and beyond.
The congas also known as tumba drums have an upright barrel shape: the body of the drum is made of hard wood or fibreglass, open at the bottom and supported by four legs. A vellum or calfskin head is held tight on to the body below the actual level of the drumhead, giving the player unencumbered access to all parts of the head. As with the tabla, the skill lies in using all parts of the hand, including the flat palm and the fingertips.
Generally used in pairs with different pitches, the congas are frequently complemented in Latin American line-ups by:
• Timbales: a pair of high-pitched metal-shelled drums, played with sticks and mounted on a stand with a cowbell.
• Bongos: two small bucket-shaped wooden drums, joined by a metal bar and played with the thumb and fingers.
Repertoire
The contrast and interplay between the congas and the timbales is evident on Santana’s ‘Se A Cabo’, and ‘Oye Como Va’ (a number by timbale virtuoso Tito Puente). Little Feat’s conga player Sam Clayton appeared on ‘Spanish Moon’, while Haircut 100 featured the congas on ‘Favourite Shirts’.
Related Instruments
Other single-headed drums include the tom-tom, a native American Indian drum, and the atumpan, a traditional Ghanaian drum, which is a kind of hybrid between the bongos and the congas.
We know that the clashing of ‘loud’ and ‘well-tuned’ cymbals were familiar to the writers of the Psalms, but their origins are unclear: certainly they were first used in the East, possibly in Assyria or Turkey, from where they reached the orchestras of Western Europe during the eighteenth century.
Cymbals are concave plates of brass or bronze, held at the centre either by leather handles or a pole so that the edges of the metal can vibrate. Their manufacture remains a craft full of closely guarded secrets and tradition: the present-day Zildjian cymbal company is descended from a long line of Turkish cymbal-makers.
There are now hundreds of varieties to select from, particularly for use on a drum kit, including:
• The crash: a bright cymbal with a fast crescendo.
• The sizzle: with half a dozen rivets set loosely in the cymbal.
• The ride: a ringing cymbal for driving the rhythm along.
• The hi-hat: two smaller cymbals clashed together by pedal action.
For alternative effects the cymbals can be played with drum sticks, timpani sticks or wire brushes or even recorded backwards, as The Beatles did on ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’.
Repertoire
The climaxes of many of Gustav Mahler’s symphonies use to splendid effect the power of the clashing cymbal, especially his Fifth. Led Zeppelin drummer John Bonham laid down a sheet of sound on tracks like ‘Rock and Roll’; compare the skittering cymbal play of jazz drummer Jon Christensen on Keith Jarrett’s ‘Questar’ or the funky hi-hat technique of Isaac Hayes’ ‘The Theme from Shaft’.
Related Instruments
Antique cymbals also known as finger cymbals or crotales are only a few centimetres in diameter: they provide the only percussion in Claude Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune.
The drum kit is so much a part of contemporary music that it’s easy to forget it’s a relatively recent invention, even though the separate elements that make it up often date to antiquity. In the 1900s, a need emerged for a way of playing various percussion instruments, ideally while sitting down; this need was driven in the main, though not exclusively, by jazz drummers.
The resulting set-up was originally known as ‘traps’ (short for contraption a term still used by some players) and was common by the 1920s in Dixieland and dance bands. By the 1950s the basic combination of instruments and implements had stabilised:
• Bass drum (smaller than in military bands), struck by a floor-pedal beater.
• Snare drum.
• Different sized tom-toms and cymbals mounted either on the drum or a floor stand.
• Hi-hat cymbal (two cymbals clashed together by a foot pedal).
Drummers can explore endless variations: double bass drums (Billy Cobham once used three!), additional instruments like wood blocks, as well as a customised mix of drum heads, cymbal shapes or stick weights, so each drummer creates a blend of sounds that becomes his or her personal signature.
Repertoire
Billy Cobham’s dynamic style can be heard on Miles Davis’s Live-Evil; compare this with the laid-back reggae groove of Carlton Barrett on Bob Marley’s ‘No Woman, No Cry’ or Buddy Rich’s swing on ‘Jumpin’ at the Woodside’. A classic rock solo by John Bonham is captured on the Led Zeppelin live movie The Song Remains the Same.
Related Instruments
The street busker’s one-man band is a wearable drum kit, with foot- or arm-operated bass drum and cymbals, though usually in combination with other instruments such as a trombone.
Drum Machine see OTHER INSTRUMENTS, ODDITIES & INVENTIONS
The gong has played an important role in the theatre and in religious ceremonies particularly in the Far East and Central Asia, where it is believed to have originated; in Malaysia gongs were long considered a valuable part of any dowry.
Essentially a large round dish of metal with an upturned edge, often with a raised boss at its centre, the gong is hit with a padded drumstick or beater, the heavier the better to build its crescendo of sound. In the classical orchestra, the instrument about 100 cm in diameter, with a hammered surface and suspended from a frame is technically called the ‘tam-tam’ (not to be confused with the tom-tom, see p. 17).
Gongs feature large in the gamelan music of Indonesia; more recently new-age practitioners of ‘gong therapy’ have used them. Twentieth-century composers also sought to expand its sound range by instructing the percussionist to play the gong with a violin bow (Kryzstof Penderecki) or lower it into water (John Cage).
Repertoire
The orchestral gong can convey a sombre mood, as in François Joseph Gossec’s 1791 Funeral Music for Mirabeau, or tragic passion, in Giacomo Puccini’s Turandot. Carl Orff and Olivier Messaien used its power in Carmina Burana and Turangalia-symphonie respectively. In rock music, Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters played a gong during live performances of ‘Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun’, while Queen’s Roger Taylor rounded off ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ with a climactic gong crash.
Related Instruments
Gong chimes the bonang barung form part of the gamelan orchestra, usually lying horizontally in pairs within a wooden frame.
The hustling shaking sound of the maracas is an essential part of Cuban music forms such as the rumba and mambo, although rattles go back to the Egyptians and beyond, in fact predating the drum. Many civilisations have believed that the sound of a rattle can ward off evil spirits or win over benevolent deities.
The sound of the maracas is multi-textured, but the technology is straightforward: a pair of round or egg-shaped containers, made from gourds, wood or plastic, mounted on the end of sticks and filled with anything from beans or pebbles to buttons or lead shot to provide the necessary sizzle. Various techniques are available, including twirling both maracas to create a kind of drumroll, banging one maraca into an open hand, or flicking the shot into the top side of the maracas before letting it fall back to the bottom for a double shuffle.
Bo Diddley’s right-hand man, maracas player Jerome Green, was an essential component of the distinctively syncopated sound of Diddley’s singles in the 1950s. Mick Jagger was a fan of both men and was rarely without his maracas during early Rolling Stones performances.
Repertoire
Cuban maracas maestro Alberto Valdés stands out on the Buena Vista Social Club’s ‘De Camino A La Vereda’; Jerome Green features on Bo Diddley’s ‘I’m A Man’ and ‘Bo Diddley’. In the Jeremiah Symphony Leonard Bernstein has a single maraca used like a stick to strike a drum.
Related Instruments
Other shaken instruments include the cabaça, a round gourd with the beads in a network on the outside, and the chocallo, a metal tube filled with lead shot or peas.
The insistent rhythm of the snare drum has accompanied war, work and play since antiquity. The Romans marched to its beat, Elizabethan revellers danced to the pipe and tabor and in the days before field telephones, military messages were transmitted via drum calls. In the twentieth century the snare (or side) drum became an essential part of the standard drum kit, and provided the off-beat drive of rock‘n’roll.
In its simplest form the snare drum is a small, cylindrical drum covered with parchment. What gives the drum its distinctive sound is the snare: a strip of metal wires, nylon or gut stretched across the bottom of the drum. When the drummer strikes the top skin, the snare vibrates and the high-pitched rattle is able to slice through the loudest of bands and the fiercest of battles.
The military snare drum is hung over the drummer’s shoulder, with the drumhead at an angle for ease of access; rolls, flams and paradiddles support the brass or bagpipes. In jazz and rock the rim shot, a smart crack with the stick simultaneously hitting the metal rim and the drumhead, is a frequent device.
Repertoire
A quintessential drum roll usually starts ‘God Save the Queen’; the constant pattern throughout Ravel’s Boléro is the basis of the music’s hypnotic quality. Ace session drummer Steve Gadd studied military drumming: it shows on Paul Simon’s ‘Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover’. The Police’s Stewart Copeland often used rim shots (with extra echo) on tracks like ‘Walking on the Moon’.
Related Instruments
The tenor drum is a deeper drum with no snares: Hector Berlioz used six in his Te Deum. Elizabethan drummers often played the long, narrow tabor and a simple pipe at the same time, with the pipe in one hand and the beater in the other.
The steel drum or steelpan is a relatively recent addition to the ranks of percussion instruments. It was first created in Trinidad in the 1930s and 40s, when a plentiful supply of 45-gallon oil drums was available; and it was found that they could be sliced in half, turned upside down and tuned.
Creating a finished steel drum involves cutting the pans to size, sinking down the main pan with a sledge-hammer, defining the areas for up to 30 different notes with compass, chalk, hammer and punch, and then hammering each note back up to form a low dome. Each note is carefully tuned usually by ear. Finally the drum is tempered and painted, or electroplated, ready for players to use sticks with rubber tips.
A complete range of drums form families, either called after choir voices (treble, alto, bass) or traditional instruments (guitar, cello) supported by a rhythm section. The steel orchestra, particularly in the major West Indian carnivals, can require anywhere up to 100 performers, producing a significantly uplifting volume of sound.
Repertoire
Authentic steelband music from Trinidad and Tobago is provided by ‘Calypso Music’ by the Samaroo Jets; the rapso style mixing steelband, calypso and social conscience is typified by Brother Resistance’s ‘Cyar Take Dat’. Crossover appearances include 10cc’s cod-Caribbean ‘Dreadlock Holiday’.
Related Instruments
There are no true relatives of the steel drum, but the performers from the theatre/dance group Stomp have discovered the rhythmic possibilities of dustbins, among many other domestic objects.
It is said that the tabla the double drums that have been a primary instrument in the classical music of northern India, Bangladesh and Pakistan since the end of the eighteenth century have the power to talk at the hands of a skilled player. Certainly many people consider that the tabla represents the pinnacle of percussive ability.
The tabla consists of two individual drums, each with its own character. The lower is the bayan or bhaya usually positioned to the musician’s left (the word bayan in fact means ‘left’), which has a copper shell, somewhat like a kettledrum, and a double-skinned head attached to the drum body by laces. The distinctive off-centre black spot, a patch made from a concoction using flour, iron filings, tamarind juice and other secret ingredients, lies under the fingertips. The smaller drum, the tabla, has a wooden body; its black patch is in the middle of the head.
The two drums lie on cushions, and players, sitting cross-legged, with the drums between their knees, use all parts of the hand the heel, fingertips, knuckles and nails to bring out all the expressive quality of the drums.
Repertoire
Tabla master Alla Rakha and his son Zakir Hussain, a founder of Shakti with John McLaughlin, play a rare tabla duet in ‘Dhamar’. Talvin Singh merged tabla and drum‘n’bass to produce a unique fusion on ‘OK’. The Beatles, following their Eastern odysseys, realised the potential of tabla on ‘Within You Without You’, capturing all its texture and subtlety.
Related Instruments
The kalangu is a small talking drum that features in the Hausa music of northern Nigeria.
The tambourine is one of the oldest but one of the most underrated of all instruments. The version used today has changed little from that used thousands of years ago by the ancient Greeks (which they called the ‘timpnon’). Egyptian friezes show tambourines in the hands of women celebrating sacred ceremonies.
Although its construction is simple a shallow, round wooden frame or hoop, sometimes with a single, taut, parchment head, and circular metal discs set in pairs into the hoop the tambourine’s bright, fluttering jingle can lift a piece of music on its own. The player can shake the tambourine for a constant, rhythmic pulse, use the finger pads to provide a sharp tap, or strike the tambourine on to a knee, leg or open hand; the thumb trill involves moistening the thumb and running it round the edge of the tambourine.
The tambourine has proved particularly versatile throughout its life: as appropriate to the religious rites of antiquity as it is in folk dancing (particularly in Spain), marching band, who borrowed the instrument from Turkish military music, in rock and pop line-ups, and through generations of Salvation Army bands.
Repertoire
Manolo Badrenas’s tambourine provides the essential groove of Weather Report’s fusion classic ‘Birdland’; Freda Payne’s ‘Band of Gold’ also has a sparkling tambourine track. In Igor Stravinsky’s ballet Petrushka, the death of the heroine is marked by dropping the tambourine on to the floor, while Debussy’s Ibéria contains a lengthy, controlled pianissimo trill.
Related Instruments
The traditional Irish bodhrán is a frame drum, but significantly larger than a tambourine, with no jingles, and played with a wooden beater.
The shape of their copper cauldrons suggests the term ‘kettledrums’; the Italian name ‘timpani’, referring to the drumhead, is from the word for a membrane of the ear. Bowl-shaped drums appear in Babylonian drawings, but they first entered Western consciousness when Crusaders brought back examples mounted on horses, camels or carriages.
The essence of the timpani is the fact they can be tuned. Originally this was achieved with difficulty by a network of laces, before the introduction of tension screws set round the collar. The problem was that each drum could only play one note at one time, limiting the range or demanding serried ranks of drums. Various people (including Leonardo da Vinci and Adolphe Sax) tried inventing systems, but only the arrival of pedal tuning in the 1880s finally solved the problem. Now pedals change tunings in a second or two and allow a glissando effect where the note is deliberately allowed to slide up or down.
Their great dynamism and colour, and an ability to create special effects storms, gunfire in Sergey Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf, a beating heart in Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet has made timpani central to the percussion section.
Repertoire
The pounding timpani in Richard Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra reached a wide audience through the soundtrack of 2001: A Space Odyssey; they also provide the malignant dramatic bite in the Uranus movement of Gustav Holst’s The Planets. Fewer are probably aware of their use in Earth, Wind and Fire’s ‘Boogie Wonderland’ or the trembling undercurrent in Debussy’s Nuages. The ultimate line-up is Berlioz’s requirement for 10 timpanists playing 16 drums in his Requiem.
Related Instruments
Naqqara are small kettledrums, with wooden, earthen or metal bodies, used throughout the Middle East and Asia.
The sound of a bell can carry for miles, celebrating weddings or warning of attack. Since the great foundry cast bells are weighed in tons, they are less than practical for concert use hence the invention of the tubular bells by John Hampton of Coventry in the 1880s.
The tubular bells (known in the US as ‘chimes’) are a portable, efficient way of reproducing the bell sound, although they can never reproduce the sheer power of a genuine belfry. The most common version uses 18 narrow tubes, of the same width but different lengths to produce an octave and a half of individual chromatic notes. They are hung on a frame, damped by a foot-operated pedal to stop the sound and struck by a wooden mallet or a drumstick at the top of the tube.
Other instruments that composers and arrangers can turn to for bell sounds include:
• Handbells, played by teams of ringers.
• Traditional sleigh bells.
• The cowbell, often mounted on top of a drum kit.
• The triangle, which although a single steel rod, has a clear ringing tone with the ability to cut through the largest of orchestras or bands.
Repertoire
Not surprisingly, this instrument provides the dénouement of Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells. Tchaikovsky used them to recreate the Kremlin bells in his 1812 Overture; a less predictable appearance is in Chic’s 1979 disco classic ‘I Want Your Love’. A triangle can be heard insistently throughout Ben E. King’s ‘Stand By Me’, while a cowbell provides the clangorous introduction to The Rolling Stones’ ‘Honky Tonk Women’.
Related Instruments
The bell tree also known as the Chinese pavilion or Turkish crescent was an ornate pole carrying rows of cup-shaped bells once used in marching bands.
The vibraphone, or vibes, took the metal of the glockenspiel to all intents and purposes a small xylophone with metal bars and added metal resonators underneath the bars, kept in motion by an electric motor to provide a quivering, breathy edge to the sound. Originally called the vibraharp, it was invented in the early twentieth century; dance and jazz bands were quick to pick up on its potential.
The glockenspiel (‘bell-play’ in German), struck with metal beaters, was a relatively simple instrument, and could be carried in marching bands mounted on a rod, when it was known as the bell-lyra. The vibraphone added luscious layers of sophistication: the speed of the vibrations could be varied and a sustain pedal controlled the length of the notes. Another incarnation is the tubaphone, which has metal tubes rather than bars, creating a softer sound.
The jazz world has produced the largest crop of virtuoso vibraphone players, most using a pair of mallets in each hand, allowing them to play chords.
Repertoire
The vibrant swing of Lionel Hampton, doyen of jazz vibraphonists, is at its most dazzling on ‘Love For Sale’, a duet with Oscar Peterson; the elegance of Milt Jackson is on display in the Modern Jazz Quartet’s ‘Django’, while Gary Burton provides lustre for k.d.lang’s ‘Constant Craving’. A glockenspiel doubles the bass line on Diana Ross’s ‘Ain’t No Mountain High Enough’ and adds sparkle to Debussy’s La Mer.
Related Instruments
The celesta was a version of the glockenspiel, with wooden resonators and a keyboard, invented in the 1880s it directly inspired Tchaikovsky to write ‘The Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy’ for The Nutcracker Suite.
A staple instrument in zydeco music (black American dance music, also featuring guitar and accordian) and the skiffle bands of the late 1950s, the washboard is one of the most widely used of the instruments that produce their sound by scraping. It is a form of rhythm-making that goes way back. It is also an example of inventive recycling for musical purposes, since the washboard was adapted directly from the domestic corrugated metal board once used in washing clothes.
The washboard as an instrument is based on the same principle as the guiro, a Latin American instrument that uses a stick scraped along the serrated notches carved into a wood block or gourd, except that the washboard creates its sound from the contact between metal and metal players place thimbles on the ends of their fingers to produce a harder-edged, more rasping sound than the gentler guiro.
Over the years musical washboards have become increasingly elaborate constructions, worn over the shoulder and round the player’s neck like an apron and involving Edward Scissorhands-style industrial gloves tipped with metal talons.
Repertoire
Washboard Sam (aka Robert Brown) played with Big Bill Broonzy in the 1940s ‘Play Your Vendor’ is a good example of his technique. On the film soundtrack of The Big Easy, Terrance Simien & The Mallet Playboys feature some upbeat washboard on ‘Oh Yeh Ya!’; the spirit of skiffle is exemplified on Lonnie Donegan’s ‘My Old Man’s a Dustman’. In The Rite of Spring, Stravinsky scores a part for the guiro (calling it the ‘râpe guero’).
Related Instruments
The ratchet (the football rattle of yesteryear) uses much the same principle as both the washboard and guiro, with its wooden cogs clicking round as the rattle is spun. Richard Strauss calls for one in Till Eulenspiegel.
The wood on wood sound of the xylophone (xylo from the Greek for ‘wood’), produces a dry, choppy sound that has its roots in much ethnic music: the gamelan orchestras of Indonesia use bamboo, African native instruments used wooden bars set in frames and before that simple logs.
The tuned wooden bars (ideally Honduras rosewood, although some are now synthetic) are the same overall size, but with different-sized recesses underneath to create the pitch of individual notes. Layout of the three to four octaves of notes is as the piano keyboard, with the ‘black’ notes raised from the ‘white’ notes. There is no sustain on a xylophone, so players compensate by relying on a tremolando or trill technique; a range of beaters can also brighten or mellow the notes.
The xylophone’s role as a concert instrument is primarily due to the Polish player Michael Josef Gusikov, who performed throughout Europe in the 1830s; the instrument enjoyed a vogue for the next 100 years, and was particularly popular during the early days of the gramophone and radio.
Repertoire
Camille Saint-Saëns used the xylophone to suggest the sounds of skeletons and fossils in Danse Macabre and Carnival of the Animals. Evelyn Glennie pays tribute to the golden age of the instrument in a bravura performance of a 1927 tune, ‘Gee Whizz!’, with the Black Dyke Mills Band. The xylophone also appears in Tom Jones’ version of ‘Delilah’.
Related Instruments
Originally from Africa, but also adopted by Latin American music, the marimba is very similar to the xylophone, but is larger (traditional marimbas are sometimes large enough to have four ‘marimberos’ playing one instrument at a time) and has resonators beneath the notes to help lengthen the sustain.