Hit Something, Make Music

ARCHAEOLOGISTS say that the oldest known musical instrument is the Divje Babe flute, fashioned from the femur of a cave bear and estimated to be around 50,000 years old. I don’t buy it.

What I’m willing to grant is that it’s probably the oldest surviving musical instrument. The oldest device used to produce musical sounds is more likely us.

Did we clap hands before we drilled bear bone? Did we slap our bodies as we danced around the evening fire? Heck, we still do. Great apes still do. Therefore percussion beats woodwinds.

Who made the first drum? Which people? Did it predate the Divje Babe? We may never know, because the materials used to fashion a drum deteriorate much faster than bone. We can say that drums are known from ancient China circa 5500BCE. The materials used then are still with us: animal hide or skin stretched over a resonating chamber usually fashioned of wood. Modern drums are made with modern materials, often metal and plastic. But any way you cut it, a drum is still a drum. From the huge Japanese otaiko to toys designed to put children in touch with their ancestral rhythms.

I once played taiko at a biker wedding. It was liberating. Taiko sticks are more like small logs than what you see used in typical band setups. Playing taiko is a workout in every sense of the word.

Every country has its own traditional drums, drumming styles and rhythms, from those that accompany Amerindian chants to more frenetic Polynesian log drumming, from solemn Tibetan thunks to brilliantly improvised jazz. Anywhere you find music you’ll find drumming — even hospitals, where research is finding that drumming has therapeutic value.

My parents tried to push me to take piano lessons (my mother played very well). Me? I wanted a drum set. Our house was not large and its garage not particularly isolated from the other rooms, so no junior Buddy Rich in our household. But I never lost my love for drums and drumming. I don’t think any of us does, even if the only contact you have with drumming is tapping a pair of chopsticks on the table at a Chinese restaurant while awaiting the arrival of your dim sum.

Which takes us away from drums for a moment and back to drummers.

There are many styles of drumming and kinds of drummers. I’ve already mentioned taiko and great apes, which brings me to the 2024 Olympics and Gojira. As the first metal band to ever perform at an Olympic opening ceremony, these homeboys from France carried national as well as musical responsibilities on their shoulders. The result was a striking three minutes of sight and sound on the Seine. Plenty of videos of the performance are available for viewing on YouTube and elsewhere. The video won a Grammy.

Mario ‘Super Mario’ Duplantier is the band’s drummer. His technique might be described as modulated physical insanity. I reveled in it. As a lover of classical music, I similarly admire the complete control with which straight-backed tuxedo-clad drummers handle all manner of drums, from snare to bass to a brace of timpani. So I do not distinguish effect-wise between the drums of Gojira’s performance of “Mea Culpa” and that which helps to propel the final movement of Hovhaness’s Mt. St. Helen’s Suite or the opening of Strauss’s tone poem Also Sprach Zarathustra, which, for those of you deprived of a taste for classical music, opens the film 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Want to hear something really metal? Listen to the drum ‘duel’ between two sets of timpani in Carl Nielsen’s fourth symphony. Two guys in black tie having at it.

I say two “guys” but that’s not always the case, even in classical music. Fleetwood Mac’s drummer Mick Fleetwood is 6’6” tall. Metal band Sabaton’s drummer Hannes van Dahl is about 6’3” (standing next to him, I had to guess). On the other hand, Haruna, the drummer for the superb Japanese all-female metal band Lovebites, is 4’9”. Her nickname is ‘little big engine.’ The Warning, a metal band from Monterrey, Mexico consisting of three sisters, features middle sister Paulina as the winner of multiple drummer-of-the-year awards. She stands a sneeze over 5’0”.

I mention all these statistics to show that drumming is an activity, be it amateur or professional, that requires no special inherent physical attributes. More than anything it takes practice and persistence. The desire to drum, to hit something and produce a pleasurable sound as a result, resides in all of us. Call it primitive, atavistic or whatever, hand a human a drum and even the least musically inclined among us will, either boldly or tentatively, give it a whack. Give that person a stick and you can almost see the ancient light go on in their eyes.

Now go and find that Gojira video from the Olympics. It’s a lesson in French history, with pulse-pounding accompaniment.

‍