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Black Musics, Technology, and Modernity: Exhibit A, the Drum Kit

2012; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 36; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/03007766.2012.681111

1740-1712

Peter Avanti,

Music Technology and Sound Studies

Abstract This article examines the history of the trap (drum) kit. Debuting in the 1890s, the "kit" developed to meet the creative needs of Afrological musical styles: evolving mechanically, technically, and conceptually into a complex multi-instrument requiring four-limb coordinated independence to perform rhythmically interlocking sonic structures across four (or more) percussion instruments. Ubiquitous, often thought timeless, the kit is modern technology, the core of popular musics, articulating our sonic environment, influencing aural perception, identity, and consciousness. As embodied musical technology and praxis, kit drumming is a "technology of self" indicative of a need to re-locate African-American musico-cultural history within the technologies and philosophies that distinguish modern life. Notes [1] This is not to suggest that African-American artists were the only ones doing this or similar; artists like Russolo, Partch, Stockhausen, Scheaffer, Boulez, Cage, Leo Fender, Les Paul, George Martin, Robert Moog, and Don Buchla, and others come readily to mind. Rather I am focusing on the often overlooked fact that black artists were very active and interactive in this larger process and that much of the stimulus for innovation also came from the "thrust" of black innovation (Braxton) which was continuous and musically productive. African-American artists, because of social conditions, perhaps had a greater urgency to find an innovative way to "say something." Leo Fender, for example, designed a electric guitar that eliminated feedback, because an amplified acoustic could not cut through in big band settings (very much African-American influenced), and he surely did not anticipate the use of amplification's ability to sustain sound (Palmer), and that later Jimi Hendrix, appropriating that technology, would revise its application, turning feedback suppression to productive musical purpose as controlled feedback production (McSwain). I also want to emphasize that African-American technical innovations and inventions are, still today, not often listed, valued, and discussed equally with those of European and Euro-American artists. If we were to change the phrase "black artists" in the sentence to "European artists" and offer it in general discussion outside of this article, how many readers might express misgivings that the phrase does not acknowledge the important and various contributions of black artists? [2] Al Rose reminds us that Adolphe Sax's invention "was originally intended as a cure for asthma. It consisted of a section of tubing bent into an 'S' shape, with a bulb containing medication (probably menthol and laudanum) at the bottom. It was prescribed that the patient inhale and exhale through the device for twenty minutes, morning and night" (233). To make the treatment more enjoyable Sax came up with "the idea of adding a reed mouthpiece and appropriate valves to make a scale so users could play simple melodies." The instrument as a treatment for asthma was not successful. Rose reminds us: Sax "named it after himself and eventually died in a mental institution" (233). [3] In February 1982, Percussive Notes, the journal of the Percussive Arts Society, which has been published since 1963, issued their first issue to feature the drum set (introduced by Ed Soph), describing the kit as "a multiple percussion instrument used primarily to play improvised music." A "young instrument," the drum set requires "teaching techniques of its own. The teacher/performer must have an understanding of the history of the music associated with the instrument. He [sic] must have knowledge of the artistic and technical growth of the great players of the instrument" (Levine 42). [4] In 1897, along with his bass drum playing "attachment" which was literally strapped to the toe of the player, Harry Bower of Massachusetts also obtained a second patent (no. 579735, March 30, 1879) for, in his own words, a "support for a snare- drum constructed to maintain the latter in position before the drummer in an orchestra or band, so that his hands and feet are free to play the bass drum and cymbals or the castanets or other instruments under his control." [5] Abbot and Seroff Abbott, Lynn and Seroff, Doug. 2002. Out of Sight: The Rise of African American Popular Music, 1889–1895, Jackson: UP of Mississippi. Print [Google Scholar] remind us that the Chicago World's Exhibition was "an exhibition of the unabashed official rejection of the principle of racial equality" (294). In the degenerated and tragic racist politics of the nascent Jim Crow era, "Hell bent on 'keeping the Negro in his place,' and conditioned by a half century of 'Ethiopian minstrelsy,' the white, mainstream public was unprepared to accept any black music that entailed respect" (294). The "ground rules" for the emergence of ragtime, an expression of the first post-slavery generation of black artists, were commodified in the strictest racist terms: "white audiences of the 'Gay '90s' demanded 'coon' travesties as a necessary accompaniment to their ragtime" (295). It is useful to bear in mind that the period, between 1890 and 1920, when the kit and the musics it would articulate were emerging corresponds with what is considered the nadir of African-American experience, where the promise of Reconstruction ended in legalized segregation, widespread voter disenfranchisement, new forms of economic exploitation, and wholesale lynching. It is a period of extraordinary importance in American history, immense technological change, the coming of age as an imperial world power, and the beginning of consumer capitalist economics and culture. Within the discourses and institutionalized practices of white supremacism, and beyond them, ragtime and jazz became synonymous with things American and being American. [6] In the context of American assimilation, Ludwig's autobiographical comments begin with something of a transgressive desire. Wanting to be a drummer after having seen the drum corps of the First Regiment of the Illinois National Guard in 1887, he found his father, a professional musician from a family of musicians, opposed on the grounds that "drumming did not require classical musicianship." A compromise was struck allowing Ludwig to begin drum lessons only on condition that he "made the violin his major instrument" (8).