Beating Time
Wadaiko Ichiro Drummers
Sadler’s Wells at the Peacock Theatre, 1996
Every year on 3 December in Saitama Prefecture, Honshu, an all-night festival is held featuring richly decorated two-storey yatai (carts) pulled from village to village. The people hauling the yatai are urged on by the powerful beating of the taiko, concealed in the cramped first storey of the carts. This gave rise to a technique of drumming while seated…
Western music developed through melody harmony and counterpoint. In the East, it took a different route, founded principally on rhythm. So while in the West the main sounds are conveyed by strings, brass and woodwind, in the East percussion was and still is king.
The very earliest musical instruments were percussive, forged out of the simplest and most obvious materials to hand. Those who could create sound-making tools from skin, bone, wood and rock were highly regarded in their communities as holders of mystical powers. In the rituals carried out by priests, shamen, witch doctors and juju men today, music still plays a major role in creating the atmosphere of mystery and magic, and in the ‘developed’ world such things are not so alien either, in the bell-ringing and chanting that accompanies many church services.
In Africa, the cradle of mankind, the drum is still a powerful source of spiritual magic. Used to communicate information over the vast distances that separate the scattered tribes, it is capable of imitating the inflections, pitch and pace of human speech to a remarkable degree. The most powerful drums were always held in awe by the locals and were sequestered from public view to preserve their mystique. The talking drums were even held to be so sacred that they could only be moved around under cover of night by the initiated. And again they held another symbolic significance that we would recognise: just as in the West a fugitive could claim sanctuary within the confines of a church, so anyone taking refuge in an African drum house was automatically protected from his pursuers.
As civilisations grew, clashed and mingled, there was a great exchange of cultural totems, and it was by no means all one way. In the Middle Ages, mainly due to the conflicts between Europe and the Ottoman Empire, Western cavalry began to adopt the kettledrum as a spur to their armies. Military bands today still march to the regular beat of a drum, and snare drums retain a distinctly martial resonance. In the 18th and 19th centuries, when the West at last began to pull itself out of the turmoil of seemingly continuous wars, this military sound even began to feed into the orchestral works of Europe’s finest composers, a process which has been going on ever since.
In this century, with ever-increasing social mobility and increasingly complex ethnic mixes influencing all areas of society, music has benefitted most from a breaking down of traditional barriers. Old meets new in music, and certainly since the mid-fifties, the importance of rhythm in popular music has never been so great. Dance could not exist without rhythm, and whereas the Old World has always known this – and the more primitive and atavistic the beat the better – it seems the new has only recently begun to appreciate this fundamental truth.
Today’s music is defined as much by its distinctive rhythms as by anything else – the four-square, relentless hammering of rock, the off-beat stress of reggae hitting the third beat in the bar, the exuberant speed and syncopation of Latin music, the frenetic heart-pumping rush of techno. All these are enjoyed by people of different backgrounds, and culture seems irrelevant to how an individual responds. What is clear is that there must be something in the rhythm itself that evokes the response, something which speaks directly to that impulse in us all which makes us want to tap our feet, clap our hands or nod our heads in time. It is not even a purely aural experience: in the world of classical music Evelyn Glennie, the Scottish percussionist, has become one of the best-known performing and recording talents of the last ten years, and she is profoundly deaf. She doesn’t need to hear the music she plays – or even the music around her – in order to stay on the beat.
But for those who can hear, there are few things more exciting than pure rhythm thundered out in a spectacularly visual way, and this is precisely the kind of music the Wadaiko Ichiro Drummers provide. Set low to the ground to increase the power of the reverberations through the floor as well as through the air, the taiko requires a uniquely strenuous style of playing, and indeed the physical power and concentration needed to play it has been likened to a kind of martial art. The discipline, the spatial perception, as well as the all-important senses of rhythm, balance and control are all there.
But while the sheer technical and physical dexterity of the players is stunning enough, there is something further that compels your engagement. It has been claimed that the elegant sophistication of Mozart can actually improve your brainpower while you’re listening to it. In the same way, the sound of the taiko drum beneath the sticks of a maestro can increase your heart rate the way any purely physical, adrenaline-pumping stimulus does. It puts the body on its mettle in a deeply primal way – the sound prepares the muscles for the fight-or-flight response of our ancestors and, since there is no reason to do either of those things while sitting in a concert hall, we stay instead to enjoy the purely physical thrill of this visceral beat. The taiko drum has come a long way from being simply the spiritual centre of a Japanese village.
PS
One of those that exposes my shortcomings. I stand now, as I have always stood, in awe of anyone who can play any instrument with even modest competence. I love music but on a purely visceral level, so since I have no technical knowledge at all, anything I say about it has to come from books and instinct, which means that nothing I say about it has any more value than anything anyone else similarly limited might say or think. But however empirical, it’s all sincerely meant.
But lack of technical knowledge is one thing; carelessness in the development of an argument is a whole other order of ineptitude. I talk glibly, for instance, about the importance of the drum ‘In Africa, the cradle of mankind’. It would have been nice not to have recycled such a worn-out cliché about that vast and varied continent. Do I mean all of Africa? Were there no little pockets where the drum was ever silent? Might there not have been one tiny corner, its unpronounceable name, assuming it ever had one, now irredeemably lost to history, where perhaps one genius one afternoon experimentally blew down a reed and single-mouthedly altered the course of his tribe’s musical journey until such time as its fledgling chromaticism was overwhelmed and silenced forever by the irresistibly rolling tide of tabla, timpani and tom tom? We will never know.
Similarly, ‘The most powerful drums were always held in awe by the locals and were sequestered from public view to preserve their mystique.’ Oh they were, were they? Always, everywhere, all at once? I worry that this piece suffers from the same problem that dogs many modern museums and the liberal drive to ‘return native artefacts to the people who made them’. Just loading up a Boeing 757 and dropping the things out the back over the equatorial savannah like some misguided humanitarian feel-good gesture sounds like nothing more than lazy racism to me.
Not only that, but the claim that listening to Mozart can actually improve brainpower has, I believe, now been thoroughly debunked, exposed as nothing more than special pleading on the part of his most fervent champions, I’m afraid. How could it physically work anyway? What possible connection could ever have been forged between sound wave and neuron? And if it were ever true, why only Mozart? No, nice if it were the case, but such an easy path to genius always sounded too much like virtue signalling to me. “Look how clever I am, and I owe it all to my mother playing me The Magic Flute in the womb.” One of these TV academics filmed himself recently wearing some kind of wired cap which monitored his brain activity while he listened to Richard Strauss. A monitor showed how his brain reacted, becoming flooded with colour like an octopus performing metachrosis. The academic nodded smugly, assuming his intellectual credentials had now been conclusively confirmed for posterity by science at the service of art. But you can surely enjoy a bit of Strauss without having to go all round the houses. I happen to be partial to a bit of Elektra myself. The only thing this exercise proved was that, whatever else he may have been, this bloke was also a wanker.
(I had to look up metachrosis of course, but I just thought an octopus would be less of a cliché than a chameleon, and I felt I had some ground to make up on that score. Cuttlefish would have been another option.)