Dear Gila,
Thanks for the lovely story.
Making music is like trying to capture time and putting it in a box.
But that is a modern-world approach.
As it happens I am fascinated by making sounds on a drum or other surfaces, and have been so ever since I can remember.
In terms of pre-modern thinking (going back 5000–25000 years), the drummer is the horse, or the reindeer of the shaman.
I can really see and feel it that way. It is a way of making palpable streams of thought and energy. There didn’t used to be the strict division between object and subject that we have grown used to as the norm: there is stuff going on inside our minds, and there is stuff out there in physical reality, without any intrinsic connection between the two.
I believe we are in a very slow process of re-discovering the connections, although it’s hard.
To me, being involved in drumming is like uttering non-verbal thoughts, or maybe I should call them moods and modes.
In old communities it simply “was” there or not. We see “music” as an add-on, a cultural refinement. But before it was called music, it was sound-making without which that which happened alongside it (marking seasonal moments in the year, or other rituals) could not be.
After more than 50 years of being fascinated and totally grabbed by the being transported by sound-making, I have become drawn (for the last 10–15 years or so) to folk music from all over the world. My starting point was Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk, and they still for me are the bedrock of what it means to be transported by sound-making, but they were like a big pebble tossed in the pond. The ever-widening circles created by them are still taking me to newly found deeply impactful music. And in fact I am re-discovering existing music from the last 50 years, discovering why certain songs were/are so good. It can be any music. From Handel to Coltrane to the Spice Girls.
But I always return to sound-making on a drum. A simple hand drum, which can produce an infinite number of shades and sounds, as long as you allow your attention to become engaged with the skin, and allow the on/off markings of the beat to create their own rhythm and pulse.
And yes, coming back to your description of the dancing and African drumming, I think the whole point of it is to be carried away, away from language, into realms of feelings, of departures and arrivals, modes and moods that have a significance that cannot be expressed in words.
I think it also has to do with trying to come to terms with the essence of concepts like time and movement. The passing of time implies movement. From this moment to the next has intrinsic movement related to it, otherwise you can’t get to the next moment.
Defining time and us being in it is still one of most difficult topics to be involved in, but through dance and drumming you are some way there, without talking about it.
