Percussion: Drumming, Beating, Striking (Paperback)

~ (Author)
Key Phrases: rough musicians, academic musicology, percussive character, Little Richard, African American, New Orleans (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review

"This book contributes subtly and powerfully to the important project of self-reflexively re-theorising musical analysis. Mowitt knits together the most complex cultural theory with the most influential popular music in surprising and illuminating ways." - Robert Walser, author of Running with the Devil: Power, Gender, and Madness in Heavy Metal Music

Product Description

Percussion is an attempt—in the author's words—to make sense of "senseless beating," to grasp how rhythm makes sense in music and society. Both a scholar and a former professional drummer, John Mowitt forges a striking encounter between cultural studies and new musicology that seeks to lay out the "percussive field" through which beating—specifically the backbeat that defines early rock-and-roll—comes to matter for raced, urban subjects.

For Mowitt, percussion is both an experience of embodiment—making contact in and on the skin—and a provocation for critical theory itself. In delimiting the percussive field, he plays drumming off against the musicological account of the beat, the sociological account of shock and the psychoanalytical account of fantasy. In the process he touches on such topics as the separation of slaves and drums in the era of the slave trade, the migration of rural blacks to urban centers of the North, the practice and politics of "rough music," the links between interpellation and possession, the general strike, beating fantasies, and the concept of the "skin ego."

Percussion makes a fresh and provocative contribution to cultural studies, new musicology, the history of the body and critical race theory. It will be of interest to students of cultural studies and critical theory as well as readers with a serious interest in the history of music, rock-and-roll and drumming.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: Duke University Press (June 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0822329190
• ISBN-13: 978-0822329190
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 5.9 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.5 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,756,292 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars original and necessary approach, December 17, 2003

By	scarecrow "scarecrow" (Chicago, Illinois United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)

Mowitt explores the heretofore unmentionables within the discourse of music analysis and musicological dimensions. His primary orientation is that the percussive world and any discussion of it has been through social filters,"imported" concepts from academia that not always shares such dimensions of illumination. By introducing such diverse concepts as Althusseur's "interpellation"(cross-referencial disciplines rather than one seminal kernel) and Adorno's theory of the demise of content within an administered world Mowitt finds a wholly unique approach here making sense out of senseless beating. So the "percussive field" is like a special preserve and then treated very much like a pure language to itself. The relative cloistered universe of musical academia has seen little use for such social and political dimensions; whereas Mowitt confronts these cognitive material aspects directly.

He begins with the idea that music in particular percussion music(beating, striking, banging) can be and is/implies a coherent language that is rooted in a "socialness" and has a unique discourse of representation. Percussion music recall has been a special preserve for innovation as the early 1930s works of composer Edgar Varese later John Cage. In fact one can usually determine if a composer, a creator understands timbre strictly from the sensitivity to percussive timbre. It seems to be the last dimension within any musical oeuvre that develops.
Interestingly Mowitt refers to our primordial forms of the aesthetic of tribes beating on their/Our bodies. And there is a wealth of timbre from the body, filled with or unfilled with cavities, resonating "boxes". He is quite well-read and draws many fascinating pathways not only into World music but Popular culture, Chuck Berry. And examines how the "beat, the backbeat as in "Get Off My Cloud" by the Rolling Stones. He seems to imply that the beat has all the necessary language and subversion we often miss. We need to get away from the market tyranny of contemplating music, of placing music into a pre-determined set and serial means of styles and genres. Mowitt, implies that understanding is lost with market formulas.