Percussion: Drumming, Beating, Striking

Rating:
Summary: original and necessary approach
Review: 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.