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Drumming: A Personal Perception

by Doug Bower

I had just finished my power nap after working on sermon and biblical material during a break at Warm Springs this year. I heard drumming near the lodge we met in and left my van to see if a meeting was taking place.

I passed by the drummers on my way into the building. Only a couple of people were beating drums at that time. When I got into the lodge a semi-community meeting was taking place. I sat down for a moment and said to myself, "I don't want to sit through this." I was too quiet for my liking in the previous evening's session, and in the morning session. "I am not going to participate in silence, I want to be actively involved." The drummers were picking up outside. I could hear the rhythms.

I got up out of my chair, left the meeting room and went out to watch a moment and soon found a drum. I don't know the name of the drum and have no recollection of ever having seen one like it before.

A handful of people were drumming. There was no overt leadership though I knew Paula Bickham was the "facilitator" and that she wanted to make a presentation on drumming. I thought I plugged into her presentation. I had and I hadn't. She hadn't begun a formal presentation, but then maybe what was taking place was the formal presentation. She spoke about drumming later.

I have two observations. One: the drumming enabled me to participate. I certainly stepped out of my silence. It was loud. I didn't have to be a spectator. I had played that role too often already. I was in a position to jump in without interfering and without disrupting and still contributing something. No one changed their rhythms or beats because of my beat. My own rhythm at first was awkward to my ears and out of sync with the others.

Soon I discovered what I could do with the drum I had. I then found my rhythm and beats in sync with the group. I found I could change what I was doing and still be in sync and certainly felt I was both doing what I wanted to do and contributing to the overall rhythm of the drumming group.

Now, I have a background in music though I never really developed any confidence in my abilities, piano and voice lessons, self teaching on the guitar and harmonic. One of my hobbies is listening to Romantic Piano Concertos, I have over 100 different recordings and an ever expanding list of composers in that area. So I like music. I have just never been good at performing somebody else's music.

With drumming that didn't matter. It didn't matter if I had fancy techniques, if I knew what I was doing, or if I just did what I wanted. I was participating at a level that I had have only generally fantasized about during community meetings. Community meetings are not like opera where three and four or more people can be singing and it is called beautiful music. All too often what I am thinking doesn't match what is taking place in the community. I feel my contributions will be interruptive, or inappropriate, or nonunderstanding. Not so with drumming.

I emphasized, in the above remarks, being in sync with the group. I want to make it really clear that from the stand point of a semi-trained musician we were not musically in sync. There were awkward periods. People would experiment with different rhythms and beats and it sometimes seemed like we just a a mish-mash of individuals doing their own thing. Then that serendipity would occur and those individual rhythms would blend into a community sound that dazzled this languid musician.

I said I had two observations. I can't remember the second one. Perhaps it was the observation that I made over the cct/pca network that it was impossible to interrupt the group by participating. It was impossible to interrupt the group by observing and listening without picking up a drum. It is possible to interrupt the group by not participating. In fact, I learned that the indoors community group had representatives leave it to ask the drummers to do something about where they were. That apparently disrupted the flow and may have been part of what I saw when I first walked by the group and saw only a couple of people lightly beating on the drums. But when I went back out there the intensity had picked up. I have no doubt that I added to that intensity.

Oh, the second thing, it was the power of the individuals on any given occasion to change their rhythms and impact the group in such a way as to change the overall rhythm of the drumming group. Sometimes that change would be met with a chaotic adjustment until folks got in sync, and sometimes it was like watching a flock of birds or a school of fish automatically shift in realtionship to objects that entered their field of flight. It was like everybody knew how they could make a change to respond to the new directions taken. Would it be possible to say who the rhythm change maker was that people were adjusting to. I doubt it. Somehow to find out who that person was would seem to miss something. We were individuals in this together, who had power to cooperate and to change the directions and to maintain a direction. I found it fun to change my rhythms without changing the groups rhythm. And I found it fun to change my rhythm and hear the whole group change its rhythm. And I found it fun to hear others doing that as well.

I finally got tired of drumming. I don't remember how long we drummed. Some continued after I left. But for the first time in 12 years of Warm Springs, I felt I had participated on a sustained level without interrupting or being interrupted, yet at the same time having an impact on the group and I did so without saying a word.