Drums

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DRUMS

DRUMS are instruments that produce sound through the striking, rubbing, or plucking of stretched membranes. The religious use of drums is historically and geographically extensive, but by no means universal. They are conspicuously lacking in many Christian and Islamic liturgical traditions, as well as in various African religions. Their absence from the oldest forms of religious music of such well-known hunter-gatherers as the African Pygmies and San (Bushmen), the Australian Aborigines, the Väddas of Sri Lanka, and others suggests that drums are not particularly archaic or "primitive" but rather are associated with the later cultural systems of sedentary agriculture and urban civilization. They are important in both local traditions and in the "great" intercultural, literate religious traditions.

Drums have relatively low value in Middle Eastern and European religious traditions, somewhat more in East Asia, Oceania, and Native America, and high value and variety of uses in South Asian, African, and Inner Asian and circumpolar shamanistic traditions. Where drums are used, they may have considerable symbolic or ritual value: E. Manker (in Diószegi, 1968, p. 32) describes how, when Christian missionaries burned the drums of Sami (Lapp) shamans, the Sami protested that the drums were their compasses; how could they find their way in the world without them?

Description

Drums belong to the organological class membranophones, instruments that produce sound by means of a stretched flexible membrane (skin, plastic, etc.). Instruments shaped or played like drums, but lacking membranes—the "slit-drums" or "log drums" of many tropical areas, the "bronze drums" of Southeast Asia, the "steel drums" of Trinidad, and so forth, are idiophones or solid instruments. Other mislabels, such as "tambourine" (correct only for frame drums with jingles) or "tom-tom" (corruption of a Sinhala/Tamil name for paired kettledrums), often have been indiscriminately applied by Westerners to non-Western drums in much the same way as labels like "witchcraft" and "vodou" have been widely and derogatorily applied to non-Western religions.

Drums are described by number of membrane heads (one to five), by material composition (wood, earth/clay, metal, bone, etc.), by shape of body (shallow frame, round-bottomed kettle, straight-sided cylindrical, bulging barrel, narrow-waisted hourglass, etc.), and by playing technique (hands, sticks, suspended clappers), decorations, and other physical features. Although such features are the basis of scientifically accurate descriptions, religious traditions themselves often categorize and evaluate drums in terms of less tangible but religiously more significant factors.

Symbolism

Drums may carry a wide range of symbolic values, both positive and negative. The negative symbolism best known in the West, that of sensuality and licentiousness, is based on culture-specific associations of drums, rhythmic dance, and sexual abandon. Because this particular symbolism is not universal (for example, dance and sexuality may be seen as normal, as religiously beneficial, or as unrelated to drums), the negative symbolism of sensuality may be rarer than other negative associations. Another important one is the association of drums with pollution. In South Asia, for example, drums have sometimes been considered religiously polluting because the hands of those who touch or play them must come in contact with the skins of slaughtered animals, or because of associations with powerful, dangerous beings and forces; hence, both making and playing drums have been restricted to low castes. The negative association of drums with noise and chaos may be less widespread than is sometimes assumed: for example, drums were included only in a few scattered, atypical cases in the European Christian "Instruments of Darkness" complex described by Claude Lévi-Strauss in From Honey to Ashes (New York, 1973). Christian and Buddhist images of hells with sinners imprisoned in drums gain at least some of their negative impact from the demons shown beating them.

In their positive roles, drums may be associated with almost any aspect of religious experience, and may even themselves be considered deities. One common symbolic complex links them with elements of nature, biology, and cosmology. A drum may embody an axis mundi of the cosmic tree or mountain in its wooden or earthen body, the life force of a helping spirit in the form of the animal that supplied its skin, the voice of thunder or of an animal/spirit in its sound, and elements of hunting or pastoral lifestyles in its manufacture, treatment, and use. Another widespread symbolic complex derives from social relationships: drums may form "family" relationships with one another or with humans; sets of them may constitute hierarchies that parallel or are included within human and divine hierarchies; and they may play functional roles within society and the pantheon, ranging from invoking the deities to functions as practical as telecommunication. The "royal drums" of Africa and ancient South India were part of the property, symbols, and tools of divine kingship, considered so powerful and important in some cases that it might be more appropriate to speak of the king as a symbol of the royal drums than the reverse. The model of royal and divine proclamation is often central to the religious symbolism of drums, whether or not they are actually sounded for communication or musical purposes. Where the symbolic connection of drums, dance, and sensuality exists, it may become a positive symbol of divine enjoyment and celestial pleasures, with court and village dances serving as models for, or sacramental participations in, their heavenly counterparts.

It should be emphasized that the symbolism of drums does not support any unitary hypothesis of universal sexual symbolism. Drums may be seen as feminine because of their hollow bodies and soft skins; as masculine because of their intrusive sounds and the rigid sticks or hand tensions required to play them; or as neuter, androgynous, or symbolic of sexual union because of any of these or other reasons. The paired high/low-pitch kettledrums of Asia are often considered male/female; but if low is "male" in one culture, it is just as likely to be "female" in a neighboring culture. The multioctave drum sets of West African and African American possession religions are often viewed as "families," with the largest and lowest drum acting as "mother," and with primary contrasts drawn across generational rather than gender lines. As with most instruments, drums are more widely played by men than by women; but for almost every case of a male-oriented drum tradition or practice, a corresponding female-oriented example can be found somewhere, occasionally even in the same culture or religious tradition.

Religious Use

Drums may be excluded from religious uses, used peripherally to demarcate the temporal, spatial, or structural boundaries of religious occasions, or integrated in positive, essential ways into religious thought and performances. If they are used religiously, their role is usually musical; but sometimes they function instead as signaling or communication devices, as silent cult objects or offerings, or in other capacities. Drums may or may not have special religious status compared with other musical instruments. For example, many Islamic traditions exclude all instruments equally from religious observances. Some Christian traditions have admitted other instruments while excluding drums. Many African and South Asian traditions assign special roles and status to a wide variety of drums. In most of Central and North Asia, drums were the prime focus of ritual, while other instruments were used for secular music. Generally, the great intercultural religious traditions of Near Eastern origin have shown more hostility or indifference to drums than have many others; but this ultimately may be due as much to the lack of early wide distribution and musical importance of drums in the area as to religious factors.

The vast range of religious valuations and uses of drums can be suggested by a few specific examples.

African and African American traditions

Although images of a "dark continent" filled with compulsively throbbing, obsessively omnipresent drums, witch doctors, and similar colonialist missionary-in-the-cannibal-pot stereotypes have partially faded away in the post-independence period (1950s onward), the ideal pan-African perspective of many writings continues to mask a range of cultural, religious, and musical diversity as great as is found in Europe or in Asia. The use of drums in African religions is a typical example of this diversity, with cases ranging from drums playing central, essential religious roles to their total absence from a religious tradition.

Colin Turnbull, in The Forest People (New York, 1961) and Wayward Servants (New York, 1965), found the drums used occasionally by the Mbuti Pgymies to be a late import from contacts with sedentary non-Pygmy villagers. Drums were not suitable by reason of their heavy wooden construction to the traditional Mbuti nomadic-forager lifestyle and their associated religious observances—a point equally worth noting in regard to other hunter-gatherers who lead a nomadic life without the assistance of draft animals. Even the pastoralist Fulbe, distributed through nearly the entire sub-Saharan borderland, adopted drums only in ceremonial contexts arising from culture contact with neighboring sedentary agricultural peoples such as the Hausa. Agriculturalists, in turn, need not accord drums a significant place in religion: Maraire (n.d.) reports that the Shona of Zimbabwe assign a very high religious value and function to the plucked idiophone mbira used in Bira possession rituals, while considering drums and their music appropriate to less sacred contexts oriented around socializing and entertainment. In the last analysis, neither race, place of residence, nor ecological adaptation is an accurate predictor of the importance or unimportance of drums in African music and religion.

Against this background of diversity, of contrasting occurrences interspersed with significant blank spaces where no uses are found, the pattern of use of drums in African religions stands out clearly as one of remarkable religious and artistic richness. In some cases, drums and ritual are so closely associated with each other that the same term can be used to refer to both (Turner, 1968, p. 15). If drums are not universally present, they nevertheless occur throughout the continent in nearly every possible physical shape (beside those mentioned above, goblet-shaped, conical, cylindroconical, and footed varieties are widespread), musical function, and religious value, and application. Drums may be found in every position and role from that of peripheral accessories that signal the start of ceremonies to that of spirit beings in their own right, called to life through invocations and rituals, tended by priests and acolytes, and housed, unseen by profane eyes, in sacred dwellings. They are so widespread and important that even religious traditions of Near Eastern origin—those of the Falāshā Jews and Coptic Christians of Ethiopia, as well as of the Islamic Ṣūfīs—overcome the reservations widespread among non-African branches of their respective religious traditions to the extent of allowing some liturgical drumming by cult members, leaders, or priests. Frequently, however, the drumming is less extensive and elaborate than that used by neighboring religious traditions of local African origin. The paired kettledrum apparently spread with Islamic conquests and conversions. Its most widespread ritual use, however, is in ceremonies of state, rather than in Islamic worship.

Although only extensive reading in the ethnographic, religious, and ethnomusicological literature would give an adequate sense of the religious uses of African drums, a few topics of broad interest are worth mention.

Talking drums

The widely mentioned "talking drums" that transmit verbal messages by playing tonal and rhythmic abridgments of stylized phrases are frequently slit-drums (i.e., wooden percussion tubes) or xylophones, rather than true drums with membranes; but drums may also be used for communication, as in the cases of the atumpan two-drum set of Ghana or the variable-tension hourglass drums widespread in West Africa. Most reported cases of religious use have involved announcements and communications among cult members (e.g., to invite guests to an initiation ceremony), a peripheral application sometimes combined or alternated with the widespread practice of using drums to accompany religious dance. However, there have also been reports (e.g., among the Ewe and Yoruba) of "talking drums" used for direct communication with gods or spirits, transmitting messages in the form of invocations or prayers—a function of greater apparent religious centrality and importance than announcing and signaling.

Royal drums

One especially characteristic function, best documented in East Africa but occurring in other regions as well, is the use of drums as royal emblems or regalia, a religious function insofar as it usually relates to concepts and cults of sacral kingship. Drums may be personalized spirits or ancestors, or conduits of power; in either case, they are the sacralizing and legitimizing emblems of royal rule, and as such receive honor, offerings, and ritual care that may be greater than that accorded the king himself. Royal drums are the prime example of drums that may be religious artifacts without necessarily being musical instruments as well: some royal drums are never played, and a few may exist entirely on a divine plane, invisible to all but the gods themselves (Lois A. M. Anderson, n.d.). Other royal drums may have a full range of musical uses while still enjoying a higher ritual status than their profane counterparts; such was the case with the entenga tuned-drum ensemble of the Buganda court. Often, as with the Buganda and Rwanda royal drums, several sets existed, each with its own kind and degree of religious, political, and musical function. Playing and/or priestly service of the royal drums might be restricted to male members of either hereditary noble or service classes. As was also the case with royal drums in ancient South India, some African royal drums were the recipients of ritual blood sacrifices.

Possession

Drums may not be used at all in possession cults (cf. the Shona Bira, mentioned above). But their importance in West African areas exploited by the slave trade led to their use in African American possession religions such as Haitian vodou, Brazilian Candomblé, the Lucumi of Cuba, the Shango religion of Trinidad, and others. In keeping with their West African sources, these religions use drums in cross-generational "families" of three or more to accompany spirit-possession rituals and dances. There has been some controversy as to whether the sounds of the drums actually "cause" or induce possession, that is, whether their effects are best understood in physiological or cultural and religious terms.

Rhythm and time

The musical variety of African religious drumming extends from the austere patterns of widely spaced single beats used by the Falāshā Jews, to elaborate polyrhythms (one rhythm played simultaneously with one or more contrasting rhythms) of the complex and compelling sort that most listeners associate with African styles. The question of possible conceptual relationships between musical rhythm and cosmological/calendrical time has been raised by Alan P. Merriam in his article "African Musical Rhythm and Concepts of Time-Reckoning" (in Thomas Noblitt, ed., Music East and West, New York, 1981, pp. 123–141) and by others. The unresolved issue is whether the perception by foreign observers of "time" and cyclicity in African music (or their being labeled as such in European languages) corresponds significantly to African conceptions, given the apparent lack in African languages of a "time" domain that extends to musical categories. J. H. Kwabena Nketia (n.d.) has suggested that music itself might constitute an extralinguistic, complementary system of conceptualization. We might hypothesize that musical rhythm is one fundamental human mode of perceiving and conceptualizing time, whether lexically labeled as such. If so, the apparent "polyrhythm" of simultaneous contrasting-length market weeks in West Africa may share an underlying conceptual unity with musical polyrhythms. On the other hand, we might equally hypothesize that musical polyrhythms result at least in part from the proliferation of conceptually multigenerational drum "families" that replicate socioreligious concepts of ancestor-descendant relationships. While research trends during most of the twentieth century moved gradually away from consideration of such broad issues, favoring a view of music as an autonomous "art" intelligible only in terms of acoustic-structural principles peculiar to itself, new approaches in the century's final decades suggested a growing interest in the conceptual bases of the close links between music and religion that are so evident in African behavior and performance.

Buddhism

Buddhist traditions share a common symbolic valuation of drums but differ widely in patterns of use. The act of proclaiming the Buddhist teaching is traditionally known as "sounding the drum of the Dharma," either because of a proclamation by Śākyamuni Buddha (c. 560–480 bce) after his enlightenment that he would sound the "drum of immortality" (amata-dundubhiḥ ), or because of an edict of the Indian emperor Aśoka (d. 232 bce) that "the sound of the war drum [bherighoṣa ] has now become the sound of dharma [dharmaghoṣa ]." Both dundubhiḥ and bherī were royal/military drums. Perhaps because of the Buddha's kṣatriya (warrior/princely) caste origin, Buddhist drum symbolism relies heavily on the concepts of royal authority and invincibility. Drum sounds reach everywhere, filling earth and sky; they are clear and unmistakable; and they cannot be ignored or overwhelmed by lesser sounds. These are all characteristics both of the royal drums themselves and of the teaching proclaimed by the Buddha.

The use of drums in Buddhist ritual, derived from the stupa (reliquary mound) cult sanctioned in the Mahāparinibbana Sutta, is said to date back to the death of the Buddha (c. 480 bce). They are pictured on the railings of the stupa in relief sculptures of the first century bce–first century ce period. In Indian Buddhism up to the early second millennium ce, drums served the function of elaborating and ornamenting the tāla rhythmic cycle outlined by the cymbals, according to standard Indian musical practice of the time. Written drum notations were introduced before the mid-eighth century ce.

Sri Lanka

Modern practice varies with traditions and cultures. Generally, Theravāda Buddhism restricts the use of instruments to laymen, while Mahāyāna and Vajrayāna traditions allow monks to play them as well. In present-day Sri Lanka, TheravādaBuddhism exists in conjunction with a variety of indigenous yakkha (local spirit) cults whose priests are hereditary low-caste drummer-dancers using their ritual and artistic skills to control a variety of powerful forces. Just as their gods are admitted to the Buddhist pantheon in a subordinate role, so also their instruments and performances find a subordinate, boundary-marking role in some Buddhist ceremonies.

Two kinds of drums, the dawula (cylindrical drum) and the tammätamma (paired kettledrums), play a more central role in the orthodox Buddhist cult of stupas and other types of cetiya (relics), in the pañcavādya, or fivefold instrumental music that can be traced back to the first centuries of Indian Buddhism. The drums play auspicious music based on beat patterns conventionally associated with the Buddha, with acts of offering or circumambulation, and so on. The players are of the same caste and are often the very same persons as those who serve as priests of the yakkha religions. The primary drum of the yakkha cult, the gäta bere barrel drum, also finds an important place in Buddhist rituals as the mangulbere, or "auspicious drum." In the chief Buddhist temple of Kandy, even high-caste specialists play the hourglass udäkki drum to accompany secret songs of praise in the inner shrine.

Nepal

In the Vajrayāna Buddhism of the Newars of Nepal, drums find both more diverse and more central ritual roles. Parallels with Theravāda include the use of paired kettledrums in the fivefold offering music and the adoption of drums from local cults, such as the barrel drums adorned with ram's horns (yakkakhiṃ ) embodying the indigenous god of dance (Nasadyah) which accompany some dances with Buddhist contents. Specific drums are allocated to specific castes, from the small barrel drum (naykhiṃ ) of the butchers to the deified barrel drums (damaḥkhiṃ ), decorated with masks of the deities they embody and played by the highest castes of Buddhist Tantric priests. In processions farmers play the dhimay, which is made from an irregularly shaped cross section of tree trunk. They and the oil-presser caste play the mākhiṃ barrel drum to accompany songs of praise at Buddhist temples. Vajrācārya priests accompany some of their Tantric cārya songs and dances with the kwotaḥ, a three-headed drum set made by joining a large horizontal and small vertical barrel drum together. The drum becomes the embodiment of both the god of dance and the buddha Vajra-sattva during performance, and it plays musically structured, notated compositions of mantra syllables evoking the presence of buddhas and gods. Drumming, singing, and dancing, along with meditation, become the technical means for generating the maṇḍala of buddhas in the performers' own bodies, voices, and minds.

Central and East Asia

Outside the South Asian homeland of Buddhism, drums lose their caste associations and some of their practical musical importance, while retaining their symbolic value. In Tibetan Vajrayāna, the double-headed frame drum (rnga ) is used in both vocal and instrumental performances, but in a role supporting the cymbals, which provide a primary musical structure based on elaborate mathematical sequences. The hourglass drum made from two human skulls (Skt., kāpāla-ḍamaru ), adopted from the Indian Kāpālika yogic tradition, is also largely subordinate, often being replaced by a similar wooden drum. Nevertheless, such drums may symbolically embody the entire range of Buddhist concepts and teachings and enjoy greater practical importance in specialized ritual/meditational traditions. In East Asian Mahāyāna Buddhism, drums are often used, together with an assortment of metal and wooden idiophones, to mark off the subdivisions of musical structures. Japanese Buddhist practices range from the elaborate drumming in Zen temples to the greatly lessened use of drums in traditions such as Buzanha Shingi Shingon, in which idiophones such as the wooden fish-shaped mokugyō play beat patterns accompanying chants. Some traditions give drums a practical role to match their symbolic value, as with the Nichiren school Nihonzan Myohonji pacifist monks who walk about chanting and beating a small single-headed frame drum, literally "sounding the drum of the Dharma" to call attention to their Buddhist teachings and way of life.

Shamanism

In the "classical" shamanism of Inner and North Asia, drums play central roles in religious belief and practice. The drum is the shaman's primary religious tool for attracting helper gods or spirits, for taming or inciting them to action, and for carrying the shaman away on spiritual flights to heavenly realms or to the underworld. The drum itself is part of the shaman's pantheon, a living spirit helper or a theriomorphic steed such as a horse or a deer. It may serve as object as well as agent of religious acts, being treated to life-cycle rituals, like those performed for humans, from its "birth" to its "death," as well as to cyclic or occasional ceremonies encouraging or exhorting it to perform its helping function. It may also serve the shaman as a tool for specialized ritual purposes, as in drum-divination ceremonies in which the upturned skin of the drum is sprinkled with small grains that move about through sympathetic vibration when a second drum is played nearby (or, if the drum has two playing heads, when the second head is beaten) to form divinatory patterns on the drumhead. The type of drum used may indicate the shaman's status in a graded hierarchy of initiatory rankings. In contrast to many religious drum traditions, shamanic drumming is frequently performed by women, as female shamans are fairly widespread.

The shaman's drum is usually a shallow frame drum with a wooden circular or ellipsoidal body and one skin head, played with a stick. Small jingling pieces of metal or bells may be mounted either on or inside the drum, or worn separately on the shaman's costume. Making the drum recapitulates a primordial cosmological quest, as in this song of the Tibetan Bon tradition:

seek a drum, where do I seek? I seek in the four directions, and the eight between; On the Chief of Mountains, in the center of the world, There, there is a tree growing; A mighty sandalwood tree has grown. Now, having cut a branch from it, Bending, bending, forced in a coiled circle, Knowing the method, hewn by an ax's blade, With the hide of a black antelope covered over, That amazing drum, that swastika-circle drum, Sewn together with effort, by the pressure of a tendon, Has a miraculous, melodious, sweet sound, full of meaning: Beaten, it is beaten in the highest heaven; Sounds, it sounds at the peak of the world-mountain; The realm of demons trembles: Shig shig! When I beat on that great drum, then Even all the ocean, churned, clouds up with mud; The massive Chief of Mountains, shaken, is thrown down; The water-serpent children are uneasy in their minds; E ma! How great this most superior of wonders!

The feeling of joyful mastery expressed here is the result of spirits, called and subjugated by the drum, entering the player's body and merging into a single identity under his control. Siberian ethnographic accounts are seldom detailed enough to show exactly what role the drumming plays in this course of events, but the process is quite clear for the related Himalayan shamanic traditions. The shaman begins by drumming at moderate speed in a dotted-rhythm beat pattern, singing an invocation of the "first shaman"; he then changes to a slightly slower, steady rhythm, as he sings an invitation song to the spirits who will come to help in the ritual. As he senses the approach of the spirits, his body begins to shake, sounding the metal bells on his costume or in the drum, and the beating grows louder. The drumming becomes irregular, suddenly breaking off into short periods when the drum is silent, and only the sound of the shaking bells carries on the emotional momentum of the performance. The singing is interspersed with special vocal effects: singing into the face of the drum, grunting, whistling, sneezing, and altered tones of voice. These events are signs of the entry of a spirit into the drummer's body, and of the struggle for control between him and the spirit. As the shaman asserts mastery over the spirit, the drum reenters with a strong, steady beat, the shaman begins a song of praise to the helping spirits, and the way is open for subsequent ritual stages of dancing, travel to spirit worlds, diagnosis, divination, curing, or whatever is required by the ritual.

The combination of heightened emotion and use of the drum to summon and control spirits, evident both in shamanic songs, as quoted above, and in the actual events of the ritual, is characteristic of the full geographic range of Asian shamanism. Use of the drum as a "steed" for a flight to the spirit world is a more limited phenomenon. Mircea Eliade (1964) argues that ecstatic flight is the historical and religious core of the shamanic complex, and that those traditions that lack it represent a degenerate stage; I suggest in "Musical Flight in Tibet" (in the journal Asian Music 5, 1974, pp. 3–44) that the practice of drumming to attract the tame theriomorphic spirits is a religious transformation of widespread use of music by Asian hunters and pastoralists to lure and control animals, and that the ideology of spiritual flight is a later and more localized superimposition on a conceptual basis of the shaman as a spiritual hunter-pastoralist. In some religious traditions outside the "classical" Asian/circumpolar area, broad similarities in ideology and practice seem to justify comparative extension of the term shaman (originally from the language of the Tunguz of Siberia); some of these traditions (e.g., the Mapuche of Chile) use drums in ways similar to Asian shamans, while many "shamanic" traditions of Latin America use hallucinogenic drugs and/or rattles whose symbolic and functional status so closely parallel that of the shaman drum as to suggest that they are local substitutes for it.

Other traditions

Drums have seen religious use on every inhabited continent, although in Aboriginal Australia they were characteristic only of coastal zones of contact with Melanesian cultures. They have been used throughout most of human history and found a place in the religions of ancient civilizations of both the Old and New Worlds.

Near East and Mediterranean

Drums appeared rather late in Mesopotamia. Clapper idiophones were shown in the artwork of the Mesilim and Ur I periods (c. twenty-eighth–twenty-fourth centuries bce). Drums alone begin to appear in depictions of ritual dances in the neo-Sumerian period (twenty-second–nineteenth centuries bce). Frame drums (adapa?, balag? ) existed in sizes ranging from extremely large varieties played by two men down to small handheld types carried by dancers; the latter apparently spread to Egypt (sixteenth–eleventh centuries), Israel (tof, mentioned in Exodus, Psalms, etc.), Greece (tumpanon, sixth–fifth centuries?), Rome (tympanum, c. 200 bce), and eventually throughout the Near East, where it is still widespread under the Arabic name daff.

In Sumeria, drums were ideographically linked with the god Enki and by ritual and symbolic attention to their skins with the bull, symbol of sacred strength. The small frame drum became associated (c. 2000 bce) with women players and with revelry and has generally retained these associations throughout its geographical and historical range. Even today it is widely played by women at weddings. In Israel the small-frame drum was excluded from Temple ritual. Other drums may have been employed until the ban on instrumental music following the destruction of the Temple in 70 ce. The small-frame drum was associated in Egypt with the goddess Isis and in Greece with the imported Cybele and native Dionysos cults. Eventually it spread to Rome along with these three "orgiastic" religions.

Cultic associations with dance and sexual license helped to shape Judeo-Christian attitudes to drums up to the present day, but they may not be entirely responsible for the subsequent exclusion of drums from the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic liturgies. In fact, such associations applied only to one type of drum (the small-frame drum); but this was, perhaps significantly, in an area where few types were available as more "respectable" liturgical alternatives. Cylindrical drums, goblet-shaped or footed drums, and a few other types were known in Sumeria and Egypt. In Israel, Greece, and Rome frame drums may have been the only drums available. There is no evidence of musically important or elaborate rhythmic traditions that might have stimulated the importation or invention of other types. Even the drum perhaps most characteristic of the Near East, the paired kettledrum, did not appear until the beginning of the second millen-nium ce.

At any rate, we see the disappearance of drums and other instruments from the Jewish liturgy in the first century ce, after the destruction of the Temple and the rise of the less ritualistic synagogue tradition. Christianity, perhaps simply following the lead of its parent tradition and culture, seemed to mirror the synagogue in its apparently exclusively vocal musical practices. Islam, in its turn, excluded drums, instruments, and "music" from its worship, which nevertheless came to include melodically chanted "readings" from the Qur˒ān and religious poetry; these in turn eventually came to embrace possible rhythmic accompaniment with drums, even the once-suspect frame drum. By the early second millennium ce the Ṣūfīs movement began to develop, leading to ritual traditions that use drums along with other instruments to accompany inspirational dancing. Drums would likewise gradually reenter Christian religious music through the influence of European folk, military, and art music traditions.

India and China

Textual evidence indicates the presence of drums in India and China by at least the late second millennium bce; they are probably considerably older in both regions. There is some evidence for the use of drums in the Indus Valley civilization of the third millennium bce. The earliest Indian sacred texts, the Vedas, seem to regard drums as primarily military instruments used by the Central Asian Aryan tribes who migrated into India some time after the middle of the third millennium. Later Tamil (South Indian) literature, which may reflect a much earlier culture, describes a cult of sacred royal drums reminiscent of African traditions, including sacrifice and ritual care by priests who were avoided because of their association with powerful, dangerous beings. Such cults may have provided the initial impetus that led to the eventual high religious value of drums in Hinduism. Another stimulus was provided by the decline of Vedic sacrificial ritual and its supplanting by the performance of pūjā offerings, a development particularly stressed in Buddhist traditions, where we find the first evidence of musical pūjā. Hindu traditions parallel their Buddhist counterparts in variety and richness, incorporating drum music at every level; and one of the three supreme post-Vedic gods, Śiva, is identified with the hourglass-shaped ḍamaru drum, which he plays to accompany his own cosmic dance. The elaborate rhythms of Indian drumming were, at least until the growth of Islamic dominance in the second millennium ce, part of a tradition that was inseparably both aesthetic performance and religious offering, whether Hindu, Buddhist, or Jain, and hence a reflection of the same ideals of complexly multifaceted individuality that appear in Indian pantheons and ritual practices.

In China, by contrast, drums and their music were a balanced component in both a carefully orchestrated musical structure and the elemental cosmic structure it embodies. Drums were part of an ideal system of ba yin or "eight sounds" represented by the names of eight characteristic materials from which instruments are constructed: metal, stone, silk, bamboo, wood, skin, gourd, and earth. Each of the instrument groups corresponding to these materials in turn corresponds to a cardinal point of the compass, a season of the year, a natural element or phenomenon, and other cosmological features. Drums are classified under their most characteristic constituent material, skin, and they correspond to the north, to winter, and to water. In Confucian ceremonial music, they play a musical part that is slow and simple in terms of technique and rhythmic density but that, together with the other instruments of the ensemble, forms part of a restrained, carefully regulated, and balanced whole. Barrel drums, some very large, are the most characteristic type used.

Americas and Oceania

New World civilizations, like their Old World counterparts, made use of drums. Ritual applications included sacrifices that sometimes involved human victims and, among the Incas at least, used their skins as drumheads. However, reports of at least one "drum" used in sacrificial rituals are the result of misidentification: the Aztec teponaztli was a slit-drum, or wooden percussion tube, rather than a membranophone.

The drum most widely used in American music and ritual is the frame drum, the form, ideology, and use of which in many regions show general parallels to that of the Asian shaman's drum. In addition to their shamanic use, frame drums were utilized in a wide variety of local religious contexts; among the best-known examples are the Plains Sun Dance and War Dance, as well as the late nineteenth-century Ghost Dance and other postcontact syncretistic and revitalization movements. Frame drums are played with sticks held in one hand only, a practice that links them with other unacculturated Native American drum traditions and distinguishes them from Euro-American and African American traditions and styles.

Two relatively recent traditions show some unusual features. Thomas Vennum, in his The Ojibwa Dance Drum (Washington, D.C., 1982) and subsequent work, has examined the history of the "dream drum" revealed in a vision by the Great Spirit to Tailfeather Woman of the Sioux in the nineteenth century and passed on to the Ojibwa (Chippewa) and other Northeast Woodlands peoples through manufacturing and song-learning rituals ultimately intended as a way of creating intertribal peace. While the "dream drum" is a larger and more elaborate version of the widespread frame drum, other physical types of drums may also attain religious importance. The best-known example is the water drum used to accompany songs in the sacramental peyote rituals of the Native American Church. The drum consists of a solid-bottomed body that forms a vessel into which water is poured and with the single playing head covering it at the top. Using more or less water creates a higher or lower sound; the dampness also changes the tension of the drumhead (which can be tuned by making it wetter or dryer), and the sound has a characteristic wavering reverberation caused by the movement of the water inside.

In Oceania, the area richest in variety of musical instruments was Melanesia, where log slit-drums (percussion idiophones) generally enjoyed more religious and musical prominence than true drums with membranes. Oceanian drums tend to have only one playing head, often made from fish or shark skin and to be set or held in vertical position and played with the hands. Hourglass shapes are common in Melanesia, and cylindrical types are widespread in Polynesia.

Drums were accorded sacred status in Polynesia, kept and tended by priests in temples, and considered receptacles of mana (sacred power). Some were associated with sacrifice, including, in Tahiti, human sacrifice. Many were "royal drums," used to honor chiefs as well as gods; one Hawaiian king traveled with such a drum in his canoe. Important drums of chiefs or gods were often large, with smaller versions used in lesser contexts; ensembles of varying sizes were found in some areas. The Hawaiian ceremonial Mele Hula dances utilize two drums: the larger pahu hula of wood, played with the hands, and the smaller pūniu made from a coconut shell, played with a braided fiber "stick." Although other instruments are also used, the drums are reserved for the most important dances.

Drums and Possession

African American religions, shamanism, and many other religious traditions employ drums in conjunction with, and apparently to induce, a kind of experience known in the research literature as "possession" or "altered states of consciousness." Behind such standard labels lie essential differences in both the experience itself and the process of achieving it: Haitian priestesses and Tibetan oracles, for example, are controlled by the beings who enter their bodies, while the Tamang shaman asserts control over the spirits who enter his. Both of the former rely on others to play drums for them during the ritual, but the shaman acts as his own drummer. What all these traditions have in common is a varied range of techniques for transformation of personal consciousness into a correspondingly varied range of experiences of identity with a god or spirit and, in many but not all cases, the use of drums with or without additional instruments.

A famous and controversial hypothesis by Andrew Neher (1961, 1962) posits an automatically causal, physiological link between drumming and ritual experiences of consciousness-transformation. Neher cites laboratory experiments with photic driving (pulsating lights) and covariation of alpha rhythms in the brain to support a suggestion that rhythmic drumming, with its wide frequency spectrum and high energy content, would automatically affect a normal brain in such a way as to affect alpha rhythms and produce reactions similar to those reported by laboratory subjects: visual, tactile, kinesthetic, and emotional sensations for experiments with light, but only "unusual perceptions" and muscle twitching reported for actual tests with drums. He predicts (1962) that a beat frequency of 8–13 cycles per second (the range of normal alpha variation) will be found to predominate in "possession" rituals with drums.

Neher's hypothesis has been accepted without further examination by a number of ethnologists and scholars of religion (e.g., Siikala, 1978) but has been questioned or rejected by ethnomusicologists investigating actual drum usage in transformation rituals. Gilbert Rouget (1977, 1985) argues, based on extensive studies of African and African American traditions, that the laboratory experiments differ greatly from the conditions and experiences of actual ceremonies; that automatic physiological causation is out of the question because most of those who hear the drumming (even the same individuals on different occasions) do not experience trance or possession; and that if Neher's quantitative predictions were correct, "then the whole of sub-Saharan Africa should be in trance from the beginning to the end of the year." But in fact, given the speeds that occur in drum music elsewhere, if Neher's (1961) dubious alternative of a lower limit of 4 beats per second were accepted, much of the world would be in perpetual trance.

While proponents and opponents of the hypothesis have tended to argue over its merits on the basis of logic and conviction, Neher's quantitative prediction has not been subjected to quantitative testing by comparison with measurements of drum rhythms in actual performances. Figure 1 shows a comparison of (A) Neher's (1962) predicted minimum tempo of 8 beats per second for "trance" rituals, with transcriptions of actual drumbeat tempos in (B) the "invitation" song to helping spirits sung by a Tamang shaman; (C) the instrumental "Invitation to the Protector of Religion" (Chos skyoṅ Spyan ʾdren ) played for the Tibetan state oracle (Gnas-chuṅ chos skyoṅ ) before he sinks into a quiescent state to receive the god Pehar; and (D) the "Song of Invitation" (Spyan ʾdren gyi dbyaṅs ) sung to the oracle just before he begins to show evidence of having been transformed into a state of conscious identity with the god.

Clearly, the minimum quantitative requirements of the hypothesis are not satisfied by two of the best-known Asian traditions that ought to fall within its intended scope. Example B of figure 1 is 58 of the required minimum speed, while Example C would have to be 280 times as fast to reach the minimum 8 beats per second. Other well-known Asian traditions (e.g., Tibetan and Newar Tantric sādhana s) likewise fail to satisfy the hypothesis; and, while one might expect to find more cases of African and African American traditions that fall in the predicted quantitative range, there are also African cases that do not meet the requirements of the hypothesis (John Blacking, n.d.). In any case, the hypothesis in its given form must be rejected, as the occurrence of exceptions to its predictions show the operation of cross-cultural variables external to the species-universal mechanisms of human physiology. The possibility cannot be excluded that a more sophisticated reformulation of a physiological-causation theory will lead to verifiable, significant results. Current research on musical and religious practices show, however, such a wide range of variation as to render the search for causal universals progressively more difficult, and also greater apparent progress in the investigation of cultural and ideological factors that seem to underlie both religious and musical practices.

Bibliography

Although drums are both musical and religious instruments, it is difficult to find studies that do not ignore or misinterpret one of these two aspects. Information is scattered in journal articles and general religious and musical studies of particular areas; and many important findings of recent researchers are still unpublished, as indicated by the number of "n.d." (no date) citations for information used in this article.

The most extensive previous general study, A. E. Crawley's article "Drums and Cymbals," in the Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, edited by James Hastings, vol. 5 (Edinburgh, 1912), is flawed by outdated and inaccurate ethnographic data and by discredited interpretive approaches. These faults are common to many nineteenth- and early twentieth-century ethnographies (and almost universal in travelers' and missionaries' accounts); while later studies have increasingly tended to treat music and religion as autonomous, mutually unintelligible domains. Thus, even such excellent ethnographic studies of drum-centered ritual traditions as Victor Turner's The Drums of Affliction: A Study of Religious Processes among the Ndembu of Zambia (Oxford, 1968) or Bruce Kapferer's A Celebration of Demons: Exorcism and the Aesthetics of Healing in Sri Lanka (Bloomington, Ind., 1983) exclude drums and their music from the depth of analytical attention paid to other components of ritual symbolism and performance.

The scientific, physical description of drums is given accurate and readable treatment in the "Terminology" section ("Membranophones," pp. 459–463) of Curt Sachs's The History of Musical Instruments (New York, 1940), an organological classic with a wealth of accurate information organized around partly outdated historical viewpoints. The most comprehensive and up-to-date organological information will be found in the New Grove Dictionary of Musical Instruments, 3 vols., edited by Stanley Sadie (New York, 1984).

The most ambitious recent effort to relate African drumming and ideology, criticized by some specialists for lack of methodological explicitness and generalization of localized West African experience to a pan-African scale, is John M. Chernoff's African Rhythm and African Sensibility (Chicago, 1979). A less exciting but perhaps more reliable ethnomusicological study, also from West Africa, is J. H. Kwabena Nketia's Drumming in Akan Communities of Ghana (Edinburgh, 1963). The classic work on "talking drums," with an old-fashioned perspective and pronounced missionary bias, is John Carrington's Talking Drums of Africa (London, 1949). Among the more technically oriented organological studies of specific regions, Olga Boone's Les tambours du Congo Belge et du Ruanda-Urundi (Tervuren, Belgium, 1951) is one of the more comprehensive. There are a number of good studies of religious and symbolic aspects of drumming-centered ritual traditions in Africa, among which Victor Turner's works (including the book already cited) are outstanding examples.

General works on Buddhist drums are unavailable; and on drum symbolism, only Rinjing Dorje and Ter Ellingson's article "Explanation of the Secret Gcod Ḍa ma ruʾ: An Exploration of Musical Instrument Symbolism," Asian Music (1979): 63–91, gives Buddhist primary source material, a text on the symbolism of a Tibetan drum. The standard work on shamanism, Mircea Eliade's Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, rev. & enl. ed. (New York, 1964), contains valuable information on the ideology and use of drums, as do various articles in Popular Beliefs and Folklore Tradition in Siberia, edited by Vilmos Diószegi, (Bloomington, 1968); Shamanism in Siberia, edited by Vilmos Diószegi and Mihaly Hoppál (Budapest, 1978); and sections of Anna-Leena Siikala's The Rite Technique of the Siberian Shaman (Helsinki, 1978). The only detailed study of music and drumming in a "classic" Asian shaman tradition is Valerie Jill Poris's "Shamanistic Music in the Bhuji River Valley of Nepal" (M.A. thesis, University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1977). Andrew Neher describes his drum-possession hypothesis in two journal articles, "Auditory Driving Observed with Scalp Electrodes in Normal Subjects," Electroencephalography and Clinical Neurophysiology 13 (June 1961): 449–451, and "A Physiological Explanation of Unusual Behavior in Ceremonies Involving Drums," Human Biology 34 (February 1962): 151–160. The best counterarguments to Neher are given by Gilbert Rouget, in a short article, "Music and Possession Trance," in The Anthropology of the Body, edited by John Blacking (London, 1977), pp. 233–239, and in a book that is so far the most complete study of its subject, Music and Trance: A Theory of the Relations between Music and Possession (Chicago, 1985).

New Sources

Ahlbäck, Tore, and Jan Bergman. The Saami Shaman Drum: Based on Papers Read at the Symposium on the Saami Shaman Drum Held at Åbo, Finland, on the 19 ^th –20 ^th of August 1988. Åbo, Finland, and Stockholm, 1991.