What Inspired Me

Introduction

Percussion is used widely across folk and popular musics around the world. The kakko of Japanese gagaku, the drum ensembles of the Ewe people in West Africa, the frame drums of the Middle East, and — as we'll see later — jazz and rock. In many cultures, drums and percussive instruments have carried the very skeleton of the music.

And yet, in the Western classical tradition, percussion has remained almost entirely confined to the timpani — an instrument whose role is essentially supporting, reinforcing harmony rather than driving it. Western music, freed from the church and expected to hold paying audiences spellbound in the new venue of the public concert, never made pulse-driven rhythm its protagonist. Percussion instruments certainly did reach Europe. So why did they never sit at the center of the Western art-music canon?

Digging into this question, there's no single answer. At least four distinct historical layers, each with its own logic, are stacked on top of one another.

Layer One: Theological Suspicion of the Body

Remarkably, Europe's wariness toward pulsing, bodily rhythm was already firmly established well before any contact with the Ottoman Empire or Moorish Spain — as early as the fourth and fifth centuries, in the writings of the Church Fathers. In the Confessions, Augustine confesses his own conflicted anguish over the sheer sensory pleasure he took in hearing sacred chant. The Church Fathers dismissed instrumental music in general as a “Judaizing” concession, and Thomas Aquinas later summarized this position by stating that the Church does not use instruments in praising God, lest it appear to be falling back into “Jewish ways.”

What was being excluded here was not the instrument of any particular ethnic group. Rhythm that moves the body was tied to sensory pleasure and pagan ritual (the cult of Dionysus, for instance) and ranked below rational, spiritual music — vocal music, chant without pulse. It's no coincidence that the theoretical foundation of Western music has, since the Middle Ages, been built consistently around relationships of pitch — mode, harmony, counterpoint, tonality. Unpitched percussion was never given a place of meaning within the grammar of this compositional language to begin with.

Importantly, this hierarchy never fully suppressed European folk culture. Tarantism in southern Italy — a trance-inducing healing ritual built around frenzied, drum-driven dance — was documented well into the twentieth century, and the adufe, a type of frame drum, survived as a women's tradition in the folk music of Portugal and Galicia. So, more precisely: Europe didn't lack an ecstatic, percussion-driven culture. Rather, the institutions above it — church and court — consistently pushed it to the margins.

Layer Two: Marginalization by Class and Gender

Throughout the Middle Ages, the tabor (as in “pipe and tabor”) was the instrument of itinerant entertainers and jesters, while the frame drum, going back to temple ritual in ancient Mesopotamia, was consistently coded as “an instrument women play.” These instruments certainly persisted — but always as markers tied to a particular class, a particular gender, and were never promoted to the status of structural material for composers to work with. They reached Europe, but they were never internalized.

Layer Three: A New Layer — Orientalism

As contact with the Ottoman Empire intensified in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries, ethnic othering was layered onto this existing hierarchy. The drums, cymbals, and triangle of the Janissary military band became fashionable in Europe as “Turkish style” (alla turca), leaving traces in Mozart's Die Entführung aus dem Serail and Haydn's Symphony No. 100, “Military.” But this was no more than a surface-level borrowing of “exotic” signifiers — the drum was never integrated into the structural skeleton of Western music.

In other words: the foundation was a theological value judgment, which was then institutionalized as a structural norm — that pitch-centered writing was the only legitimate musical language — onto which ethnic othering was later superimposed. It makes the most sense to see “a problem of musical structure” and “a gaze of ethnocentrism” not as two separate causes, but as the same underlying hierarchy of values expressed in different forms at different moments in history.

The Turning Point: The Twentieth Century's Liberation from Within

This structure first began to crack from the inside in the early-twentieth-century avant-garde. Edgard Varèse's Ionisation (1931) was, as far as we know, the first Western concert work written for an ensemble of entirely unpitched percussion. Bartók, and then a series of percussion works by John Cage, followed.

But the real turning point came with minimalism. In 1970, Steve Reich actually traveled to Ghana, where he took daily lessons in drumming from Ewe master drummers at the University of Ghana, Legon. Drumming (1971), which grew out of that experience, transplants directly into the skeleton of Western compositional language the structural principle of Ewe drum ensembles: multiple patterns sounding simultaneously, their downbeats deliberately never coinciding. This is categorically different from eighteenth-century “Turkish style.” Where that was a surface borrowing, Reich actually acquired the technique and internalized its underlying principle.

That said, even this “learning and integration” hasn't escaped criticism — the argument that it amounts to a more sophisticated form of appropriation, in which a Western composer extracts a non-Western tradition and folds it into his own authoritative artistic language. The asymmetry by which Reich's reception in the West didn't necessarily translate into recognition or standing for the Ghanaian musicians who taught him remains a lingering shadow within this long history.

Why Did It “Internationalize” in the Twentieth Century?

Another important question arises here. Why did jazz, rock, and minimalism manage to achieve a genuinely global reach in the twentieth century, carrying percussive vocabulary with them?

One hypothesis holds that the link between percussion and ecstatic, religious trance is a near-universal phenomenon found across many of the world's cultures, and that this drove the internationalization. The classic study of the relationship between music and trance, Gilbert Rouget's Music and Trance, puts a careful check on part of this hypothesis. Having surveyed a worldwide body of ethnographic material, Rouget rejects, as pseudoscience, the popular theory that drumming rhythms directly and neurophysiologically induce religious ecstasy (trance), concluding that what trance means, and when it occurs, varies enormously by cultural system of meaning.

But this doesn't mean every response to rhythm is purely a cultural construct. Below the level of religious ecstasy, there's a more basic phenomenon: entrainment, the synchronization of brain activity and bodily movement to a steady external pulse. Research shows that the brains of eight-month-old infants already entrain to musical rhythm, and “beat induction” — the capacity to actively perceive a pulse in an auditory stimulus — is widely reported as a foundational, broadly shared feature of human music cognition. Among animals, this ability is strikingly rare, which makes it reasonable to treat it as a near-universal physiological substrate of our species.

So, to be precise: the strong claim that “drumming carries a universal power to induce religious ecstasy” is hard to support. But the weaker claim that “the human body has a basic physiological tendency to entrain to a beat” has real grounding. This distinction matters for the comparison with architecture that follows.

What has stronger empirical grounding is a far more mundane and concrete set of political and economic mechanisms.

As for jazz's own origins: its percussive core owes less to “the collective will of multiethnic America” than to the specific colonial legal quirks of Congo Square in New Orleans. Under French and Spanish colonial custom, enslaved people were granted Sundays off, and West African drumming rhythms were passed down there without being outlawed — a site of cultural resistance under oppression.

As for its international spread: there was a deliberate Cold War cultural diplomacy policy, beginning in 1956, in the form of the U.S. State Department's “Jazz Ambassadors” program — sending figures like Dizzy Gillespie and Louis Armstrong around the world to counter Soviet anti-American propaganda. Voice of America radio broadcasts underpinned the effort.

A Comparison with Architecture: A Single Style, or Fusion Through a Hub?

It's worth drawing one more line of comparison here. Another, quite different kind of “internationalization” happened in the twentieth century: modernist architecture in glass and reinforced concrete. The idiom of Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe redrew the skyline of cities from Chandigarh, India, to the new downtowns of Southeast Asia.

But this architectural internationalization can't be explained by exactly the same mechanism as music's. There's a decisive difference between the two.

In architecture, what spread across the world was a single, uniform style. Glass and concrete could be assembled the same way regardless of climate, cultural background, or whatever traditional building style already existed on a given site. The physical material itself carries no “content” to fuse with local tradition. That's precisely why modernist architecture replaced local skylines with essentially the same shape — the glass box — wherever it landed. Internationalization here meant homogenization, replacement.

Music is different. As the previous section suggested, entrainment — the basic physiological tendency to synchronize with a beat — appears to be a fairly universal human trait. But when this “universal engine” was exported from the United States, the century's great hub of international exchange, it didn't replace local traditions with a uniform shape the way architecture did. Instead, it fused with local musical traditions everywhere it went, branching into different forms in different places. Jazz crossed into France and became Django Reinhardt's gypsy swing; it fused with Cuban rhythm to become Afro-Cuban jazz; in Japan it produced the distinctive culture of the jazz kissa. Minimalism followed the same pattern — Reich absorbed the structure of Ewe drumming from Ghana, Glass drew on the cyclical rhythms of Indian tala, and the composers who followed fused the idiom further with their own local musical vocabularies. Rock's countless local variants worldwide likely reflect the same structure.

So where modernist architecture was a case of “a single form blanketing the world,” twentieth-century American music was a case of “a single universal driving force — the physiological tendency to entrain to rhythm — passing through a hub nation and fusing with local traditions into countless different shapes.” Homogenization versus diversification: this difference, I think, is exactly what separates architecture's internationalization from music's. The fact that minimalism, jazz, and rock each branched into utterly different musics in different parts of the world, while still sharing “the same engine” underneath, points to a kind of universality specific to music — one that a single spreading style, of the kind we see in architecture, simply can't account for.

Why Didn't It Spread During the Colonial Era?

A contrasting fact emerges here. European classical music, despite centuries of colonial contact, almost never took root as a local culture in the places Europe colonized. The opera houses the French built in Hanoi, Saigon, and Haiphong in French Indochina were, scholars note, met with local indifference, and ended up “making the distance separating the colony from metropolitan France even more apparent” rather than bridging it. The opera house in Manaus, Brazil, was likewise an enclave for settlers alone, built on the exploitation of Indigenous labor. Audiences were nearly always confined to a colonial elite fluent in French or versed in Western manners, and the music never made contact with local musical traditions.

What this contrast reveals is that cultural transmission can't be explained by the appeal of the music alone. Colonialism as a system was designed to maintain a permanent hierarchical difference between colonizer and colonized; it had no structural will to share culture on equal terms. Jazz, by contrast, became an international common language in the twentieth century precisely because Cold War politics required newly decolonized nations to be won over as equal allies — and because, on the receiving end, people made an active choice to embrace it.

Conclusion

The history of percussion's exclusion from classical music cannot be reduced to a single cause. Theological suspicion of the body, marginalization by class and gender, and ethnic othering — several distinct logics of exclusion happened to point in the same direction, layering on top of one another to shape the norms we inherit today as “classical music.” And when that norm finally began to crack from within, it wasn't through some passing aesthetic whim, but through the concrete practice of composers who actually traveled to non-Western traditions and approached them as equal students.

Beyond that lies the twentieth century itself. A fairly universal human tendency — entrainment to a beat — genuinely exists, and when it was exported around the world by way of the United States, that century's great hub of international exchange, it didn't replace local traditions with a uniform shape the way modernist architecture did. Instead, it fused with musical traditions everywhere it landed, branching into countless different musics. The fact that jazz, rock, and minimalism each took on utterly different shapes in different parts of the world, while still sharing the same underlying drive, is itself the story of this particular kind of universality. It wasn't a single style blanketing the world — it was one universal engine opening outward into diversity, through countless encounters with local traditions.

To love Western classical music while also staying aware that it is the product of this history of exclusion — these two things are not in contradiction. The tension Tōru Takemitsu spent a lifetime working through in November Steps — the recognition that Eastern and Western musical traditions shouldn't be forced into harmony, but held side by side while preserving their differences — was, perhaps, one honest way of answering to this long history.