Exploring the Role of Percussion in Music. These days we take so-called beat music, or music with a regular persistent beat stemming from percussion, so much for granted, that it is almost as though music had never been anything else, having now reached a kind of plateau of developmental excellence the absence from which of a persistent beat would be difficult if not impossible to imagine. But has it? Is the prevalence of a regular percussive beat necessarily a good thing? Certainly music has not always been based in percussive rhythms. There was a time, in Western civilization, when percussion was the exception rather than the rule, and in much of the music of Bach, Handel, Haydn, and Mozart one finds no discernible percussion at all but, rather, an absence of or, should I say, freedom from drum-like rhythms in overly melodic and harmonic compositions. It was only during the late-nineteenth century and into the early-twentieth century that what one would call classical music began to show signs of beat dependence which, in the more pronounced examples, almost reversed the rule, albeit not to an extent, arguably, that would have taken percussion to the inalienable position it occupies in jazz and rock music and literally made it de rigueur, as though an indispensable prerequisite of serious or quality music. That it is not and, to my mind, has never been. For is it not the case that what distinguishes quality serious music – call it classical – from the popular forms of music, including primitive music, is the comparative absence or paucity of percussive rhythms such that most forms of popular and primitive music take for granted. And is this not because classical music is, at its best, more sensible than sensual and somehow less an exemplification of will and spirit than of ego and soul? Is it not the case that regular persistent beats in music are an indication of that music’s moral immaturity and want of true musicality? Can it not be said that, as though in an exaggerated extrapolation from the metronome, percussive rhythms are indicative of something which is fundamentally more noise than music, and that in an age which worships power, as the contemporary age does, music will be enslaved to noise as though to an engine of devilish power which is a reflection of the heathenistic nature of the times, with its female-oriented worship of the life force and all that glorifies brute strength and will. Frankly, I have no doubt that, whatever forms these percussive rhythms take, they are fundamentally instruments of wilful instinctuality and spirited sensuality which reflect an almost fatalistic fascination with militarism and sexuality, power and glory, to the detriment, in melody and pitch, of form and contentment, or intellectuality and religious quietism. Were not contemporary music, by which is meant beat music of an electronic character, like rock, in the grip of these percussive rhythms it would hardly be contemporary in the sense of reflecting the age’s obsession with rocket-like propulsions of engine-driven matter. And yet what sort of an age is this compared with one that, like the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries, was more concerned with the welfare of the soul and of man’s final destiny? Or, like the eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, was more concerned with the freedom of the mind and of man’s capacity for reason? Surely it is something of a barbarous and philistine age which puts power and glory before form and contentment! And therefore it must be an age that, like its predecessors in the history of civilization, will be overhauled and superseded by a more sensible age, an age that does not equate musical excellence with persistent percussive beats, but had somehow learned to transcend the beat in the interests of music of a suitably synthetically artificial order. Such a return of music to something approaching the heights of classical purism is not as exaggerated as it may at first appear; for even now there are compositions of a suitably electronic order which if they do not entirely transcend percussion are at least able to sublimate it and render it subordinate to other musical considerations, incorporating it within the overall synthetic structure of their synthesizer-centred integrity. Such music is already beyond rock and other forms of beat music. It is in the process of escaping from heathenistic criteria into a sort of superchristian or supra-christian world which is more concerned with inner self-development than with expressions of outer power through not-self dominion. It is the music of psyche as opposed to soma, of the mind as opposed to the body, of culture as opposed to commerce, and it heralds an age in which, once again, percussive rhythms will be the exception to the rule as music extricates itself from the power of noise and ceases to dance to the tune or, rather, beat of a glorified metronome. I heartily commend such an age, for it will be one in which music is once again true to the self, only this time less on the middle-class basis of the intellect than on the classless basis, germane to eternity, of the soul.