Instruments

Drums

Striking a membrane stretched over a cavity is perhaps the world's oldest way of organizing sound, and in many cultures today, drums still have ceremonial uses that Westerners would not consider specifically musical. There are countless variations in shape, construction, and sound. Though nearly universal, drums for centuries played only a minimal role in the Western classical tradition; one seventeenth-century compendium of instruments does not even mention them. The familiar bass drum was imported to Europe in emulation of Turkish military bands. It was in the late eighteenth century that drums began to appear regularly in classical music; Mozart's opera Die Entführung aus dem Serail was among the first works to feature them. Since then, drums and percussion in general have increased in importance within the classical tradition. In the world of popular music, the invariably plural form ("drums") indicates that drums are generally played in sets of more than one. Indeed a pop drummer generally employs a battery of several instruments, some of them not drums at all, to produce a variety of timbres and pitches. There are electric drums that pass percussive sounds through electronic amplifiers and a mixing board in the same manner as with other electric instruments, but they are less commonly used than such pop mainstays as the electric guitar and the electric piano, having been largely supplanted by drum programming.