Drumming at the Edge of Magic: A Journey into the Spirit of Percussion by Mickey Hart; Jay Stevens; Fredric Lieberman
Review by: David Dodd
Notes, Second Series, Vol. 48, No. 1 (Sep., 1991), pp. 106-107
Published by: Music Library Association
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/941797
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own artistic independence. We watch with equal fascination as Hindemith (in Mathis der Maler) and Beethoven (in the Eroica Symphony) wrestle with the political and musical implications of their work. As Kramer sums up: "What Beethoven really buries (with his Funeral March) is not Bonaparte, nor even his own conflicting attitudes toward Napoleon, but the classical style in music" (p. 84).
On a smaller scale, Listen to the Music serves up platesful of delicious crudites, telling us, for example, that Mahler's name was misspelled Malheur- French for "misfortune"-on posters during an illstarred tour of Paris.
Kramer, who relies as much on his own aesthetic and musicological judgment as on received opinion, presents more than his share of insights. In Ravel's experimental Bolero(the success of v hich astonished even the composer), he sees the roots of today's electronic music. He makes a useful and fundamental distinction between the spirit of invention (which, he says, motivated Ravel and Bach) and the need for selfexpression, which drove the Romantic composers. He even toys with the notion that the subconscious communicates with the conscious via the creative act, as witnessed by Mahler's eerie premonition of his own demise in his dark and deathly Sixth Symphony, written at what was ostensibly the height of his health and happiness.
Most relevant to the non-musician is Kramer's affirmation, revealed in a marvelous quote by insurance executive and composer Charles Ives (p. 329), of how central, if sublimated, our aesthetic sense is to the conduct of our daily lives.
A work of this size is not without its faults, however. As our insights deepen, so does our sense of deja vu. We learn seven or eight times (once for each symphony, it seems) of the contrast between Bruckner's uneventful outward and turbulent inner life; of Schoenberg's inheritance of Brahms's artistic mantle, if not his sounds; of Schubert's lyricism at odds with classical form-but at least such repetition has a positive affect on pedagogy. The problem of scope is more serious: even with Kramer's reasonable delimitation of "most per- formed [non-operatic] music" as the criterion for admission, one wonders if Heitor Villa-Lobos's Bachianas Brasileirasand Ra-
vel's Left-Hand Piano Concerto have really gained more performances than any orchestral works by Ralph Vaughan Williams, Carl Maria von Weber, Nikolai RimskyKorsakov, and William Walton-or even George Gershwin-all of which are conspicuous by their absence.
Alfine, though, Kramer's book is a worthy resource for future program-note writers as well as novices seeking deeper enjoyment of orchestral literature. Quotations from primary sources, including the composers themselves, are liberal and faithfully attributed. Although the lack of an index and a cursory bibliography will limit the book's usefulness, savoring its pages is like exploring an old attic trunk, where new or half-forgotten delights may be found in every corner.
JAYWURTS
San Francisco
Drumming at the Edge of Magic: A Journey into the Spirit of Percussion.
ByMickey
Hart,with Jay Stevens and Fredric Lieberman. San Francisco: Harper, 1990. [263 p. ISBN 0-06250372-3. $35.00; ISBN 0-06250374-X. $19.95, pbk. 1 cassette tape: ISBN 0-06-250415-0. $9.95.]
Mickey Hart has taken seriously the role of the amateur scholar-amateur in the finest sense-and has produced a book that is intensely personal and at the same time revealing of the wider traditions of per- cussion. Hart is one of the two drummers for the rock group, the Grateful Dead, and has always been the more overtly adventurous of the two. His adventuring has taken him around the world in search of drums and drummers and into research libraries to learn about the evolution of drums.
In the process, he has accumulated a huge collection of percussion instruments, many of which he incorporates into his own performances. He has also made a number of field recordings, using sophisticated recording equipment in the backwaters of the world, and compiled vast amounts of information, including drum myths, history, and theoretical speculation. Here he writes about the process of accumulation and of
Book Reviews
his own evolution as a drummer, in a book that would serve as an autobiography, except that it goes further and becomes a primer for anyone seriously interested in drums, or, more generally, in music. That is why this book will find an audience far beyond the circle of Grateful Dead aficionados.
Hart's father was a champion rudimental drummer, and Mickey Hart's own foundation begins with rudimental drumming. Drummingat theEdge of Magic is structured in such a way that Hart leaps back and forth between the narrative of his own evolution as a drummer and the history of the various influences that have shaped that evolution. Thus, he pays special attention to shamanic traditions, African sources, military drumming, Indian classical drumming, and jazz.
Through each chapter runs Hart's obsession with the origin of drumming as a human activity and with its deeper meaning. In concerts, Hart has been known to wear a T-shirt proclaiming, "God is Sound," and this reverent attitude makes itself clearly felt in both his performing and his writing. In his prologue, Hart writes that "fifteen or twenty billion years ago the
blank page of the universe exploded and the beat began, since what emerged from that thick soup of neutrinos and photons were rhythmic pulses vibrating through empty space, keying the formation of galaxies, solar systems, planets, us" (p. 11). He continues, "In the beginning was noise. And noise begat rhythm. And rhythm begat everything else. This is the kind of cosmology a drummer can live with" (p. 12).
A moment of frustration occurs for the reader when Hart says "I also discovered that the first drummer whose name we actually know was a woman, the granddaughter of a Sumerian king" (p. 75). He then neglects to tell us what her name was.
Drummingat the Edge of Magic, the first of two projected books, was issued together with a cassette tape titled At theEdge (compact disc and cassette also available on the Rykodisc label). Hart provides an excellent bibliography and always credits the scholars whose work he uses in his quest. I look forward to his continued writing.
DAVIDDODD
Benicia Public Library, Benicia, California
VOCAL MUSIC
Blake Set to Music: A Bibliography of Musical Settings of the Poems and Prose of William Blake. By Donald Fitch. (University of California Publications in Catalogs and Bibliographies, 5.) Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990. [xxix, 281 p. ISBN 0-520-09734-3. $40.00.]
Donald Fitch's BlakeSettoMusic is a welcome addition to the body of reference material that seeks to document the connection between literature and music. Research that makes material accessible to the critic and performer is essential, and even a cursory reading of this volume will indicate the extensive effort Fitch has devoted to his task, begun in 1976 and concluded in 1989. His labors have resulted in 1,412 entries (arranged alphabetically by surname of the composer) listing music connected with Blake (including some con-
trafacta). Prefacing the entries are a List of Sources, a List of Abbreviations, and an Introduction, and following the entries are an Index of Blake Titles, an Index of Performing Combinations, an Index of Translated Texts, and an Index of Names (including editors, arrangers, translators, performers, et al.). The design of the book is sensible and clear; it is, without question, easy to use-a vital consideration-and an occasional spacing problem (see, for instance, p. 168-the second line of the reference to The New Hymnal for American Youth)causes no difficulty for the reader.
Individual entries frequently offer a high level of detail: in addition to standard bibliographical data (with vocal and instrumental specifications) and an indication of which texts are involved, they often include details of first performance, recordings, reviews, brief notes regarding the composer or biographical references, and the like. On occasion the author provides a succinct crit-
