Silence Breakers -Silence Shapers (abberations on percussion)
The percussionist’s table :
A concert percussionist goes on stage with a wheeled table, carrying a set of what will later produce the vocabulary of sounds required for the musical work about to be performed.
It's an assortment of objects that seem randomly grouped, irrational even ; there can be functional objects like a mixing bowl or a wood saw, a block of wood, a grater, things seeming disparate and unconnected ; but once one is aware that they re there to produce noise, they instantly become buildling blocks of a sort of language. They become tools operating in one singular realm.
The particular notion of Percussion relative to these works, is the one that presumes silence as a state prior to the event of a percussive sound: i.e. a drum punctures silence. A bell, a snap of two fingers splits the silence in two parts ; before and after it.
It is like a very primordial and binary state of the begginings of a language : not dissimilar to a 0s and 1s system.Then comes rhythm, a pattern repetitive or not at all, but carrying information which we instantly decode as emotive, dynamic, structural, syntactical.
This notion of percussive ‘tools’ is also an idea of intimacy ; the word ἅπτω - (haptics ) means primarily to touch, but this is a notion of touching in order to identify an object, its nature, its soundness : Like a cat taps gently on a surface with its paws well before it climbs on it, to test whether its rigid enough to hold its weight, to get a feeling of what its made of.