CONUN-DRUM

This week we puzzle over the mysterious absence of this ancient instrument from modern ritual hereabouts…

I think it was last Saturday’s match against Newcastle.  The Gunners’ drummers were pounding away so loudly that for a few short minutes they almost drowned out the heartbeats of the anxious Gooners, still clinging to the dream of winning the Premier League for the first time in twenty-two years. 

The day before I’d attended the funeral of a true West End legend, where, appropriately enough, the service was punctuated with numbers from some of the shows that he’d helped catapult into Musical Theatre history.

But no drums.

In fact I can’t recall attending a single memorial-type service when drums had been used to

to send-off the Dearly Departed.

So I peered into the archaeological record for evidence of when the drums were first used to mark Humankind’s march through time and found a plethora of Palaeolithic flutes from  around 35,000 to 40,000 years ago…

But again no drums.

Archaeologists did apparently find ‘a set of decorated mammoth bones and two possible percussive beaters at the Gravettian site of Mezin, Ukraine, dating back about 20,000 years.’ 

And the bones did ‘show signs of repeated striking, suggesting they may have been used as a lithophone (stone musical instruments) or percussion instrument.’ *

But then we need to leap forward 14,000 years, to Neolithic China, before the familiar (and highly perishable) vibrating membranes make their first appearance in the record.**  

'Archaeological findings offer glimpses into the earliest manifestations of drums, with significant discoveries dating back to the Neolithic period in China around 5500 BC. Among these discoveries are primitive drums crafted from hollowed-out logs and covered with alligator skins, reflecting the resourcefulness and craftsmanship of ancient artisans. Similar percussion instruments have been unearthed in various ancient cultures worldwide, from Mesopotamia and Ancient Egypt to the indigenous tribes of the Americas.'**

But I cannot believe that the haunting and uniquely human patter of drumbeats didn’t play a part in marking the parting of loved ones much, much further back in time.***

‘Humans have the ability to entrain their movements to an external rhythm such as a beating drum. Such rhythmic entrainment of periodic body movements to rhythmic sound patterns is a fundamental component of music and dance, themselves integral elements of natural human behaviour. Many animals move their limbs in metrical alternating fashion, but the underlying motor pattern generators are mostly automatic and refer only to the animal’s own bodies.  Yet in a few arthropod (invertebrates like insects and spiders) and anuran (amphibians like frogs and toads) species the males use periodic movements to create acoustic courtship and can synchronise these sounds to the signals of other nearby males. However, Homo sapiens is the only known species where both sexes engage in spontaneous synchronisation of periodic body movements to acoustic rhythmic pulses. Furthermore, this rather unusual skill among primates develops relatively early in human ontogeny (lifetime development) long before sexual maturity.’

Of course drums do play a significant role in funeral rituals across the planet, including West Africa, Central and South Africa, The Caribbean, Latin America, the indigenous peoples of North America and Canada, East and South East Asia, Tibet and the Himalayas…

But here in the UK, as in France and Germany, the drums only play their part in military funerals.

And it may well be that it was early Christianity’s more general prohibition on musical instruments, later repealed for organs, (between the 10^th to 12^th century) and tambourines (between the 18^th and 19^th century) that contributed to the drum’s exclusion:

John Chrysostom (c. 347-407): 

“Where there is singing with instruments, there also is drunkenness and disorder.”

Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225 – 7 March 1274)

“The Church does not use musical instruments… lest she seem to Judaise.”

The Last Laugh

I can think of only one celebrated funeral where the drums played a key part, and that also had a strong military connection.  Aircraftman Second Class Sellers served as a drummer entertaining the troops during WWII before emerging as that towering colossus of The Business of Pleasure, Peter Sellars.  According to the anecdotes of his fellow Goons, Spike Milligan and Harry Secombe (which I paraphrase and extemporise wildly) there was a respectful silence within the congregation at Golders Green Crematorium as Glenn Miller’s ‘In The Mood’ started to tinkle it’s familiar d0-do, do-do, do-do, da-da, dobedy-do. And then one by one the Goons startled to chuckle.  They knew that Sellers hated the song, and he knew that they couldn’t stand it either, so the dirty rotten swine thought he'd inflict it on his friends one last time while he himself wouldn’t be around to hear it.

DT

1^st May, 2026

* Sergei N. Bibikov’s 1981 monograph, Drevneishie Muzykal'nye Instrumenty (The Oldest Musical Instruments)

 ** Stefan Joubert, London Drum Institute website, April 2024

 *** Sebastian Kirschner and Michael Tomasello, Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, December 2007.