This Drum Is a Place

“This Drum Is a Place” seeks to explore the ontological and ethical implications of the post-instrumental practice, a recent theoretical and aesthetic movement within Western art music. As understood by its practitioners, the post-instrumental practice celebrates the ambiguous relationship between objects and instruments, bodies and technologies, and the erosion of disciplinary boundaries. Many of the foremost theorists and practitioners of this movement are percussionists, and so this article argues that many of the tenets and ambitions of the post-instrumental practice find their roots within 20th-century modernist percussion. To illustrate, this article begins with a phenomenology of percussion objects as they are understood by percussionists, and how the themes of interchangeability and human intention lie at the center of their ontology. This article argues that post-instrumental practice runs the risk of sharing the same ethical problems of modernist percussion, particularly in the realm of colonization and appropriation, if the philosophical implications of its aesthetic ideology go ignored. Instead of assuming instruments as anchors rooted to classical instrumental disciplines (the traditional view), or as more fluid, abstract conveyors of human action (the modernist view), this article turns to recent anti-reductionist philosophy in order to paint the image of an instrument as a place—one whose meaning is irreducible to either context. This metaphor, along with the philosophies behind it, is intended to cast fresh light on discussions of decoloniality in contemporary music and to encourage further speculation on how instruments/objects can be better understood and shared.