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A substantial body of musical literature for solo and ensemble percussion was created in the twentieth century. This book examines percussion literature’s evolution: how it came to be and the styles that composers embraced as they produced a large body of music for percussion instruments alone. The focus is on the music that was created, the various genres that arose, and the composers who contributed seminal works. The question is posed: What world and cultural events brought composers to reject the past and embrace modernism? The twentieth century is notable for its many technological advances as well as for the global conflicts that disrupted the lives of millions. Both had significant impact on the arts. Tape recorders, synthesizers, and computers became useful tools for the avant-garde composer. Artists, exiled from their homelands by the war’s devastation, arrived in the Americas with new ideas to share. On the West Coast of the United States, composers found that percussion music was an ideal accompaniment for a nascent modern dance movement. The end of World War II brought monumental change to higher education and to music education in the States. College-trained percussionists became an important resource for the modern composer, who contributed new solo and ensemble works to the percussion canon. The twentieth century witnessed the rise of the percussive arts to a status equal to that of other instrumental groups.

This book is an ethnography of spirit possession ceremonies and accompanying musical practices in the rural Ndau-speaking communities surrounding Chipinge, Zimbabwe. Collectively called madhlozi, these spirits are the “outsider spirits” of distant social encounters that have shaped Ndau identity and history. The purpose of this book is to explain how musicking during ceremonial life in rural Ndau communities in Zimbabwe is meaningfully experienced during a single spirit possession ceremony. It investigates the immediacy of musical experience and the ways in which the ongoing present of ceremonial performance becomes emotional and socially salient. It provides a model rooted in ethnography and semiotic analysis that illuminates the tight relationship between sound, meaning, experience, and emotion, engaging with three overlapping bodies of knowledge: Ndau spiritual life, semiotics, and studies of emotion and affect. Each chapter in Part II focuses on a specific category of spirits and emphasizes an element of semiotic theory to build a model for exploring affect, emotional experience, and ceremonial efficacy: objects, signs, effects, and continuity. The purpose of the ceremonies I describe and analyze is to transform possibility into actuality, desires into reality. Music is uniquely suited to facilitate experiential transformations such as this. Situated within the historical, spiritual, musical, and political contexts of contemporary Ndau life in Zimbabwe, this book explains how important the experience of meaning is to ceremonial life.