Chirality and Drumming

Play a drum. Rattle a tambourine. Excite any percussion instrument and you'll feel it: the sensation of chirality. The implicit duality of left and right, forward and back, beat and backbeat.

Chirality is not equality. Left and right hands are not identical. Children learn to recognize their left and right shoes, their left and right mittens, as early as they are able to dress themselves. Yet that which is chiral is indivisible from it's pair: we see one half of a chiral pairing and we immediately sense the absence of the other.

Beat and backbeat are likewise inseparable. One without reference to the other is just a single note, neither strong nor weak, neither beat or backbeat. Remove either party for a single measure - a single beat - and the entire phrase is altered. We feel the pulse stronger in its silence: the chiral pair is never dropped, never disappeared, never destroyed. Only focused and unfocused.

One of the strangest sensations novice percussionists experience is the first time they play a shaker instrument, like a tambourine or a cabasa: for the first time in thier lives, there is now a chiral difference between moving their hand forward, and moving their hand backward. Both produce a noise - it is in fact frustratingly impossible to prevent one. Every movement of a tambourine has a chiral consequence. It is never droppped, never disappeared. Only accounted for or not. The experienced rhythmist imbues their whole body with the sound and consequence of movement.