I picked up the drums about a year ago now, and I find it to be a great outlet for dealing with the various anxieties inherent in living. It feels great to be able to keep a beat, learn new patterns, and see myself progress. Yet, in spite of hours and hours of practicing, and occasional improvements in timing or technique, I’ll never reach the standard I’m up against – that is, the mathematical standard of the metronome. As my bandmates and “friends” never tire of reminding me, I can be replaced for about $25 at Wal-Mart.

The metronome, and its offspring, the drum machine, never tires, nor does it ever lose the beat after a particularly complex fill. It merely drones steadily along, each beat reminding me of my inevitable and inescapable failure.

At first I resisted the machine – after all, the Jazz genre is all about forsaking standard timing. Ella Fitzgerald never quite stays on beat, and this “imperfection” is beautiful, I think. But blues and rock patterns (and at their essence, Jazz patterns too), while complex and varied, are inevitably mathematical in nature, and my friends need a constant to play against. The beauty and aesthetic elements so important to music have been supplanted by the tyranny of the clock. Is there no way out of this?

Now, I’m told that after enough practice one begins to develop an “internal metronome,” but I’m not even sure if I want this. I feel like I’m in some backwards universe – instead of the drum machine attempting to mimic “organic” music, the organism must mimic the machine. So called “canned beats” sound dead to me, and I suppose that’s because they are. I think that’s why I dislike a lot of 80’s music, since that decade saw an explosion in the use of synthetic instruments. Well, that and the hair.

At the same time, as I said, drums keep the beat, and the guitarist and bassist need something to play along to. Numerous attempts have been made to develop “arrhythmic” music, but only in the “ambient” or “noise” genres, which aren’t what I’d like to play.

Here’s a very interesting CD I came across, called “Music for the Dying: Non-melodic and arrhythmic music to soothe the dying.” In my Rhetoric of Music course, we learned that this sort of music is linked with the Divine, as time is a human construct; God isn’t confined by time nor space.

Not sure if I have much of a “critical” goal here. But perhaps my fight with mathematics in my drumming is representative of the standards imposed upon all of us in one way or another – worth or greatness or what have you must be measurable, quantifiable, verifiable. I can drum along to a metronome now, which is good, but I’m also confined by it. Mathematical structures provide certainty and security, but so do prisons and dictatorships.