Are drummers not musicians because they don’t play melodies and harmonies?
Q: What do you call someone who hangs around with musicians?
A: A drummer.
[0] https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/music/2021/08/2...
It feels almost as if the answer is "they are a component of the whole, but not musicians by themselves". i.e. the beat can't be music by itself, but the vocals for example, can.
I don't fully believe that though, and am leaning more towards a beat being able to be music by itself too. You can see my dilemma though :P
Just try getting a computer to play the notes of some of your favourite tunes with equal - or, better, random - duration and weighting if you want to be convinced of that. Also observe that music without melody can be found everywhere, from rap to Steve Reich to the Kodo Drummers, but to exclude rhythm relegates you to the really out there stuff like 4'33" (complete silence) or music composed of randomly timed or continuously varying sounds.
We have perfectly good terms to distinguish between rhythm and melody such as, you know, "rhythm" and "melody". Your instinctive desire to define "music" so as to somehow exclude rhythm is simply wrong.
Steve Reich would dispute this, with gusto. You can only possibly make the claim that he ever composed non-melodic sound in his earliest years (e.g. "Come Out"), but even then he was fascinated by the implicit melodic signatures of otherwise non-melodic music (realized later in a piece like Different Trains, where he explicitly has instruments play the melody of spoken words).
Or, I just spent a while whistling a long to take the a train at the end of https://youtu.be/crZ8ALG3tm4
.. just think about it with an open mind, or try to even defend that drummers are musicians. I think most definitions of musicians don't include drummers much more than the costume designers or the publishers. (They work in the music industry, make music better, but can't and don't create music themselves alone.) I lean towards that they are not musicians.
Also if GGGP doesn't classify hiphop or rap as music, then the "but the drummers are usually classified as musicians too" argument doesn't work on many levels.
I would be very interested to see any published definition of “musician” or “music” in a dictionary that would exclude drums.
The comparison of drummers to costume designers and publishers is so weak that I find it hard to believe you actually think this.
I am also glad that you brought the conversation back to rap. My original analogy of rap to drumming wasn’t very good, because a huge majority of rap music does have melody, harmony, form, and rhythm, no different than any other genre of music.
For reference, this is at the top of the charts today: https://youtu.be/I4DjHHVHWAE
What's harder to decide, IMO, is whether a drum solo really constitutes "music".
If rap isn't music, then is a drum solo also not music?
Personally, I can't stand most rap, but I also get bored with drum solos and usually skip them, even if I otherwise really love the drum parts of the band's other songs.
That is not hard to decide. Of course a drum solo is music.
Rap is almost all rhythm, almost no harmony or melody. Drums are all rhythm, no harmony or melody. How the hell is that "reactionary"? It's just a basic fact.
regardless it's no fact, even the rapper very frequently uses melodic elements. you seem ignorant of it and have no ear for it.
analogue - the thing which is compared
analogy - the act of comparing
in this case you'd use "analogy", as in "this is an excellent analogy ..."
the analogue is the musical characteristics of the drums, in reference to musical styles, moving from style to instruments by, well, analogy.