Why does classical music (at least from the past) lack drums?

Question

I wonder why the great classical composers from history like Mozart, Beethoven, etc. didn’t make more use of drums or percussion in general?

I mean, they did write quite a lot of bombastic pieces and did all they could to make the parts that needed it to hit hard. So why did’nt they use more than one or two bangs on a kettle drum, giving the one who played them the most boring job in the orchestra?

Also I know that a drum-kit is a rather modern invention, but couldn’t they have used different guys playing different kinds of percussion?

Also maybe I’m completely mistaken and this turns out to be a list of classical music with some blasting in it..

Edit: I’m sencerely apologising to every classical percussionist, reading the answers I clearly underestimated your role

In: 4587

Answer 1

I’m probably too late to this but none of the top comments are actually explaining *why* classical music lacked drums. It’s simple – complex percussion sounds muddy as all hell in a big echoey room, and those are the only types of rooms you would find a large crowd of people who wanted to listen to music in hundreds of years ago. Percussion in classical music has to be used sparingly. A big cymbal crash, a very clean sounding triangle, or perhaps a quick crescendo of timpani is about all you can get away with without stepping all over the other instruments. String and horn instruments, on the other hand, sound great in that environment – their potentially harsh, ‘peaky’ high end is smoothed out by the long, natural reverb tail of the room and they blend together beautifully.

The top comment (/u/MDeneka) mentions that percussion was more associated with military and folk music. These forms of music would usually be played in smaller, tighter sounding rooms (much less echo than a concert hall) or outdoors (generally no echo). In fact, drums sound great outside. This is why they’ve been so heavily used in tribal settings, and why EDM sounds great outside but would sound washy in a big, stone cathedral.

[David Byrne does a great job explaining this in his TED Talk.](https://www.ted.com/talks/david_byrne_how_architecture_helped_music_evolve?language=en)