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
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Classical percussionist here. Percussion instruments weren’t really part of the western classical idiom until later. With the exception of timpani (commonly used in Mozart’s and Beethoven’s music), like others have said, percussion was mostly reserved for military use and folk music from other cultures. The first use of a percussion section was the famous finale of Beethoven’s 9th, where he was trying to replicate the sound of a Janissary (Turkish) band. He wrote for bass drum, cymbals, and triangle, which would have been much different “versions” of those instruments than we know today.
It wasn’t really until the mid-late 1800s that we see percussion being fully utilized in western classical music, but even then, they were borrowed from other cultures and used to mimic folk music from those traditions (the Nutcracker is quintessential “I heard this instrument in a far away land and I’ll try to replicate it in a symphony” with Tchaikovsky’s use of percussion in the second half).
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