This paper seeks to explore how the work of French sociologist and philosopher Bruno Latour can impact our understanding of the percussive arts. Latour is perhaps best-known in the English-seaking arts and humanities as one of the pioneering thinkers of actor-network theory (ANT), a social methodology that focuses its attention on the individual actors that weave a social fabric (human and non-human) rather than the resultant fabric itself. At the center of his philosophy is the the concept of irreducibility: that nothing can be reduced to its relations, yet nonetheless these relations must exist for a thing to be real. The later work of Latour shifts the focus of this work from the translating, mediating social networks of ANT to metaphysical questions of being in modernity. Latour ultimately arrives at what he terms an ontological pluriverse, which he deploys for the political purpose of questioning the assumptions of Western modernity and its construction(s) of truth and knowledge.

Western Percussion, being an artform descended from the modernist impulses of the early 20th century, remains entangled, both materially and epistemically, in modernity’s motivating drives. I argue in this paper that Latour’s work may help percussionists to question our discipline’s commonly accepted ontology of action, that is, that percussion is defined by human intention above all else – “no instruments, just sticks.” It may furthermore enrich the experience of playing percussion by attuning us to the myriad agencies that construct the networks of the art form. Finally, I argue that it may help percussionists in the increasingly urgent projects of decolonization and ecological sustainability — two contemporary problems that Western percussion has a fraught relationship with. Percussionists may access Latour’s work from any number of directions be it historical, sociological, or philosophical, and I believe doing so will greatly enrich the artform throughout the ongoing century.