Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, February 6, 1993 TAG: 9302060241
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: N.Y. Times News Service
DATELINE: PLAINFIELD, N.J. LENGTH: Medium
WOMEN FIND RELIEF, GROWTH MAKING NOISE
When she first laid a hand on an African drum at a music festival three years ago, Penny Gnesin set off, with a gentle thud, on a complex journey through rhythm and consciousness.It has taken her far from the rat-a-tat cadences of high school marching bands into the growing ranks of women discovering drumming as a means of spiritual transformation, stress relief and personal growth.
Whether it comes through the meditation of a long drumming session or from the plain exhilaration of making noise, Gnesin and other women, including the members of a drumming circle that she formed here, say they have tapped into something with an uncanny ability to transform.
"Our culture does not allow women to make noise," said Gnesin, a 32-year-old free-lance musician. "You remember when you were a kid and when mom and dad weren't looking, you'd jump on the bed? Drumming is like doing something we're not supposed to do, and it feels great."
Gnesin's drumming circle, which meets twice monthly at the First Unitarian Society in Plainfield, is one of many such groups sounding off across the country at colleges, women's retreats, health fairs and craft shows.
"Something is happening out there," said Layne Redmond, a Manhattan-based drumming instructor and recording artist who has led workshops at such varied places as the Sam Ash Music Institute in Edison, at a retreat for nuns in upstate New York, and at the Esalen Institute, a personal growth center in Big Sur, Calif.
Women say that what is drawing them to drumming is quite different from the resurgence of interest in drumming among men, an outgrowth of theories about masculinity popularized by Robert Bly, author of the book "Iron John."
Bly talks of the "wildman" - a primal, spontaneous being within every man that has been suppressed by the industrial and corporate culture and can be resurrected in a variety of ways, including drumming.
Women often first come to drumming because they are interested in multiculturalism and music, Gnesin said.
Gnesin, a pianist and choral instructor, said, for example, that she was attracted to the African and Latin rhythms because they were a looser and freer form of expression than the more melodic and structured music in which she had been formally trained. Now her drumming has become a tool for personal growth.
"Many of us are afraid," she said. "We somehow believe our own rhythms in drumming or dancing are not good enough. Drumming is about reclaiming and recapturing the feminine divine."
"Women don't even know this is their heritage to reclaim," said Redmond.
More likely, she said, the opposite is true: Tradition is being created. "We truly have no meaningful ritual right now," she said. "People have a need to create their own."
Noting that many of her students are older women, she said: "Women are determined not to end their lives as their mothers have. They're often alone and looking for something meaningful for the company of other women."