ABSTRACT
Multiple percussion as a force to be reckoned with in contemporary music began about the same time that tonality became less dominant. roughout the course of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, percussion instruments served essentially a single purpose, that of giving dramatic and coloristic emphasis to structural harmonic movement. e nature of the tonal language practiced by classical and romantic European composers meant that percussion sounds had to be folded into the limited timbral, rhythmic, and melodic rhetoric of the orchestra.
