ABSTRACT
From the opening title sequence of the 1990 pilot to the enigmatic reprise of “Audrey’s Dance” in Part 16 of The Return, the modern drum kit plays a prominent role in the original music of Twin Peaks. This chapter explores the instrument’s idiosyncratic usage throughout the first series (1990–91), the film (1992), and The Return (2017), focusing on session jazz drummer Grady Tate’s memorable solo cues. I propose that the drumming in these cues forms a musical thread that connects all three iterations of Twin Peaks, providing a distinctive temporal framework for Angelo Badalamenti’s scoring and David Lynch’s idiosyncratic direction. This framework has a direct impact on shot pacing, diegetic logic, and tone, particularly in scenes involving the series’ unique sense of comedy; yet it also figures within more complex constructions of time that emerge when we read Twin Peaks as a whole. I begin with a survey of drum scoring in the original series and film soundtracks, examining specific techniques in Grady Tate’s solo cues, scenic contexts in which they emerge, and how they impact the temporality of a given scene. Moving to The Return, I analyze how Lynch and his collaborators use drumming to link the later series with its predecessors and how distinct changes in scoring mark its unsettled relationship with the past. Here I place drumming, particularly the loop-like sound of brush-stick snare patterns, in conversation with Twin Peaks’ broader temporal politics of repetitive cycles and cyclical time. Like the rhythmic hum of the Palmer house ceiling fan or a phonograph needle scratching on a spinning record, the drums take on deeper meaning, entering a paradoxical space where music, sound, and image blur together and time runs in circles.
