The Making of a Drum is the second album of Grex Musicus Chamber Choir and it was released in the year 1999. The Making of the Drum is a praise for Bob Chilcott's, a former member of the renown The Kings Singers and a acknowledged composer, music and it includes four series of music for mixed choir. The record is also a good example of the dedication and skills Grex Musicus and Marjukka Riihimäki posesses and how those two can be used to create unique experience for the listener.
The Making of the Drum, a composition for an unaccompanied mixed choir and percussion, is an extraordinary and very effective choral cantata in five parts based on Edward Kamau Brathwaite's poems by the same name. The poems were first published in his book Masks in 1968 which is the middle part of his New World Trilogy The Arrivants. The text narrates the ancient and intensely spiritual ritual of drum making and is especially influenced by such rituals practiced by the Akan people of Ghana. "When I first read the poems that make up The Making of the Drum they leaped out at me with their pulsating energy and sensuality. I wrote the music for the 20th anniversary concert of the Oxford Pro Musica Singers, and it is one of the pieces I have most enjoyed writing"
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