I love this lecture by UCSD’s music professor Steven Schick about percussion music. He said that in music, the suffix ist is focused on the object that is played. For example, in the word pianist, the focus is on the piano. The term percussionis, however, is not centered on an instrument. Rather, it is centered on what the musician does. The German word for percussion schlagzeug defines the music perfectly: schlag means to “strike” and zeug means “stuff”. That’s what percussionists do: they strike stuff.

Interestingly I recently the word gamelan also refers to an action. The word is derived from the Javanese word gamel, which means “to handle”. The same word also refers to a type of hammer. So the word gamelan is also related to the act of hitting the instrument with a mallet.