At 10 minutes to 2 Tuesday afternoon, Aug. 14, the world music drums — 20 in all — sat in a circle at St. Andrews Village in Boothbay Harbor, their resplendent colors cast against silence.

But not for long.

Within minutes, independent living residents streamed down the hallway and into the main room, and Carole Drury greeted them with an invitation: “Pick a drum, any drum.”

Drury, who teaches music at Wiscasset Elementary School, had done this sort of thing before with her students, but never with a group of seniors. She had a willing group on her hands.

Within minutes, she had them banging away, after showing the group how to create low tones (using the part of the hand just below the fingers) and high tones (the edges of fingers) on the silo-shaped drums.

As the tonal rumble built, Drury, crouching low and with arms raised, began moving within the circle, with short, quick steps. Her movements inspired the rhythm that came back at her.

“Does anyone else want to try? It makes you feel very powerful,” she said.

Her husband, Bob, the marketing manager at St. Andrews, stepped into the circle. He walked forward, then backward. Quickly, then slowly. The drummers matched him.

Music, of course, has been with us for as long as we’ve had the impulse to make rhythm and voices and tangible objects with which to create it. World music drumming, though, is fairly new to the scene, a movement aimed at fomenting culture and community through the shared experience of percussion.

Carole Drury said her interest in world music drumming sprang from a workshop she attended. “It’s just fun. The rhythms are tied to speech and language. You don’t have to read music to do it. You don’t have to be a musical genius.”

Drury came out of that experience intent on bringing the music to her classroom, and did it, via a grant from Wiscasset’s Carl Larrabee Fund.

The connection between drumming and language was evident throughout Tuesday’s hour-long session. Drury built rhythms into phrases she would give the group in various tempos and tones, and the drummers would then repeat those patterns with the instruments.

“Let’s all play the drum.”

“Let’s all play the drum because it’s so much fun.”

At various points, Drury pulled words from the phrases and had her drumming crew fill them in with beats. The drummers pounded out their own names. “Jean Smith” was a particularly short, but powerful, sequence.

Drury also shared the inspiration for many of the drumming phrases she invents: food.

“Ham and cheese” — the main tone — and “peanut butter sandwich” — the complementary tone — carried the drummers through a rendition of Herb Alpert’s “Rise.” Later, “cake and candy” served as the syncopated rhythm to “I love apple pie” as Drury put the group through the paces of one of her favorite songs, “Sugar,” by the Archies.

The session ended with what Drury called a “move-it exercise,” unconnected to drumming but still musical. As Tchaikovsky’s “Swan Lake” played, she led the seniors through a dreamlike series of moves that proved relaxing and a fitting end to an afternoon of music. One of the goals of world music drumming is peace. By the end of the session, Drury and her drummers had achieved it.