Percussion Deconstruction™

Picking up from Part 1, we'll look at some examples of modern pieces for percussion. Again, it must be noted, that once you get beyond the standard snare, timpani, mallets, drum set scoring; writing for percussion can pretty much be a free for all . The main problem is that percussion can not only be just about any and everything that can make a sound, it can also be any number of those things. This can be from 1 drum up to a whole percussion section, played solo, as in Stockhausen's famous, Zyklus .  I could write a major dissertation on percussion notation because it's so broad and varied. But for our purposes, I'll keep it more general. Be aware that there are exceptions to every example I will present, as composers have a way of doing their own thing when it comes to percussion notation. How do you notate all this crazy stuff? The main thing is try to make your notations and intentions as clear as possible. Once we get beyond pitched percussion, we can dispen...

This week's blog comes out of a recent experience I had presenting a performer-composer forum at Cal Arts, in Valencia, CA.  The thing that made this such a different experience for me was that only a couple of students attending were percussionists. The majority were composers and other instrumentalists. Right away, by not having an audience full of drummers, you enter a different dimension. I'm not knocking on drummers, but an audience full of drummers tends to ask a lot of gear type questions: “What type of snare batter head do you use,” or, “Is that a heavy or medium ride cymbal?” A lot of questions like that. Non-drummers really don't care about your gear. They are more interested in what you do and how it possibly applies to what they do.  This is true of composers,   especially if they don't play percussion at all. They want to know how to notate all the weird and wonderful instruments we play, and all the strange sounds we make. So this week we will...

As drummers, we spend a lot of time playing and practicing by ourselves, and we are used to hearing our cymbals in that context. Or perhaps we try out cymbals at a music store (hardly the best environment for hearing them). The problem is that cymbals aren't designed as  solo instruments, so hearing them alone often gives us a false idea of how they will work in a band situation. So you play a cymbal by itself and find that “it rings too much,” or, “it's too bright.” But that says nothing of how it will blend with the music. Cymbals need overtones and a bit of brightness to both blend and be heard, standing out among the other instruments.  Dark & Dry (I actually have one of these for special situations) Going To The Dark Side Today's trend is toward darker, dryer cymbals. I must admit that they can sound great when played by themselves, but I've heard numerous drummers live who's cymbals just disappeared in the mix. That dark, dry sound got swallowe...