NYTimes.com
“I have been thinking a lot lately about percussion and percussionists. It is not so much because I’m fascinated with the kaleidoscopic array of noises and textures they create — though I am. I’ve been pondering the way percussion has gradually grabbed the spotlight over the last century, and how percussionists have been asserting themselves in the broader musical scene as composers and conductors.
Where a 19th-century orchestral percussionist mostly provided emphasis at cadential points and occasional painterly sound effects — the thunderstorm in the Beethoven “Pastoral” Symphony, for example — his modern descendant oversees a huge array of pitched and unpitched instruments, and from Stravinsky, Varèse and Bartok forward, his work could make or break a performance.
And that’s to say nothing of the expansion of the percussionist’s presence in chamber music. Contemporary chamber ensembles almost always have at least one percussionist on hand, often more, each with more paraphernalia than the rest of the group combined. Soloists like Evelyn Glennie, Steven Schick, Jonathan Haas and Michael Pugliese and groups like So Percussion, the Kroumata Percussion Ensemble and Nexus can fill a stage with a truckload of vibraphones, marimbas, tubular bells, gongs, rattles, drums and assorted items to be hit, struck or whaled on.
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If you think about it, drums are the new violins.”
(Read the full article HERE)
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