Lessons From Long-Term Collaboration
Percussive Notes
If you’re not a percussionist, you might not know that I write a weekly (well, quasi-weekly) newsletter with practical practice and learning tips for percussionists and, I hope, other music-makers. I’ve covered topics from warming up (it’s also practicing), charting practice progress (go charts), refining one’s writing (editing is your friend), reflection (not just for mirrors), and more. It's a more application-focused version of my current research.
In a rare confluence of percussion and general nerdom, I’m crossing the streams this week to share an article I wrote published in the December issue of Percussive Notes, the journal of the Percussive Arts Society. It concerns long-term performer/composer collaboration and its multi-faceted potentialities
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Catalyzing creative collaboration has been the largest joy of my professional career, and it was quasi-cathartic to have the opportunity to reflect on how my idols, mentors, and peers have inspired these practices. My central argument is that a platform of trust earned through shared musical experiences empowers fluid idea exchange, radical collaboration, quick prototyping, and rigorous refinement of new ideas. The result: boundary-pushing music. The piece also deals with precisely the processes that inspired my journey into the obsessive study of details.
There are some Mike traps in this edition, including:
A nice chart from marimbist and composer Daniel Berg of mixed chamber music featuring keyboard percussion with an emphasis on western European music. Who doesn’t love a chart?)
“Reconstructing Early Eighteenth-Century Swedish March Drumming.” What better than an article with THIS:
By the Way
Rest assured, I’m still thinking about all sorts of musical ideas, such as:
Critical Listening/Recording Comparisons: The performance of the first note of Orff’s Carmina Burana (a timpani solo) across extant recordings, and how it might be used as a barometer of timpanistic acumen.
Did you know that most early American maps of the Grand Canyon (including such epynomic all-stars as John Wesley Powell) just left the entire canyon area blank? My awesome colleague Matthew Toro dives deep into this in his “Rescaling Geography:Grand Canyon Exploratory and Topographic Mapping, 1777–1978). He also has state’s largest collection of Mike catnip:
