Taking Musical Chances

Students at the So Percussion Summer Institute getting ready to play Shifty.

A couple weeks ago, I had the pleasure of doing a composition master class at the So Percussion Summer Institute. My piece Shifty was on the repertoire list for the students, and I was asked to come to a rehearsal and talk about it.

It’s been a long time since I’ve done anything like this. Heading to Princeton on the train, I wasn’t even sure that I still knew what composers talked about, or what performers expected them to say. Lately, when I talk to groups, it’s about musical tools rather than music itself. It’s certainly not about my own music.

I was pleased to find that I didn’t make a complete fool of myself. I was even more pleased to find that there’s a veritable army of brilliant, hungry young percussionists out there, full of chops and even more full of great ideas about music.

Mostly, what we talked about was instrumentation. Shifty‘s weird, in that the instrumentation is partially left up to the performers. The score calls for each of the four players to build a setup using the following:

1. Kick drum, preferably double-headed and muffled very lightly. The tuning and head selection should be appropriate for funk.
2. Large tom tom, double headed and tuned just high enough to eliminate wrinkles in the head. The drum should be unmuffled if possible and both heads should be tuned to the same pitch to avoid pitch bends.
3. Small drum with short decay and high pitch. (e.g. timbale, bongo, tight snare drum with snares off, small roto-tom, etc.)
4. Piece of resonant wood with short decay and higher pitch than the small drum. A woodblock is a possibility, but found objects are encouraged.
5. Resonant metal with short decay and complex overtones. (e.g. broken cymbal, brake drum, Englehart Crasher, etc.) Found objects are encouraged.

Three of the five instruments are pretty clearly specified. The last two are not. I thought this was a cool idea in principle, but in practice the instrumentation has become fixed over time, as a result of some sort of unspoken rule that “Thou Shalt Play Shifty the Way So Plays Shifty.” So spent many years playing this piece pretty regularly, often in front of groups of other percussionists. It seems that all of these other groups decided that this was The Right Way. Then a video appeared on YouTube a few years ago showing a So performance of the piece, and this further cemented this idea into law. I’ve never heard another group play it a different way; the resonant wood is always a wood block or plank and the resonant metal is always a brake drum and/or a china.

It works great this way. It’s loud and edgy and people like it because it’s drummers doing what everyone expects them to do – play loud and edgy.

The problem is, if everyone plays it this way, it’s clear that they’re not really following the score.

“Found objects are encouraged.”

Go for it. Get an old car door and a log and see what happens. The only thing that could go wrong is that it will suck, in which case you just try something else.

The So instrumentation is just one interpretation. It’s not the “right” approach. In fact, the only wrong approach is to not think about it. This isn’t a piano sonata (and even if it was, there are tons of ways to play those as well, even though the instrumentation is specified.)

As part of the rehearsal with the students at Princeton, they played it the So way. And it sounded great. Then they played it using a tiny setup (little drums, tiny Chinese woodblocks, splash cymbals, smaller mallets – they affectionately referred to this as “Pocket Shifty.”) And this sounded great too! It was a completely different experience, but one that’s entirely within the parameters of the score.

The moral of the story is, take some chances. Music grows like gardens grow – people have to do the work. If you keep planting the same seeds in the same soil, it eventually becomes barren.