Follow up to Percussive Arts Society panel discussion…
Yesterday David spoke on a panel at the Percussive Arts Society International Convention about repertoire selections for middle school and high school percussion ensembles. The link below is a bibliography compiled for our December 2009 clinic at the Midwest Band and Orchestra Conference in Chicago. The list was painstakingly compiled, organized and annotated by Peter for several months in 2009.
Our clinic at Midwest, and David’s presentation at the subsequent panel yesterday at PASIC, focused on unconducted, non-transcription percussion ensemble music. We chose this focus after several years of working with middle school and high school ensembles in Chicago and around the country and often finding that this music was being neglected.
The value of teaching chamber music skills can’t be overstated. Cueing, score study, and a whole host of other skills implicit to unconducted music transfer to conducted scenarios in band and orchestra in invaluable ways.
Non-transcription music also has the additional advantage of introducing students to the history of percussion ensemble literature. Students can play music that was originally intended for percussion instruments, in addition to the important transcriptions and arrangements which are so widely available.
There is no reason why a student who can play a violin part from Tchaikovsky’s 4th Symphony on the marimba can’t also play some of the music of Steve Reich, John Cage, and Lou Harrison. These and several other composers featured in our list of recommended literature are not only important composers in the history of percussion ensemble music, they are some of the most innovative and influential composers of any music of the last hundred years.
In addition to historic works by master composers of the last century, our list also includes the works of more recent composers, many of whom are still writing interesting, exciting, and educationally valuable new works for percussion ensemble today.
